Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in partnership with the Fifth Avenue Hotel, hosted an exclusive Climate Week panel discussion in New York City recently. Professionals in the automotive, fashion, and design sectors were on hand to discuss “Haptic Futures: Sustainable Materials in Design Innovation.”
Moderator Sarah B. Cunningham, vice provost for strategic partnerships at RISD, noted that businesses are faced with more regulatory standards and re-evaluating supply chains, and so they are looking at more eco-based materials, and designers, to provide viable options. “We see creative practitioners employing a sort of stereoscopic vision, understanding impacts that extend beyond the human lifetime,” she explained. “While also instituting small-scale experiments, redesigns, and actions that start to completely transform prior systems of manufacture and customer behavior.”
We continue to experience the devastating effects in real-time; Hurricane Milton in Florida is just one recent example. What really makes a difference and moves us forward? While most of us might think that it starts from a company down, the collective holds undeniable power. “Culture drives most of the change that we see that ends up becoming a policy,” noted Céline Semaan, co-founder and CEO of Slow Factory.
Slow Factory’s mission is to empower people to advance climate justice and social equity through educational programming, regenerative design, and materials innovation. Change itself is at the top of the non-profit organization’s pyramid, which includes 500,000 people actively engaging.
The panelists agreed that the stories that we tell about products, services, and companies are influenced by designers’ perspectives. “Art and design can help shape the public imagination and the public demand for change,” said Charlotte McCurdy, designer, researcher, and RISD Terra Carta project advisor.
RISD has joined the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Terra Carta Design Lab to find student- and alumni-led high-impact solutions to the climate crisis. The global competition was launched in 2021 by King Charles III (in his former role as the Prince of Wales) and Sir Jony Ive, in partnership with the Royal College of Art. This year’s cohort includes four design schools from around the globe, with RISD as the first and only U.S. institution to take part. Innovative top 10 finalist projects include a sustainable indoor garden system to biodegradable toys made from brewery waste.
People understand that eco-friendly materials are better for the planet, but they are not necessarily appealing to the masses. McCurdy noted that the younger generation’s enthusiasm and outside-the-box approach encourages others to contribute. “The Terra Carta teams are coming to the table with ideas that are cool,” she explained. “These alternative materials are not just desaturated versions of what we have now. There are new aesthetic and cultural vocabularies that we can use to create community and belonging, to meet human needs in beautiful ways.”
Designers and artists are on board, but there are more challenges at the corporate level, especially in the automotive industry. Every year, more than 80 million vehicles are produced, responsible for 10% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Shifts have to be made everywhere, not only in one division. “We need more generalists in design,” said SangYup Lee, head of the Hyundai and Genesis Global Design Center, and an executive vice president at the Hyundai Motor Company.
Hyundai and RISD have an ongoing partnership that reflects holistic thinking called the Regeneration Studio. Led by an advanced scientific team in RISD’s Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab, it brings together faculty and student researchers to develop new concepts for bio-innovation.
The ultimate goal is to restore the relationship between humanity and living systems. “Students learn from and about every aspect of nature,” noted Lee. “There are learners from all different departments, not just the designers.” He explained that cross-pollination is ideal, so that as many people as possible can gain knowledge about the areas they didn’t know about before. “At Hyundai, it is very difficult to shift out of your daily job, and so we are sending our engineers and product planners over to really spend time together.”
Cooperation is key, which is contrary to typical narratives that stress the division among us based on fear of what will happen during a storm or another catastrophic weather event. “People become pro-social during times of crisis,” said Andrew Haarsager, former head of the Retail Innovation Lab at Cartier, who will soon be officially launching a start-up focused on climate resilience.
More than half of Americans have been touched by the effects of a weather disaster, and Haarsager noted that acts of care for others can make us less likely to panic and offer support instead. “I think behaving as part of a community versus as an individual is the kind of mindset that we all need to have as we transition to a more sustainable economy.”
Semaan believes that people all have creative talents that can be applied to the greater good. “I like to empower everybody to think like a designer, because a designer is not just someone that makes something pretty, they make things that work for the real world,” she added.
