Sustainable Design

During the Dream Team 01 Session, Xavier, Tom & Mike mentioned that there are some existing organisations already working on ideas that we thought of also during the session. Let's use this thread to list organisations and movements that are relevant to the topic.

During the Dream Team 01 Session, one topic that repeatedly pops up is mindset and culture. Let's use this thread to discuss how to go about that.

Darja Jerjomcenko asked how can we upcycle more, and what purposes can we repurpose fabrics for. Below I will post what I know (soon), and invite everyone to list examples of cases where fabrics are given a second life.

Platform member, @Linda van der Zwan who has been a participant in Industry talks where she talked about how customer journey mapping led to success, joined our first Dream Team Roundtable which is centered around Sustainable fashion and the role of design.

Reach out to her on this platform to learn more and open discussion on this topic.

Our first session of the Dream Team Roundtable was recorded in December, due to unfortunate circumstances the editing of the recorded session is taking a bit longer than expected and will be only be published in the next few weeks.

Despite not publishing the work, I've had a lot of conversations surrounding sustainability and circular economy/design recently and have recorded more sessions for this dream team.

While working on this project, I've heard an increasingly louder narrative calling on the creative design industry to take more responsibility in creating and crafting products and services that lend to becoming more sustainable and circular.

One major question that perturbes me is how? When we are working for companies and organisations that determine the "raw materials" and scope of our resources and capabilities, how do we actually perform in accordance to the responsibility set out for us? We should consider a whole lot more, for example as discussed in this dream team, designers should start considering the product life cycle of the garments they produce. In reality I ask myself, how many of the designers in this category actually get to choose their materials? Any creative, innovaro or designer can tell you that there is always a lack of budget, a lack of resources.

I myself as a founder and experience designer who even has the option to choose frequently, do not have the capability to build according to vision. Take this platform for example, I know how to create a better user experience, but I am not financially there yet to make it happen. Furthermore, the workload and key developmental areas forces me to allocate my time and resources into MVC's. Yes, maybe a new word. You may be familiar with MVP's, minimum viable products, but applied to what I've been doing with this platform, I've come to work on what I call MVC's. Minimum viable concepts. Take for example this Dream Team Roundtable, the concept existed since May last year, I only got the first team together in December last year, I've recorded two episodes, but now it's March and due to accidents with and aging or limited equipment, combined with a high workload and multiplae other projects requiring effort, the sessions are not yet published.

In most instances we know what we must do, how we can get there, and even invest time and energy to realise it, but there are limitations. If every brilliant idea just magically had all the required resources to make it happen, we'd be solving a lot of problems and the human experience would be elevated to generally more enjoyable lives, but in reality, we are more short term in our vision and many who determine or impact the output of our work are also lacking in vision or character or merely trying to survive themselves, resorting to the continuation of what is ot working in order to brig home the bacon.

So, the role of design is important, and there is a certain level of onus to perform according to scale, but at the same time we are restricted on many levels. My ultimate question is, how do we enable makers to make actual change?