LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL >> Digital & tech: stop designing for yesterday!

Every day there's a new headline about pollution, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and diminishing resources.

Do you know if you are making things better or worse?

Designers bring new products and services to life, devise different ways to interact, and create new habits. Digital means these can scale at an unprecedented rate.

Yet many of us design for a world that doesn’t exist anymore - a world that believed resources are limitless, fossil fuels can be used with no implications, and and waste just sort of… disappears.

We are using 1.7 Earth’s worth of resources each year, yet many designers haven’t adapted. We are designing for ever greater convenience with little thought for the effect this has beyond consumer satisfaction and the bottom line.

Do you know the effects your product or service is having now, or will do in the future? Do you know if you are changing any habits and the effects they are having? Are you offering users the right choices? How is digital even relevant to sustainability?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you need to be at this talk and workshop.

We’ll look into how we can design better while still delivering on project goals.

Come and hear compelling stories of why we need to change, how to try it, and how to use your influence as a designer. Where and how can you bring sustainability into a project? Perhaps you can design more sustainably in ways you haven’t realised.

We’ll hold a talk outlining some of the key factors, hear from Dr Eva Gkenakou Sustainability Director at Multiplex about the fundamentals of sustainability, and then run a short workshop to road test some new open source tools have been developing at Futurice. Let’s dive into your current projects and and help you identify opportunities.

Bring your team, your friends, your expertise, your curiosity, and let’s get started - and give us feedback on our tools, help us iterate and improve and share them.