An Overview of this Masterclass - How to be Sustainable

This is essentially a course in a philosophy. The Sustainablist Philosophy of how to make things for the world. But it's an ideology about something practical, so it's going to be useful to you.

It is super important to get on board with a sustainable approach to everything you do, design and make ASAP, there's simply no place in the future without it. As designers and makers we have the honour of making the things for the world, so we need to take responsibility for those things. Now is the time to widen our thinking and our practices to do this, but it can be difficult to know how or even where to start.

This Masterclass will act as a guide, to help you make that transition in a really simple and enlightened way.

Your product can be the product you want it to be and it can be good for the world at the same time. And doing this doesn’t mean you have to change your basic aesthetic concerns or your stylistic ones. So that no matter what the state of the world (writing this in the time of the Covid Pandemic) when you launch your product into the world, it will feel right to you and your audience.

At first I was going to call it How to be, because once you have learnt the essential concepts and started to think this way, it follows that your problem solving skills will naturally lead to sustainable outcomes. There will be no separation between the two; design and sustainability. That is because this is a holistic philosophy that might be applied not just to design but to any discipline or thing you do. For now though, I felt as though How to be may be too ambitious. Perhaps you can let me know when you have completed the course what you think about that.

I've called this a Masterclass, because it is thinking that has come from a lifetime of designing and producing work, experimenting and mastering sustainable outcomes in that work. I intended it initially for designers and makers who already have careers in the field, but it is not necessary to have prior experience. In fact, absorbing this philosophy early in your career is optimal. The more people in wide fields far outside of design, have taken the course and benefitted, the more I've realised the key is a sustainable approach to materiality in the world. And that can be understood and applied with experience in design or without. Either way, there are going to be things that are familiar, especially if you have followed supercyclers; there will be things we've been talking about throughout our existence. It's the distilling of all these ideas into a structured set of guidelines that can be applied to your own work that makes this most useful to you.

The first two lectures, Why all design thinking needs to be sustainable design thinking and Why I wrote this curriculum explain by way of background, why I feel it’s important to introduce sustainability into design thinking in this holistic, ideological way, and literally enough, why I have felt compelled to write this curriculum to do so.

A brief History of Sustainable Design Concepts, because it is just a brief time that we've had any history of sustainable design concepts, and they are by no means widespread. These are the ones that I've sought out, noticed, documented and come up with myself, as a result of applying myself to that task over the past decade. Hopefully it's the tip of the iceberg of what will become a very long history, and by turning your mind to these processes, you'll come up with new concepts of your own, to add to the list. On that, I've set up a forum for graduate students of the course to join and contribute to the ongoing discussion, hopefully evolving the curriculum further with your input..

The next lecture provides a historical perspective on How we got to here and the mess our world is in, in terms of waste and our behaviour as consumers. And sets up the next six lectures based on the Graphic Templates that are really the fun part.

What makes it so interesting (and ironic), is that we are a product of this history and while we are creating the turning point (literally by you being here – doing this course) we are still inspired and charmed by the very nature of this history. So I’ve used a similar visual design means to flip the thinking and reverse it (thank you Missy Elliot).

I am super excited to have structured the course this way and created the Graphic Templates.

What exactly are they? They are a set of golden rules or principles, to guide your own design process, with regard to your product's environmental impact, depicted in a graphic format that you can keep and refer to.

Broken down into manageable parts, these are tangible, action-able directives, designed to be easily absorbed into your practice. They've been distilled from the best and most effective sustainable ideas and actions employed to date.

Once you've got'em you'll be leading the charge through your own work, towards a more balanced material world in terms of production and consumerism. And the influence you will have in doing this, will in turn make a difference.

Now I think the only thing to do is to make a start.

Let's go