The Design Council believes that if government wants to develop a sustainable, low-carbon economy it should:
- focus its efforts on raising awareness about the opportunities offered by low carbon careers
- enable consumers and businesses to change their behaviour
- help develop new business models and supply chains
Integrating design and STEM education
To develop a low-carbon economy, the Design Council believes government needs to go beyond awareness-raising activities such as providing information and advice, and aim to inspire, excite and incentivise the next generation of low carbon advocates, whose working lives will inevitably be shaped by the challenges presented by climate change.
To inspire students and integrate the popular and engaging subject of design with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education, the Design Council has run a number of projects.
Our design challenges for schools encourage children to think in an interdisciplinary fashion. The Eco Design Challenge gives Year 8 pupils, currently in Cornwall and previously in the North East, the opportunity to make parts of their school more sustainable. We partner schools with designers to help them research the problem, calculate the size of their school's ecological footprint, and then create ways to visualize and reduce it. Maths, geography, art and science teachers and students have been working with designers to propose design changes to their school that include fitting solar panels to generate energy on-site, using filtration ponds to clean the waste water from the canteen and building vegetable patches to supply food.
The Multi-Disciplinary Design Network, founded by the Design Council with NESTA and HEFCE, has extended this interdisciplinary approach to higher education, supporting university programmes that combine design, STEM, and business education. As these courses develop they will present opportunities to encourage sustainable design teaching and practice, integrating it fully rather than as add on. C4D, the Centre for Competitive Creative Design at Cranfield, is delivering a Design and Innovation for Sustainability course for granduates from a wide range of disciplines who are interested in sustainable development and who want to be at the forefront of sustainable design-led innovation.
Other institutions supporting sustainability skills development inlcude The Centre for Sustainable Design, part of the University for the Creative Arts, which facilitates discussion and research on eco-design and broader sustainability considerations in product and service development.
Changing the behaviours of consumers and businesses
Although building a low-carbon economy will undoubtedly require new skills, it is important to build on our current expertise in the short term and work innovatively whenever and wherever possible. The Design Council believes a low-carbon economy will be built on creative thinking and new approaches as well as new technologies.
A designer can enable changes in the behaviour of consumers and of businesses and the public sector because they begin problem solving by identifying and understanding user needs and behaviours. Then they design products, services and communications that give people what they need and also enable them to act in a more efficient way.
Design Council projects demonstrate that a design approach to problem solving can help encourage low carbon behaviours.
With Southern Water, the Design Council has been running a Low Water Living project to help ordinary people manage their water consumption. Southern Water plans to install 500,000 water meters across Kent, Sussex and Hampshire over the next five years and the Design Council has partnered them with design agencies to help the company create an installation and information experience that helps consumers understand the benefit of these water meters, and use less water as a result. We will be closely monitoring the success of the project in order to provide evidence on how the initiative can best be replicated and scaled.
The Design Council has recently run a design workship with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to look at how to encourage the adoption of home insulation and other low-carbon home modifications. A joint proposal How can we help people make their homes more energy efficient? shows how user-centred design research has helped DECC understand how consumers feel about installing cavity wall insulation or lagging their loft and it shows that people feel disengaged with the overarching environmental issues. If the Warm Homes, Greener Homes strategy's ambition of completing loft and cavity wall insulation for every home by 2015 and installing up to 7 million eco-upgrades beyond insulation by 2020, is to be achieved, DECC needs to take advantage of any currently unmet opportunities to improve the uptake of energy efficiency measures. Design Council user-centred research mapped the complexity of the customer journey and identified a number of strategic opportunities for DECC to move forward with.
The Design Council has also worked with small community groups to explore behavioural barriers to low carbon living and to generate ideas for products and services that could enable sustainable behaviour change. Designers working on our Low Carb Lane project, run in a row of old terraces houses in the North East of England, realised it was difficult to persuade other residents about the importance of cutting emissions, even if being energy efficient could save them money. A range of financial instruments to encourage retrofit and energy meter uptake were developed by the design teams, and are currently being implemented by National Energy Action (NEA) with funding of £365,000 from regional development agency One North East.
Decarbonising supply chains
In the long term the low carbon economy will see the UK develop new industry sectors and new business models in which product and service design, and the use of strategic design methodologies will be crucial. When used strategically, design helps manage risk by trying ideas out as low cost early prototypes, by visualising and making tangible the problems and solutions, and breaks down organisational silos by providing a safe space to think creatively.
Large companies have been encouraged to sign up to the voluntary Courtauld Commitment, to optimize low-carbon product design, through new packaging and reduction in food waste. Marks & Spencer, Heinz and Britvic have all redesigned packaging to help meet low carbon targets. Light-weighting design projects which optimise the amount of material used in packaging or products has been supported by the government’s Waste and Resources Action Plan.
The Designing Out Waste Consortium, set up by environment think tank Green Alliance and including businesses Asda, Boots UK, Royal Mail, Unilever, Valpak and Veolia, has published a report on A pathway to greener products which recommends a framework for designing out waste that entails:
- Evaluating product impacts
- Tackling the product shadow
- Improving product standards
- Creating upstream incentives to design out waste
Andrew Jenkins, Sustainable Development Manager - Products, Boots UK, says: 'Understanding and acting on the real environmental impacts of products requires synergy between policy makers and organisations across the supply chain. At Boots UK we adopt this holistic approach within our supply chain. We are pleased to support the work of Green Alliance to develop policy that will reduce the environmental impact of products throughout their lifecycle.'
Changing business models
UK businesses are already improving the environmental impact of their behaviour with the help of designers.
Car manufacturer Riversimple, designed a radical new business model as well as a low carbon car and supply chain. Through open source design and innovation Riversimple re-designed the idea of a car and car sales businesses and has created an electric vehicle that will be leased by them rather than sold. This has moved Riversimple from manufacturing into service provision, making them an exemplar manu-service company.
A design-led business model at Remarkable pencils has helped entrepreneur Edward Douglas Miller make stationery like pencils from recycled office materials. After developing a new product design for pencils made out of plastic drinking cups, Remarkable had to redesign the traditional material supply chain so that it could capture and use recycled drinking cups in it manufacturing process.
Tell us what you think
Have your say about how you think designers can help policy makers deliver a low carbon economy and a more sustainable Britain.