In the course of my career, I have seen a lot of design talks. But none have shaken me quite like Indy Johar’s presentation at yesterday’s World Design Congress in London.
It all started innocently enough, as the architect joked about the challenges of keeping people’s attention in the dreaded pre-lunch speaker slot. Pleasantries duly dispatched, Johar went all-in.
“We have to look the future in the eye in a much more realistic way,” he said. Climate change is here, and it’s happening. If, as current projections predict, we end up with a planet that is about three degrees warmer, “the cascading effects are numerous.”
What Johar did, with a precision that was paradoxically even more terrifying, was show how a hotter planet will fundamentally change society. It goes so far beyond people having to move away from coastal areas.
And I know that for many people closely, deeply engaged with the climate crisis that isn’t news. But Johar brought it to life with chilling reality. Crime, health, inequality – everything changes when the world heats up.
“The rest of us are at the mercy of what you decide to do with your imagination.”
There are practical consequences – did you know, for example, that our railway network here in the UK buckles at 39 degrees? But more than infrastructure challenges, the pillars we count on as humanity, without even realising it, start to crumble. “You lose predictability,” Johar warned.
And again, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I don’t come across this brutal brand of honesty enough. Much of the discussion at the conference, which was convened and hosted by the Design Council, focused on solutions, tactics, optimism.
And that’s great. But Johar set the stakes.
“We need ideas and practices that change how we, as humans, relate to the world,” he told the audience. Ignoring the climate crisis, he warned, “means you’re an active operator in the genocide of the future.”
It doesn’t get much starker than that.
And yet, there was hope in his talk, and his vision of the future where designers can, must, should, get to work tackling this existential threat.
Design’s role, Johar believes, is “desire manufacturing,” not just creating a greener and more sustainable world, but rewiring society to want and expect that version of the future. It will be hard. It will require radical thinking. But that’s the work that needs doing.
“These are beautiful and interesting and dangerous and clever questions we’re going to need to engage with,” Johar said.
Designers, he believes, “need to break away from legacy institutions and languages, and embrace a really incredible world that is waiting to be built.”
He ended with an invitation, couched in a critique. Designers must not just embrace “Post-it workshops” but develop “new competencies” that shape the future.
At a panel discussion later in the day, COLLINS co-founder Leland Maschmeyer picked up the theme. He argued compellingly for design to up its ambition. “I think we fundamentally misunderstand design,” he said. “It’s not the icing on the cake – it is the cake.”
Aesthetics, he argued, is just one strategy for designers to employ – “A very powerful strategy, but just one of many.”
Design, he suggested, is about, “What do we want to do? What do we want to become? How do we get there?”
And picking up the baton so thrillingly thrown down by Johar, Maschmeyer said we should be thinking more about “ontological design” which he defined as “facilitating the jump from one fishbowl to another.”
We name and define the times we are living in, he pointed out. So design’s role should be shaping what we want the world to become.
“We need to make another reality as real as possible,” he said, “inspired by new context and the potential that holds.”
His fellow panellist Sarah McCullough, who led Selfridges’ huge sustainability commitments, added a neat analogy. When we want our kids to eat more vegetables, do we put up posters admonishing them for the dietary choices? Or do we try and make vegetables fun and interesting?
“We need more joy,” McCullough said.
Closing the conference, Design Council CEO Minnie Moll quoted two speakers who encapsulated the opportunity, and the responsibility, facing the design industry.
“It’s a phenomenal time to be a designer,” Kate Raworth said.
But as climate activist Tori Tsui said, “The rest of us are at the mercy of what you decide to do with your imagination.”
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