An open letter to the UK design media - from UK Architects Declare, Design Declares and UK Interior Design Declares

‘Are we on track to prevent widespread collapse?’ is a question that increasingly feels like the elephant in the room in many gatherings and as an undercurrent in much journalism. Unlike many questions that the media might explore with a degree of detachment, this one is more troubling because the ‘we’ in this case involves not just designers but also the media. We need to collaborate if we are to stand a realistic chance of addressing the planetary emergency and, across the UK, Architects Declare, Design Declares and Interior Design Declares would like to initiate a constructive discussion about what this might mean. Our children’s generation are likely to view climate change as the most serious crime ever committed against poorer nations and future generations. We should therefore be prepared for the question that will surely come: “What did you do when you knew?” Their judgement is likely to be harsh if the best answer that can be given is “We ran regular pieces on zero carbon buildings and the circular economy and introduced some sustainability criteria to our awards categories.” We would like to address some gaps in the debate about the role of the design media in the unfolding metacrisis.

An oft-quoted phrase about journalism is that when one person says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, the job of the journalist is not to give them equal coverage but to look out the window and see who’s telling the truth. That perhaps applies mainly to the national news media but there are countless examples in which the design media celebrates new technologies without establishing whether they will help or hinder the transition to a safer future.

There are a lot of powerful players in business who would like us to believe that nothing radical needs to change about our societies or economies and that technology has all the answers. This is the pathway that humanity is currently on and it’s a profoundly dangerous one. We need the media to ask more searching questions about new technologies because the outcome is heavily dependent on the dominant mindset. For example, within a paradigm of conventional sustainability, 3D-Printing could easily result in us drowning in tonnes of consumerist crap whereas, within a regenerative mindset, it could be transformative: allowing us to use the right materials and assemble them in ways that facilitate perfect circularity.

Of course, the relationship between designers and the press is interdependent but there’s no doubt that the media drive design behavior to a large extent. For many architects, having a project featured in one of the respected magazines is what they crave and this influences how they design. If the media celebrates mainly flashy, resource-intensive projects then designers are more likely to produce work in that category. If as a magazine you only feature ideas or projects if there are strong images, then it’s worth asking yourself the following question: If the apocalypse photographs better than the rescue mission, which one will you focus on?

The same applies to awards. The organisers need to ask themselves challenging questions: do the awards perpetuate problematic aspects of the status quo (like the pursuit of growth or profitability as ends in themselves)? Or do they make a meaningful contribution to addressing the planetary emergency? Some awards have already been substantially transformed: The Pritzker Prize, for instance, has shifted from a focus on largely white men from rich countries to a more diverse range of designers. Many other awards systems remain largely unreformed and, where planetary issues are considered, they are firmly within a frame of conventional ‘less bad’ sustainability.

A useful question to ask in a whole range of contexts is ‘What’s missing?’ and currently there is a galaxy of important thinkers that barely get any mention in the design press: Bill Reed, Daniel Christian Wahl, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Fritjof Capra, Freya Mathews, Janine Benyus, Joanna Macey, Johan Rockstrom, Jeremy Lent, Pamela Mang, Polly Higgins, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kate Raworth and Tyson Yunkaporta to name just a few.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, there was a time when the design media embraced ideas from other fields such as anthropology, biomimetics, neuroscience or psychology. Since Peter Buchanan’s ‘Big Rethink’ essays were published in 2011, it is hard to think of any magazine articles in the UK design media that have come near to that level of erudition.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is one of the clearest thinkers on existential questions such as ‘Will our civilisation survive?’ and, while it is hard to convey the persuasiveness of his thesis in short form, he makes the case that any civilization that combines exponential technology (such as nuclear weapons and AI) with rivalrous dynamics (forms of human interaction that are divisive) will be self-terminating. He goes on to argue that, since we can’t uninvent technology, our only hope is to transform the way we relate to each other in addressing contemporary challenges. Social media companies that profit from making us addicted, polarised and angry, clearly exacerbate this problem. Magazines that build readership numbers by engaging in polarising commentary fit into the same category. We can hear the objections: “You don’t understand the commercial realities of publishing – we have to maximise our readership to be commercially viable”. There are equivalent, agency-minimising excuses in just about every field and, as Ichioka and Pawlyn have stated in their book Flourish “this defence does not represent leadership; to coin a phrase, it’s trailership - trailing edge thinking that makes our current situation worse”.

So what would constructive public dialogue look like? It would mean structuring our debates so that they define points of agreement that can carry us forward, rather than points of division that hold us back. This might involve each party in stating at the beginning what it would take to change their mind (if they are unwilling to do this, it suggests that the discussion will be of limited use). The standard form of debate involving ‘for’ and ‘against’ parties contributes to polarisation and prioritises ‘winning’ over the pursuit of truth. Across society we now need to nurture more constructive ways of discussing contemporary challenges. This means that, when engaging with people who we may disagree with, we should ask ourselves “Am I expressing myself in a way that this person could conceivably be persuaded to change their mind?” The media should feel free to critique efforts to address the planetary emergency but the criticism needs to make a meaningful contribution to the debate, otherwise it is likely to spread cynicism and demotivation in an area that is crucial to charting a safer future.

Considerable progress has been made in shaping a new approach to journalism, initially by organisations such as The Constructive Journalism Project and subsequently by Solutions Journalism and The Constructive Institute - all have useful resources to help those in the media who want to demonstrate leadership.

Image credit: https://constructiveinstitute....

Similarly to other sectors, a good place to start the journey towards regenerative practice is to establish the extent of any negative impacts. One straightforward way to do this is for a magazine to allocate a score to each of its most recent 100 features as follows: +1 for any article that describes a project / technology / idea that is demonstrably net positive/ regenerative, 0 for something that is neutral / all negative impacts fully mitigated (or “100% less bad” to use Bill McDonough’s term), a -1 for something that involves partially mitigated negative impacts (this includes the vast majority of what has been conventionally described as ‘sustainable’), and -2 for an article that gives uncritical coverage to something that is clearly unsustainable. We did this assessment for an online magazine recently that considers itself progressive and the score was minus 85. This gives an indication of the scale of the challenge that is ahead of us. Having established a baseline, a magazine can then strive to improve on that by actively seeking out net positive work to feature and ramping up the criticism of ‘business as usual’ or clearly unsustainable projects.

Our firm belief is that architects and designers can play a major role in addressing the planetary emergency. We need the media to be on-board with this and we recognise this is going to be disruptive to established ways of doing things. As Naomi Klein observed about the planetary emergency, “This changes everything” and the real struggle over the next ten years will not be for notoriety or wealth but for something much more precious: whether we will maintain the respect of our children.