The Uncomfortable Truth About Sustainable Design
We've been watching the design industry grapple with sustainability for years, and it’s still dancing around the real issue: a critical skills gap in sustainable design.
Design Council just released its latest research through their Skills for Planet initiative that confirms there's an urgent need to embed sustainable design into everyday practice, requiring systemic change across design education, practice, and policy.
The research shows that sustainable design isn't some nice-to-have anymore. It needs to become so fundamental to how we as an industry work that we stop calling it 'green design' and call it 'good design’ instead. I've seen too many projects where sustainability gets added on at the end like an afterthought, to the point where it ends up not making any kind of impact at all.
The research details exactly what skills we actually need: moving beyond the basic recyclable materials and choosing eco-friendly colours (boring), to fundamentally rethinking how we design systems that regenerate, not extract. As a landmark resource it maps out the critical skills that all designers need to be able to put designing for the planet into practice. It provides a much needed shared language that will make cross-sector conversations and skills-building possible.
The uncomfortable truth is that most designers—ourselves included—have gaps in these skills. We learned design in a different era and now we're scrambling to catch up while the planet burns and the goalposts on net zero targets keep being moved further away. Fortunately there's always opportunity in adversity. If we can crack this skills gap, we can reshape entire systems and use design as a catalyst for restoration, not only aesthetics and consumption.
So the question isn't whether we should do this (because we absolutely should); it's whether we're self-aware enough to admit what we don't know and become committed enough to learn it.
Skills for Planet is a good start. Download it here.
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