In Canada and America, “Black Friday” is the day after Thanksgiving. The ominous sounding name is hardly a bad moniker for multi-national corporations, as hoards of consumers flood parking lots, lining up sometimes as early as midnight to gorge themselves on salivating sale items. It’s the biggest shopping day of…

Reflections on the First Season of the Climify Podcast What can I do? As a designer and design educator, I find myself lost a lot looking for the best ways to use what the climate experts tell us in my design work and teaching. I don’t want to live in…

Systems Thinking is “the way” Design does not exist or function in a vacuum. It also does not exist without Mother Earth. Gaia gifts everything we need for us to live and thrive. What we have unfortunately done with her philanthropy created the divides, crises, and opportunities we still have…

The Beginning In January 2019, I emailed a few design faculty I knew in North America. From Toronto to California, I hoped to recruit a few folks to join me in introducing climate science into our classrooms that semester. I had the idea a week or two before the term started…

A Toolkit for Making Positive Impact The planet and humanity needs designers to change the way they make things. This was the astutely accurate thesis from the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart. Their book changed my…

After The Climate Strike, how can designers keep the momentum moving and growing? — Beyond your professional design life, there is a lot you can do in your public and personal life to improve the world. If you live in a democracy, vote. Vote specifically to uplift your value system in combination with improving the greater good for the rest of us. (If you’re…

At the end of our 2016 book “Design to Renourish: Sustainable Graphic Design In Practice,” we wrote that our systems thinking for designers process was in its infancy and and more exploration from the discipline was needed. A year after the book was published, this statement is still as true…

What is systems thinking? For a moment, try to remember back to your first semester in college. (It wasn’t that long ago, was it?) Think about the foundational art and design courses you took that term and the vocabulary your instructor covered in the first few weeks to help you…