Calling all creatives: design the future we need!

The creative industries are in danger of being caught “napping” on sustainability, according to Lord Puttnam. They risk waking up too late to find the world "has changed out of all recognition".

The filmmaker and politician was speaking at our Creative Industries Sustainability Beacon event, last week - the launch of a challenging project to bring together leaders from the world of fashion, performing arts, film, architecture, design and all the other creative industries, to examine the future of their businesses in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.

Lord Puttnam was “personally convinced that climate change is already the single greatest challenge facing all of us – ultimately dwarfing our present economic woes...” But he said climate change and other sustainability challenges present a raft of opportunities for all creative industries and their “attitudes and skills… can really help stimulate change.”

This project sets out to help the creative industries understand and seize those opportunities. Water scarcity; energy security; sustainable consumption; population growth; social wellbeing are just a few of the issues which need to be tackled urgently – and, we believe, creatively – for societies near and far to thrive.

Following Puttnam’s opening address, Jonathon Porritt led a Talkaoke debate from the ‘donut of chat’, surrounded by an impressive line-up of contributors (giving Glastonbury a run for its money).

Franny Armstrong kicked off by showing us the carbon footprint of her brilliant film The Age of Stupid. (Haven’t seen it? Get stuck in, you will not be disappointed.) Turns out Franny’s film emitted “one percent of the emissions of the Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow”. How cool is that? The film doesn’t lack anything, it’s just as well-made, well-produced and successful (Box office No.1). And therein lies the proof, it can be done. We now have the task of making her model simple and transferrable across the rest of the film industry.

The Age of Stupid - Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

By the virtual magic of Skype, Tim Brown then appeared, from the IDEO studio in San Francisco. As CEO of IDEO, one of the most influential global design consultancies, he’s been in the product and service design world for years. Interestingly, he started out with a confession: that the best part of his career now resides in landfill. The products he has lovingly created over the years have played their part in creating our fast consumption-obsessed world. He now views product design from a systems perspective, something he believes is “important for design but essential for tackling climate change”.

We couldn’t agree more as it becomes ever clearer that we urgently need to change our relationship with the material world to meet the coming resource crunch and deliver low-carbon lifestyles. IDEO’s Living Climate Change website is a place for designers to discuss what they can bring to the debate, and why they should play a fundamental role in finding the solutions we so desperately need.

Frances Corner then boldly answered the debate question, “Can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?”, with “a resounding ‘yes’”. As Head of College for the London College of Fashion, Frances at the heart of budding fashion talent. She pointed out that “education has to be part of the way that we address sustainability, otherwise we won’t be able to bring about the constructive persuasion we need”. The new Centre for Sustainable Fashion, which sits within the LCF is working on just that. And their international student awards, Fashioning the Future 2010, are doing a great job at spreading their work far and wide.

“There is absolutely nothing inevitable about the future” said Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture and bio-mimicry guru. He urges us to think about and design the future that we want, not to simply let it unfold. He uses biomimicry, a process that “looks to nature as a source of inspiration for new solutions.” For example, he is exploring the nifty way the Namibian fog-basking beetle stays hydrated in the desert, and using the learning from that natural system in the development of his Sahara Forest Project. He believes designers and architects need to make three transformations: “radical increases in resource efficiency; shifting from a carbon to a solar economy; and transforming from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a completely closed-loop model.”

A Namibian fog-basking Beetle

And last but by no means least, Dan Burgess - ex-Naked Planet, now Pipeline Ideas – took us on a rollercoaster of examples of sustainability comms, including photographer Chris Jordan’s stark images of birds’ stomachs full of plastic waste. Dan feels that many people in the creative industries are “wasting their energy” and should get involved in the sustainability agenda, support the great work that’s already going on and put their skills to good use. He reckons we need to get out there and “agitate”.

Photographer Chris Jordan, using shocking images to make his point.

You’re all invited to have your say and contribute to the online community, where you can watch a video of event highlights and share resources. We’ll be running a series of regional workshops in the autumn and launching the project findings shortly after. Click here for more information on this project.