The Morrison government fails to get creative on the environment
I was disheartened to read that the budget handed down yesterday by the Morrison government offered "next to nothing" to address climate change. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that only one percent of the proposed stimulus spend could pass as 'green', and cited governments around the globe who have announced inspiring stimulus packages, understanding that while all stimulus is economically beneficial now, green stimulus provides opportunities to develop the industries of the future.
I had just been to see the sobering new Netflix documentary, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, where Attenborough reflects on the environmental devastation he has witnessed over his career and urges world leaders to take serious action now. Yet, as Junkee points out, Attenborough outlines ways to make an immediate impact, ensuring that the film is much "more than just two hours of despair. It’s also a film about solutions".
What does all this have to do with design?
Designers are all about solutions. We find ways to change and improve human experience through investigation, ideation and testing. In conversation with Professor Anthony Burke from the University of Technology in Sydney in 2013, MoMA's Senior Curator of Architecture & Design, Paola Antonelli despaired at the way “design has been kind of neglected or misconstrued as decoration or as an embellishment for a really long time”. She was discussing the controversial inclusion of digital artefacts in MoMA's collection, such as Google's iconic map pin-drop symbol, and defended the importance of design as more about human behaviour and interaction than the production of a beautiful object.
Organisations such as Ideo have helped shape a new appreciation of the value of design for creating change, and this week architecture and design magazine, Dezeen introduced new design collective, URGE, formed specifically "to envision and enact radical responses to the climate emergency". In the current environmental crisis, the team of multi-disciplinary design heavyweights rejects the design of "pointless stuff that looks nice and fuels relentless consumption" and instead advocates for "re-thinking strategy, designing-in positive impact, effecting radical change, and authentically communicating... [as] essential to turning the ship around".
Something that Morrison and his cabinet should be doing. Australia's move to renewable energy and a carbon-neutral position is not simple. However, this is only one aspect of our climate challenge. State and federal governments would benefit from utilising the creative and divergent thinking of multi-disciplinary design teams to find solutions to these complex, but not impossible, problems, and begin to address all aspects of the current environmental crisis. Try us, we're ready.
Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash
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