The planet’s calling. Who’s answering?
Reflections on Autumn Conversations — Design and Planet.
For the month of April we’ve put a special focus on projects and discussions around Design & Planet in alignment with our 2024 Autumn Conversations events. In our final article of the Design & Planet series, Mark Easterbrook shares a recap of his reflections & learnings from the Auckland Autumn Conversations event.
Daylight Savings was still hanging in there on Thursday, April 4. With summer slipping into memory and Tāmaki Makaurau gently leaning into Autumn, the Design Assembly community could have been forgiven for heading home for a cosy evening on the couch.
But we had big things to talk about. A packed room in Ponsonby for the Autumn Conversations — Design and Planet event proved that. And there was plenty to talk about, and plenty of questions, even if many of them were left unanswered.
Three speakers gave short presentations of the night. Antonia Estall, Asia-Pacific Lead for Creatives for Climate, introduced the organisation’s work that’s helping the design industry become a force for positive climate impact. Creative Director Bryce Groves shared some behind-the-scenes insights into an awareness campaign he helped create at Greenpeace, which sought to provoke better and more inclusive climate conversations. And Kyoko Locussol, Senior Experience Designer at AKQA, gave an introduction to Digital Sustainability and the kind of design standards that can be employed to reduce the environmental footprint of online design.
Afterwards, convener Raul Sarrot posed questions to the three speakers and facilitated a panel discussion.
In many ways, questions were the theme of the night. Each one posed by the panel or the audience was a bit like a matryoshka doll — asking it opened up a series of other questions nesting inside it, rather than presenting a concrete answer.
For me, the three big questions that seemed to wind their way through the conversation were these:
- As creative professionals, how do we push for our clients to take climate action?
- As creative producers, how can we sustain big conversations without the capital to keep them visible?
- As creative practitioners, how do we reduce our own impact on the planet?
Walk this way
Question 1 gets to the heart of why Creatives for Climate exists. As Antonia Estall explained, it’s “a global network on a mission to drive action and awareness of our climate and ecological emergency.” Creatives for Climate is a not-for-profit, but it’s very much engaged with the creative industries and, through them, their clients.
The aim is to drive bottom up pressure on organisations that have the scale and influence to shift the narrative around climate action, moving it from the activist edges and into the mainstream. Creative professionals have the skills to create this conversation shift and, by creating frameworks for measuring the impact of creative work, Creatives for Climate believe that positive pressure can be applied to the industries we work for.
A big part of achieving that is through giving creatives the tools they need to build that narrative, so Creatives for Climate also provide free resources to help get change happening.
To me, the answer that Creatives for Climate offer up is around scale and social licence. As creative professionals, if we’re all saying the same things to our clients and building the same narrative around climate action, that narrative becomes more powerful. If we all walk in the same direction, it’s gravitational: our clients will be drawn that way too.
If a tree falls in the forest…
Bryce Groves presented an engaging case study around the Talk Nature project he helped create with Greenpeace — and it really brought home the weight of Question 2. Talk Nature involved deep research and engagement with communities across Aotearoa, trying to dig down into how we talk about climate action, in the hopes of unearthing an effective way to have the conversation in a bipartisan way that rose above ideological conflicts.
The most visible outcome of this project was an advertising campaign — Who speaks up for nature? With engaging creative and a simple but strong message that cuts across audience divisions, the campaign delivers to its storytelling objectives.
However, Bryce was very clear about the biggest hurdle: sustaining the conversation. To shift behaviours and attitudes long-term, campaigns need the longevity and visibility to become embedded in people’s minds. Think, for example, of ‘Be a tidy Kiwi’ or ‘It’s not OK’. Long-running campaigns designed to shift the way people think and talk about an issue.
With Talk Nature,Greenpeace simply did not have the capital required to sustain the campaign and the conversation it aimed to embed. And that’s the big hurdle for climate action campaigns. The vast amount of financial capital sits with industries that stand to lose from climate action. And they can deploy their vast financial capital to buy themselves the social capital to maintain the status quo.
So how do we answer this one? How do we buy a bigger megaphone so we can scale the impact of a campaign?
Public funding is one option when you have government bodies onboard with the message. But (hello, Fast Track Bill!) that’s difficult in our current political climate. Corporate dollars are another, but that requires alignment between what a business needs and what the climate needs. Hopefully that is where a movement like Creatives for Climate can begin to shift the conversation. Rich individuals and their networks are another, but in New Zealand even our wealthiest pro-climate individuals can only do so much.
Another option? Collective capital. Not just crowdfunding the cash for campaigns, but collectively using our own platforms to amplify a message. Putting it in every channel we have access to and keeping it there. Maybe Talk Nature could be more than a short-lived campaign. Maybe it can get its volume cranked up. That would be great to see.
Lead by example
It can be hard to feel like individual action matters. But sometimes small is the only way to start. The third speaker on Design and Planet, Kyoko Locussol, walked us through the concept of digital sustainability — essentially, designing websites to reduce their weight on the planet.
As a practitioner, implementing the kind of approaches she talked about is easy enough. It’s about design choices and bringing clients along for the ride, so they understand the WHY behind those choices.
But it’s also hard to do your best on one website, knowing it’s infinitely outweighed by the weight of what’s already out there on the internet. That’s the nature of change though. It is hard. And it has to start somewhere, or it never goes anywhere.
Where do we go from here?
A conversation like this one, around Design and Planet, doesn’t have a tidy answer or a magical output that solves the equation. That was especially evident in the Q+A session with Raul. People know the conversation matters. They know change needs to happen. They wrestle with how to progress.
I left this Design Assembly event loaded with questions, not answers. No doubt the same happened at the Pōneke and Ōtautahi events too. But having the conversation and keeping it alive and front of mind is a step in the right direction.
Thanks to Antonia, Bryce, Kyoko and Raul for being part of that.
About the Author:
Mark Easterbrook is a freelance copywriter and creative director with 20 years experience in the communications and creative industries. He has written and presented everything from hardcore retail advertising to poetic brand films to culturally sensitive government communications. He has an MA in Film, TV & Media Studies and has been a radio host, copywriter, bouncer, gravedigger, gas station attendant, charity board member and Programme Director of the Going West Writers Festival.
