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Exploring Behaviour Change Barriers at Greengaged
By Ed Gillespie on Sep 22, 2009 at 02:59 PM | 1 comments
photo by: Travis Drever
On Monday 21st September, I had an exhausting (but exhilarating!) day at Greengaged, the eco-conscience for the London Design Festival at which I was guest curator for the kick-off session: ‘Design for Life: Barriers to Behaviour Change’. Held at the Design Council in Covent Garden, we started the day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a breakfast panel debate addressing the sticky question: ‘Is it design’s job to save the world?’
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
Breakfast Panel Debate: Is it Design's Job to Save the World?
Professor John Wood started the debate, suggesting we needed to change the language of sustainability if we were to achieve paradigm shift, using the creation of the word ‘genocide’ as an illustrative example of how the right terminology can create salience around an idea that people were denying…and then challenging us to think of a word for ‘killing species’ (‘Speciescide’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue!) to change attitudes to human-induced extinction events.
Alastair Fuad-Luke then responded with a kick-back to the question, asking ‘Whose world? Ours? The developing world? Our lifestyles? Just us?" and suggested that we are all abdicating responsibility and all have to be more accountable, designers and clients alike, to tackle the problems we face.
For the Quiet Riot's Martin Hoenle it was all about material and resource efficiency, and seeking to exploit the considerable carbon, energy and material savings we can quickly and easily achieve through better design, a point reinforced by Sophie Thomas and her toothbrush, 80% of the impacts of which are actually defined at the design stag
The only ‘non-designer’ on the panel, Roman Krznaric, outlined how an ‘empathy deficit’, the failure to empathise with other people geographically across space and on an inter-generational basis, through time, is at the heart of our failure to act.
The five points raised around LANGUAGE, HIERARCHY OF RESPONSIBILITY, RESOURCE EFFICIENCY, CONSEQUENCES OF BAD DESIGN and CONNECTIONS were then used to frame the other sessions of the day.
photos by: Travis Drever
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
Part 2: The 'Nice to Haves' - Fashion & Travel
The morning session explored the ‘Nice to have’s’ of fashion and travel. Jamie Burdett from Worn Again shared the fact that their work had been as much about re-designing business as creating a new product and likened the challenge of their ‘upcycled’ range to trying to redesign a car whilst in it and speeding down the motorway …something I thought I’d quite like to see Jeremy Clarkson attempt to do! "It’s not about the polar bears!" mused Jamie, but rather about "proto-typing new and arguably better ways of living." Hear, hear!
"What if retail wasn't about buying clothes, but instead you rented clothes? So, rather than owning them, you experience them." Jamie Burdett (Worn Again)
Kerry from Junky Styling then talked about the importance of empathic connections with fashion products, rued the rebranding of ‘secondhand’ clothing as ‘vintage’ and the need for recycled fashion to be as stylish and desirable, if not more so, than the mainstream.
"There is something gorgeous about wearing something that is unique - the only thing like it in the world." Kerry Seager (Junky Styling)
This point was also reinforced by Eliza and Sheena of The Uniform Project, our special guests from New York (we didn't fly 'em over specially, I promise). They are seeking to change the perception of fashion, celebrate and encourage personal creativity, challenging the ‘Who are you wearing?’ attitude of fashionistas with an ‘I’m wearing me!’ response. It’s all about reclaiming ownership of fashion apparently and I likened their brilliant project to a Trojan Clothes Horse infiltrating the industry.
Fiona Bennie of Forum for the Future then talked about their work on ‘Fashion Futures’, looking at the embodied impacts, working conditions and ‘fashion miles’ of the global industry and the need for a systems design-led approach to change. She also mentioned their “Paradise Found’ and ‘Overland Heaven’ programmes looking at sustainable tourist destinations and ways of travelling – a notion backed up by green travel writer Richard Hammond who insisted green travel is "Not about tipis’, but ‘desirable alternatives".
The discussion that followed these opinions was incredibly fruitful, finding the common ground of joy and pleasure that effectively designed interventions for sustainable fashion and travel must convey, the links between personal ownership be it over your own look or your own travel itinerary and the need to invert perceptions…
"Why do we have ‘vegetables’ and then ‘organic vegetables' labelled in the supermarket? What you should have is ‘Vegetables’ and then ‘Vegetables sprayed with crap!’ Sheena Matheiken (Uniform Project)
We concluded on a need for ‘positive slowness’ finding time to reflect, travel and be creative, making do and mending, practising Feral Trade or Guerilla Travel and reinventing the notion of ‘luxury’ not as wilfully, excessively indulgent but as experiencing life at a more considered pace…like a long languorous candle-lit love session preceeded by a massage rather than a quick knee-trembler up against the wall round the back of a nightclub!
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
Part 2: The Essentials - Food & Home
In the afternoon session we focused on the ‘Essentials – Food & Home’. Ben Knowles from Sustainweb outlined the complexity of design choices in regard to food sustainability, explaining that it wasn’t as simple as replacing diesel trucks, with electric vehicles to lower emissions, but actually more important to re-engineer the whole food chain.
Duncan Law from Transition Town Brixton pushed the idea that we had to involve everybody in change, that change is inevitable and we must begin energy descent, reskilling and increased resilience now. Again, salience was important, helping people to ‘imagine a good outcome, a vision of a positive, attainable future’ where ‘the city will look a bit more like the country and the country a bit more like the city’. Duncan challenged us to remember that London is 12% farmland and 49% open space and that using a CPULs type of approach we might be able to meet up to 30% of our food needs within the city. He also provoked discussion around ‘appropriate solutions’ indicating that from an energy saving perspective that there’s little point in super-insulating a property if the embodied carbon of that insulation is many times the projected energy savings!! Complexity, as always a dilemma requiring considerable, detailed thought.
Toby Hammond of Better Generation and Greta Corke of DIY Kyoto then demonstrated their ‘gizmos’ the Power Predictor and the Wattson, showing how they can demystify energy generation and use, make energy tangible and empower people to take action.
Finally, anthropologist Victor Buchli tasked us with the challenge of ‘people-making’…reinventing people for a different world, citing the experiences of Cuba and the former Soviet Union and emphasising the difficulties of reconciling individual needs, desires and aspirations with those of the community.
The ensuing debate about triggers for behaviour change was lively to say the least, examining the ‘tyranny of choice’, the need to get people talking (Duncan gave the Brixton Pound as a great example – ‘It’s not about a local currency…it’s about getting people talking about why you would ever have or need a local currency!’) and the role of design in making the connections we really need to change the world.
Perhaps as an indication of how much reskilling really needs to happen, one young student described his design innovation ‘From Scratch’, basically a box of food with cooking instructions….seemingly a somewhat overblown version of what older folk like me might describe as a ’shopping list and recipe’!! As the old quote goes ‘There is nothing more arrogantly amusing than a young man who has discovered an old idea and who thinks it is his own’.
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
Evening: Swishing! and Earthly Sins Confessions
We finished the evening with the first ever mixed gender Swish, boys and girls swopping to swap clothes (from the racks only I hasten to add) as fashion related deliberations continued around the Talkaoke Table and confessions were unloaded in the Earthly Sins Confessional Booth!
Huge cheers to everyone who came along and participated, audience and panellists alike, for helping to make it a constructively challenging and creative day.
To see a whole stack more photographs from Monday, visit the Greengaged flickr collection, Design for Life.
photo by: Travis Drever
photo by: Chiara Terraneo
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- Posted in Behaviour Change, Debate, Design, Education, Fashion, Greengaged
Comment and discuss
{flash_msg}Morgan Phillips, Coorinator of Global Footsteps and Freelance consultant, writer and practioner o from London (mainly) and Cheltenham (occasionally)
— September 23 at 06:15 PM
(Also posted at http://becominggreenblog.blogspot.com)
There is some great stuff here, lots of people are beginning to sit up and take notice of the fact that people don’t ‘hurt’ the environment because they hate it. They hurt it because they love doing other things like 1. travelling, 2. expressing themselves through their appearance, 3. eating(!) and 4. having a warm, well lit home. Those four categories are just the tip of the iceberg, they have many sub-categories: People like driving Ferrari’s, people like wearing Diesel jeans, people like eating Tesco’s finest strawberry cheesecake and people like buying the latest SMEG fridge… The reasons why people like doing things are hugely complex and they all make sense to us in some way at the decision making moment. A lot of things don’t make sense to us when we have our eco hats on but they do make sense to us when we have our ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘I want to be sexy’ hats on. To use academic speak here, we have ‘plural rationalities’; for example, something can seem completely irrational from an environmental perspective but entirely rational from a marital harmony perspective (and the latter in that example almost always wins out!)
Design has a massive role to play in making our lives more eco-efficient, but and this is a big BUT… the reasons why people want fashionable clothes and for that matter fashionable homes, holidays, food and all the rest of it, are complex. They involve the interrelationships we have with our peers, our heroes, our family, our community, our old school friends as well as brands, governments, environmentalists, celebrities and social networking sites (that bring all these thing into one intense space)! We have been infantalised by the kings and queens of consumerism into feeling that we need a multitude of goods and services to be ‘happy’, ‘normal’, ‘unique’, ‘cool’, ‘young’, ‘vibrant’ and so on. Eg: in 2009 we discovered that we MUST twitter, so we all do! The cultural world around us creates anxieties, it makes us feel we are missing out and that we are inadequate, behind the times and un-cool as a result. Nearly all this adds up to education AGAINST sustainability because we are encouraged to buy goods, services, holidays, etc that are only ever really pseudo-satisfiers of our insecurities and more often than not environmentally damaging in their manufacture, marketing, transport, use and disposal (reused and recycled or not).
If we are not careful ‘being green’ will become just another one of these insecurities and will mix in with all our other insecurities as we struggle to create and maintain an acceptable public image. For many ‘being green’ is already something they aspire to, but is it because they genuinely understand and feel the need to be deeply, in the same way as they are not racist, or is it because everyone else seems to think it is pretty important to ‘be green’. If most people are in the latter category the result is widespread shallow environmentalism; greenwash at the individual level transferring to societal wide greenwash. In the UK today, it is much harder to be deeply green than it is to be a non-racist. Not being racist is not a chore, it does not conflict with the rest of our lives. Being green is much harder as it can compromise our desires to buy/do things that promise to relieve our manufactured and genuine needs, wants and insecurities. Things like being cool, being relaxed, being safe, being young and sexy and, when it comes to commuter travel choices, being on time! We can’t have all these things in ‘sustainable’ ways so it is good that designers are trying to make these things more eco-efficient, but often we can come to not feel the need for the things at all and that is the important point to remember.
The human race is still evolving, it is still incredibly immature and insecure. We need to mature as people and as a species so that we are less reliant on external confirmations that we are ‘ok’. We need to be more secure in who we are and more efficient at satisfying rather than buying into ‘pseudo’ satisfiers of both our material and non-material needs. Designers have a huge role to play in this, they can design the material things we need ‘cradle to cradle’ and resist the temptation to add un-related meanings to their products. ‘This fridge will keep your food cold with minimal environmental impact and it will look as ‘ok’ as a lump of metal in the corner of your kitchen can look’ as opposed to ‘This fridge tells people that you are successful, glamorous, artistic and on the pulse.’
Education FOR sustainability and Environmentally responsible behaviour change is about far more than just working out ‘greener’ ways of having a jacuzzi or playing a computer game, it is about empathy, kindness, respect, maturity, status anxiety, the music of Crass, Kramer vs Kramer, Into the Wild and Tobias Jones’ excellent book ‘Utopian Dreams’. Systemic change is needed because we can’t keep having it all, we need an economic and cultural system that understands that and does not foster a desire in us to want, want, want, buy, buy, buy.
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