Climate Change Solutions Need the Design Educator, Now.
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 a future where we have to struggle more just to get by. I don’t want folks to lose their homes, jobs, and futures to rising sea levels or catastrophic storms and fires. I want more of us to have that same empathy for one another. If designers, if people, just knew what was happening and what they could do to help, we’d likely feel a common cause to fight for; us.
Call that naive. Yes, you’d be correct in doing so. But it isn’t wrong. I want to create things with the skills and talents I have that help and inspire people. I want to teach other designers to do the same; for our common good. But when I read the findings of the latest IPCC Report stating “…all five of the new emission scenarios bring the planet to at least 1.5°C of warming over pre-industrial levels between now and 2040.” And that 1.5°C means perilous floods, life-threatening droughts, deadly heatwaves, catastrophic coastal flooding, food shortages, forest fires, and worst of all loss of life, I find myself defeated, not knowing how to apply what is in that report into direct action in my…
