Working Together to Address Climate Change

“If Anyone Here Is In Marketing or Advertising ... Kill Yourself.”

Those are the words of late comic—and social critic—Bill Hicks. To some, they’re a little rash seeming, but we think there’s some real sense to Bill’s thinking. Fact is, those of us in marketing do a lot of crummy stuff, from getting people to buy things they don’t need, to even sanitizing bad companies. That’s a pretty lame legacy to be saddled with, and most of those in our industry are well aware of the sometimes dodgy nature of the work they do.

At smashLAB we are kind of freaked out by the sheer amount of waste designers are responsible for. As an industry, we shape all of the packaging, unopened direct mail campaigns, and excessive catalogues that consumers often have very little choice in receiving. This has a huge impact—in fact, the paper and pulp industry is the third largest polluter. Designers are behind a lot of those materials. According to the AIGA, their members (designers) specify or buy $9.1 billion in printing and paper annually.

In our desire to behave more responsibly, we started to explore ways to mitigate our environmental impact. We were (at the time) poorly read on the topic, and had little success in finding resources directly related to sustainable graphic design. There had been some discussion, essays, and conferences surrounding sustainability, but (at that time) not much information related to sustainable graphic design could be found online.

Obsession Leads to Interesting Things

We have to admit that at smashLAB, we get obsessed rather quickly. When we find ourselves interested by a topic, we tend to dig in deeply and sometimes forget all other concerns. (This can be a costly habit.) Design Can Change is yet another example of this tendency. For nearly a year, we cast almost everything else aside and immersed ourselves into learning everything we could about sustainable design, and finding ways to understand the problem.

The result of this research came together in campaign called Design Can Change. At its core, this is a website that asks designers to think about their role in climate change. It also serves as a resource to help design buyers locate environmentally-sensitive designers.

The site encourages designers to make sustainability pivotal in all aspects of their practice, asking them to engage suppliers, clients, students, and the general public in a discussion around sustainability. Through vivid photographs and concise infographics, Design Can Change makes a compelling argument that encourages designers to act now while outlining the steps to start doing so.

Maybe Contributing Something Good

Design Can Change started as a grassroots effort and this approach persisted beyond the launch of the website. We spent many months building inroads with a number of media outlets and influential individuals, in an effort to spread the message as far and wide as we could.

Hundreds of thousands have visited the site, with designers from countries around the world taking the pledge to embrace more sustainable practices. Additionally, we’ve supported the effort by speaking to groups (as large as 6,000), imploring them to consider the role they play in consumption and the messages they create.

Getting a large number of people to commit to any kind of breaking initiative is difficult at best, but with Design Can Change, smashLAB was able to generate interest and strong support for a worthy cause. Well-recognized members of the design community offered contributions and trade publications took notice to further propel the effort. smashLAB also reached out to numerous blogs to establish new connections with like-minded online communities.

Design Can Change has spurred a great deal of discussion on sustainable design, and received special recognition from TIME magazine, which included the effort in the annual Design 100.