 In this episode, you'll learn which opportunities open up for you as a service design professional when you start designing with the planet in mind. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Kat and this is The Service Design Show, Episode 142. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome back to The Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the service of service design, what are the hidden things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that have a positive impact on people, business and planet. Our guest in this episode is Kat Drew. Kat is currently the Chief Design Officer at the UK Design Council and in this episode, we're going to talk about one of the biggest, if not the biggest design challenge we're currently facing as a society and that's the global climate crisis. Somehow, designing with the planet in mind has been more quickly adopted by other design disciplines. Service design seems to be lagging behind a little bit. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the responsibility you have as a service design professional to actually do that, to actually design solutions that put the planet at the heart and how to do that. Kat shares some very encouraging examples of services that have been designed this way, but we'll also discuss the two big roadblocks that we need to overcome in order to get quicker and more wider adoption of this approach. So if you stick around till the end of this conversation, you'll know exactly what we mean when we talk about designing for planet, which opportunities it brings for you as a service design professional and which tools and frameworks there already are that you can start using in your own practice today. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, know that we bring a new episode every week or so here on the channel. So if you'd like to stay updated, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon to get a notification when a new video comes out. So that about wraps it up for the introduction. Now it's time to jump into the conversation with Kat Drew. Welcome to the show Kat. Thank you for having me here. Awesome to have you on. Finally we managed to schedule this chat and I'm really happy that we did because we're going to address a topic which you've been sort of promoting and advocating for a while now and I haven't heard it being raised too often in the service design community. So I think we're going to introduce something which is really valuable and new, but before we dive into that for the people who haven't googled you yet, Kat, could you give a short introduction of who you are and what you do these days? Sure. So I'm Kat Drew. I'm the Chief Design Officer at the UK Design Council and my role there is to first of all champion design for planet which I'll be talking about and to bring together design practice from across design disciplines from architecture to service design to product design to think about new ways that we can design for planet and then to create the right policy conditions to make it easier for designers to do that. Awesome. I'd love to know a bit more about your background but we'll get to that in a second. We have a 60 second question fire round rapid question fire round. I've got five questions for you to get to know you a little bit better and your task is to answer these questions as quickly as possible. Are you ready? Yeah. All right. What's always in your fridge, Kat? Oat milk at the moment. All right. Good enough. Which book or books are you reading, if any? I am reading one of the last Booker Prize books. My sister has bought me all of the Booker Prize books since 1961 for my birthday and I'm on one of the last three. Okay. What was your first job? Oh, my first job was in a sweet shop when I was 13 years old in my primary school village. And what did you want to become when you were a kid? When I was little, my first job I wanted to be. I wanted to be a lawyer. Hmm. And you somehow ended up in the design space. Yeah. I actually wanted to be a solicitor but I said I wanted to solicit and my parents told me that that was not something that I really wanted to do. Maybe that was good career advice. Now, the final question is do you remember the very first time you actually got in touch with service design? I don't remember the first exact time because I kind of fell into it, which is a bit of my background. But the first time I realised that service design might be important was when I was working with the police and realised that actually the experience of trying to get in cold with the police to be able to report crimes online was just really, really difficult and we needed to improve the service. I had no idea that there was a whole profession out there that could help the police to do that. Yeah, a lot of people roll and somehow stumble upon service design. It seems to be like the common way people get exposed to this field. Thank you for this. I'm hopefully shared some things that aren't yet on Google and now people know a little bit more about who you are. Yeah, before we dive into design for Planet because that's going to be our main topic for today, design council. For the people who aren't in the UK and aren't that familiar with the work of the design council, could you sort of share a little bit more about that as well? Sure. So design council is the national strategic advisor for design in the UK. The council has been around since 1944 actually. So we were set up by Winston Churchill's government just before the end of the Second World War with the express kind of aim of rebuilding the post-war economy through raising the standards of good design. And at the time, good design really meant the design of products and manufactured things so that people could buy them and that could restart the post-war economy. And since then, design council has always been championing the value of good design. So that's our core role, but has done it in many different ways. So in the past, we've done big exhibitions all over the world showing the best British design. We worked with the late Prince of Wales to his Royal Highness, Prince of Wales, to create the longest standing design prize ever. We have more recently done more design programmes, really pioneering the use of design in the public sector, for example, giving rise to, in the UK at least, a market for service designers to work with local governments. And now, as I'll come to talk about, our mission is design for planets. That's really helpful. At least I didn't have all the background. I know the design council by name for many years as a very respected and credible authority. I don't think we have something similar here in the Netherlands, not yet at least. Now you mentioned that you're the chief design officer at the design council. What does that role mean within the grander scheme of what the design council is doing? So at the moment, we're doing three things. So we're championing the value of design through kind of our advocacy work and policy influencing. We are providing design skills to designers and also non designers so everyone can know how to design really well. And then we run big design programmes with big institutions in the UK to really transform society. Now as chief design officer, my role is to kind of bring together what our design practice should be, our frameworks, our tools, our methods, making sure that we're using best practice, but also that we're learning from all the designers out there who are doing cutting-edge work and bringing that together and opening it out. So that's the first thing I do, which is around our design practice. And then the second thing I do is make sure that we've got the right enabling conditions for designers to do their best work. So probably because of my background, as a policymaker as well as a designer, there's a small but great number of those people, I also am working a lot with government to think about the right investment, education, standards policy to make sure that there are the right conditions so that designers can design for planets and social outcomes as well as economic growth. How does someone become a chief design officer at the design council? So I mean, there's been amazing chief design officers in the past. I feel very kind of honoured to be in this position. I think, you know, a chief design officer is often someone who has got a handle on design practice but can also work strategically. So helping the organisation as a whole think about how to design itself in order to achieve the best outcomes. You know, as I said, my background started in government, nothing to do with design at all. And then I was lucky enough to be in a position to be one of the co-founders of the government's policy lab. Actually with an amazing woman called Dr Andrea Siadmok who was the previous chief design officer at design council who came over. So together we developed that idea with Beatrice Andrews. And then I guess I wanted to also then get into service design to my left government and joined Us Creates which is an amazing service design agency which has since become FutureGov and then become TPX Impact. So really doing service design in local governments on the front line. And I guess the reason I joined design council is because I was really interested in being able to work more systemically. So as well as doing the design work in kind of on the front line as it were, I wanted to also think about how you influence the wider system. So coming back to design council and working with governments is a kind of halfway home. And speaking about the wider system, there isn't almost anything wider than our planet. And that's I think the mission that you're on right now. You mentioned design for planet a few times already. Design for planet, how would you summarize it? What is design for planet from your perspective? What is design for planet? So designers have got this huge, huge, huge opportunity. I mean designers shape the world kind of pretty much everything around us is designed in some way or another. Some things are designed really well and are good for the planet and lots of things, many things are not designed well and are actually making the climate crisis worse. And arguably, you know, design has been very good at getting people to buy lots and lots of things that they probably don't need and is probably part of the reason that we've got ourselves into this mess. So design for planet really recognizes the amazing skills, talent, creativity that designers have and wants to support and galvanize designers to design with the planet as a priority. And so in the UK, where the UK Design Council, there's 1.69 million people working in the design economy. So 1.3 million of those are designers, professional designers. And then there's all the people who work in design firms to make all of that work happen, people working in finance and legal and marketing and so on. And our kind of primary audience, I suppose, is to support that community to really design with the interests of the planet at its heart. Now, obviously that also means working with businesses, public sector and communities who commission designers because actually, you know, you need to be commissioned to design in the right way as well as being able to kind of have the skills to do it. So that's the kind of the overall mission. And I suppose what kind of dawned on me in the middle of last year as we were putting this kind of mission together is, wow, I've got an amazing design job as Chief Design Officer here. My users, I guess, are not a group of patients or a group of people who are accessing employment support or so on. They are the 1.69 million designers. And our job at Design Council is to, I suppose, provide a sort of service or a kind of enabling conditions infrastructure to support them to do their best work. So yeah, it's huge. And we need to do an awful lot of segmentation and all the good stuff that you would do in a kind of service design project to think about how we best support them. Awesome. Super interesting. And I love to know more about that. But I'm also curious like this is a mission that the Design Council is on. But if you look at your personal agenda and personal objectives, how does it relate to what drives you as a professional? How has your journey around design for Planet evolved? Well, I mean, I imagine it might be similar to lots of other service designers. So I'd say, out of the design practices that I'm most at home with, my MA was in graphic design because I was very interested in how you could open up complex policy information to make it easier for citizens to be able to co-design policy with governments. And graphic design is a key part of service design. And then also going into service design. So these two things are kind of where my background sat. And I was always very interested in the more social aspects of things, so homelessness, health and wellbeing, less aware and less interested, I would say, from a professional level in the environment, in biodiversity and so on. And I think kind of my journey, therefore, is kind of very, very similar to a lot of journeys that many of us have been on in the last kind of five, 10 years about realising how how much of a crisis we're in, you know, the climate crisis, forget about, not forget about COVID and I'm not trying to underplay all the things, but you know, it is the biggest crisis that we're in and we have to start thinking about it and acting quickly with a sense of urgency. And designers can do that, you know, designers are brilliant at acting, cutting through the complexity and starting to act. So, but I would also say that kind of my background in service design and government has always been about thinking much more systemically about an issue. And the climate crisis is really, really one of those issues where you have to think completely systemically. It's not just about net zero at all. You know, if we have no bees on this planet, you can get to net zero, but unless you have biodiversity as well, we're still going to be in a big problem. And then of course, there's so much of the climate crisis, which is actually a social justice issue, you know, the people who are least responsible for the climate crisis, people living in the global south are the ones who are bearing the brunt of Western consumerist patterns of extraction and consumerist behaviour. So, so actually, you know, it is a social issue at all. And we're just coming at it from a kind of environmental lens. Now, it seems like a lot of disciplines, fields, expertise need to be involved in, in thinking and acting around this issue. I'm curious how much activity have you seen from the design service design community in particular about this? How, how, how, how does it relate to other design disciplines? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, so it's really interesting, isn't it? And so I think, you know, my view would be that every single designer has got a big role to play. And designers should not be working in their silos. Actually, it's a holistic problem and we need fashion designers, graphic designers, product designers, systemic designers, architects, service designers, all of us to make it work. So kind of traditionally, you know, in the past, I suppose designing around kind of climate and sustainability has quite often focused on the more technical side of things. So what materials to use? What are the best kind of low carbon construction materials? What are the best kind of alternatives to plastic or kind of more durable plastics so you can kind of reuse them? So all of these are very kind of technical, kind of almost engineering, material science type side of design. And that's often somewhere that service designers don't really work in. But what we have seen is actually the climate crisis is a massive behavioural and societal challenge. You can have all the technical kind of solutions in the world. And in fact, we've got, you know, we have got a fair few of them. But unless people adopt them, you know, that's not going to be particularly useful in service design in the way that it makes things easy and smooth and attractive to use is the way that we're going to get a massive behavioural shift. If you think about, I was just looking at the government's 10 point plan the other day about the areas that are going to make the biggest difference to net zero, which is obviously their particular focus, you know, transport green transport, whether it's jet zero or active travel locally, a switch to renewable energies, getting people to take care of the natural environment. All of these things, there are technical solutions for them, technical designs, but actually we need service designers to make all these things into experiences that are joyous for people and inclusive so that everyone can be part of it. And how much adoption are you seeing? And how much awareness are you seeing in from the service design community? So definitely a growing awareness. And I would say that when we talk about the 1.69 million design community, we say we're supporting and galvanising because actually there are people from across all designers, including service designers who have been doing this for ages. So a couple of names come to mind, Ben Rees and from Livework, Claire Brass, you know, Nat Hunter. All of these are people who've been working in the kind of product service design space for a long time. Sarah Drummond, who founded Snook, has been, who's now at the Loch Lomond and Trussec National Park, has been doing amazing work. I think they're just hiring a service designer up at the park to really take a service design approach to creating amazing visitor experiences so that people can really enjoy the nature of the park in Scotland. So, and I know that there is also developed by Lucy Stewart, Ness Wright and Emily Tello from a combination of Snook and NTPX Impact, a design service and design and climate service design community. So there are kind of voluntary communities growing around climate, but I think, you know, service designers still probably are less aware than other design professions about how to design the planet. I can imagine, like you mentioned, that design disciplines that are occupied with very tangible and physical objects, the relationship to the carbon footprint and our consumption patterns are very direct and very obvious. With services, it's maybe less obvious, so you already mentioned a few names and some examples, but I'm curious, what are some encouraging service examples where you feel that are designed from a planet perspective in a good way? Yeah. So, I mean, there are lots and they are growing and, you know, part of our role at the Design Council is to kind of spread and communicate them. So when we think about, when I kind of try and chunk down how design broadly can support the design of the planet, there's three areas and I've got some examples for each. So the three areas are designing kind of adaptable and resilient places with communities, designing for a circular economy and regenerating natural resources and learning from Mother Nature, the best designer in the world, and also making things easy and attractive for people of all types to live sustainably. So taking those one by one, in terms of resilience and adaptable places, you know, LEAP is a really good example in Exeter of a design agency that is supporting active travel. So they are thinking about wayfinding and how to make all the green travel that's available in the city centre really accessible, really easy to navigate. And I'm sure in the Netherlands, there are lots and lots of examples as well of really, really good services around kind of bike use and making sure that people can drop their bike off really easily at Amsterdam Central Station and kind of and find it again. So services around kind of transport are really good examples, but also increasingly services which help people connect with nature. So I mentioned the Loch Lomond and Trossacks National Park, but just up the road, I can almost see it from my house. There are, there is the wonderful Warthamstow wetlands. And so wetlands are these amazing places where nature is actually providing us a service, because it is providing kind of natural flood defence for us. It's also creating amazing biodiversity and giving us a place to to kind of walk and relax and is good for mental health. But because those places are so nice, actually people want to go there. So there's really good economic services there, whether they're tourist attractions, places to get married and designing services around that is obviously really, really good. So that's a bit about kind of adaptable and resilient places. In terms of circular economy, so a circular economy can only really happen if you've got services around it. So, you know, it stops the product becoming this kind of or being this linear static thing and actually encourages flow of resources into it and then also out from it. So you need a service to kind of collect the material that has been used in the product and, and, and, you know, put it on its journey to turn into something else. So some examples of that are Colleybox, which is a really nice, well product, but with a service around it, it's London's first reusable takeaway box. And it's been created by the amazing Jo Lang, who is a force of nature. And so it's a kind of reusable, durable takeaway box with a barcode on it, which means the service allows people to take away and use it and then deposit it back so it can be cleaned and put back into the system. So a really easy digital service to go along with it. And then, you know, there's a massive within the fashion world who are doing amazing stuff around kind of circular design and reuse. Depop is obviously a massive online store for kind of Gen Z where, you know, is a whole service about kind of reusing your clothes and selling them on and making sure there's really good marketplace for that. And then finally, things that make it easy and attractive to live sustainably. I mean, the shift to renewable energy is one that we all have to go on. In the UK, we've got an amazing organization called Octopus Energy who create, you know, who are leading a transition to heat pumps. But also, I mean, their design of their digital interface, the emails you get showing how much energy has been saved, is just so well designed. It is a joy to use. And designers, service designers are brilliant at making things lovely experiences, or docomony, which is a credit card, which gives you a carbon limit as well as a credit limit. So shows you kind of how, where your spending is going for the environment. So these are really good examples of where service design is being used for Planet. Yeah. And we'll try to add as many links to these examples as possible in the show notes, because I think it's good to see service designers championing these practices and showing best practices or role models, maybe, that we can live up to. Now, it's really encouraging that there are already so many examples. And I'm sure you have many more. But if we, if we look at the broader adoption, like this isn't, you wouldn't be doing this if it was already on the agenda of all of the designers in the service design space. So apparently there are still some roadblocks, challenges we need to take away to have massive adoption. Did you share your thoughts about these challenges and roadblocks? Yeah, so we did a kind of a quick and dirty survey just before Christmas to survey the design sector to understand what are their skills, capability and motivation to design for Planet. And those who are interested in behavioral theory can see that there's a behavioral there's a behavioral theory tucked in there called combi. So anyway, we surveyed kind of designers and we surveyed designers who were coming to our design for Planet festival. So it was a bit biased because we knew that they were going to be interested in design for Planet. So we found that 79% of them said yes, they were mostly or mainly motivated to design for Planet, which you know, we'd expect and is probably not quite representative of everyone. But even among those and this is the whole of the design profession, 22% said that they did not know how to design for Planet and 41% said that they did not have the opportunity to. So if you imagine that you would survey a group of people who are less motivated to design for Planet, those two numbers are going to go up. But what's also really interesting about that is when we looked kind of closer when we dissected it by different design professions, there are some quite big variations. So professions like architecture, landscape, architecture and urban planning had much higher understanding and opportunity to design for Planet. And you can imagine landscape architecture, I mean, you're working with the natural environments and biodiversity every day, that's what your kind of job is. Urban planning, you know, they have recognised that carbon construction contributes 40% to the UK's carbon emissions. So these are sectors that have already kind of, you know, woken up to it to some extent, although they're not all there, but the UK Green Building Council in particular has been doing a fantastic job. So there's those, but service design is kind of, it was much less, it's kind of similar motivated, but much had much less understanding and much less opportunity. And as I say, I think it's probably because service designers in the commercial world have mostly been asked to make things easier and quicker and less frictionless to buy and consume and use. And in the public sector world, it has mostly focused on social issues like homelessness, like education, like health, and less about kind of access to nature or energy and so on. So all of that's changing, but and that's just my kind of hypothesis, why? So in order to address both of those things, both the skills gap and the, and the opportunity, we're doing a couple of things at Design Council and we're just starting on our journey. So, you know, way more to do. But in terms of skills, we're going to be creating a skills and design for planet skills and innovation hub, which will be the place to go to learn about design for planets. And we're not doing this all on our own because there's amazing resources all out there already. So we're kind of collecting it together, but doing some of that translation work for where some of it can be quite academic or kind of technical or specific trying to translate it into a language that is more accessible. We're creating more events and learning spaces where people can come together. So last November, we put on alongside COP Design for Planet Festival, which was, I just felt like this amazing little space in between two COVID, COVID waves where people could get together. So we had 120 people up at V&A Dundee, which is the UK's only UNESCO city of design. And then we had 6,000 people join us online, which was amazing, amazing. And these were people from all over the world as well, so not just the UK. And what people said during that festival was, as well as toolkits and resources and so on, that's all great. But what we really need is spaces to connect and safe spaces where we can share our learning with each other and what doesn't work. And what we don't know, actually, we don't want to do that in front of a client, but we want to do that within the design community. So we'll be putting on more events and learning spaces. And then the final thing that we obviously have to do is address that 41% don't have the opportunity to because clients aren't commissioning them. So this is not just something that Design Council has to do, I mean, this is the whole world changing, you know, government investments and regulation about getting all sorts of businesses to design, to create services that are good for the environment. But in terms of what we can do is we can raise awareness among clients, potential clients, businesses, public sector commissioners of the need of the importance of putting design into the brief. And we've just put out a short kind of 90 second film that would encourage all designers to play to their clients at the start of a design project, which just have the Design Council red logo on it, and it kind of gives permission to designers to bring up the conversation with clients. But the other thing we need to do is create the right policies in place. So alongside Design Planet, we're doing something called the design economy, which is our kind of every three years also groundbreaking piece of research into the state of the UK design economy, into what value it creates, and then create a number of policy recommendations to increase that value. And we'll be making kind of suggestions about how Design Planet is built into planning policy. So when architects and urban planners are asked to, well, hopefully retrofit and not build a new building, but they're doing it with Planet considerations right at the start, or we'll be working with the standards British Standards Institute to help them think about product standards and making sure that those are all really environmentally sustainable. And we're thinking about how you increase the visibility of the entire cost of a product to include how it is disposed of and making sure that we do that in a way that is inclusive and doesn't just make things hugely more expensive so that only rich people can afford them. So these are just some of the things that we'll be doing with government policy. That's a lot to unpack there. And what I'm hearing is like, of course, there needs to be a demand from the people hiring designers to actually work on this. And for some clients, some organizations will see like the commercial benefits of doing this. Others will need like a more gentle push from government policies to actually start adopting this, I guess. And the other thing is educating designers and service designers on ways to actually incorporate this into their practice into doing this. Now, let's say that you're lucky enough that you're a service designer who has found a client who is at least open to listening to the story, but you haven't done any projects that actively are incorporating design for planet. What would you do in such a situation? Like, what would be their first steps to actually get this to create momentum and get this going? Yeah. So the first thing that I would do is probably look at our systemic design framework, which is our kind of evolution of the double diamonds, which many service designers will know and love or hate. But this is, you know, Design Council's world famous design process, which I think has 600 million kind of hits across the world. So the systemic design framework is taking that as a starting point and really evolving it so it can address more kind of systemic and complex challenges like the climate crisis. And the framework is made up of different bits. It has a set of principles at the beginning. It has a set of characteristics that are important to have within the team to design systemically. And then it also has a kind of a set of processes and questions and tools and methods. And what I would do is I would look at the principles to start and have a conversation with the client around the principles and I'll run through them because there's only six. So being people and planet centered, being inclusive and welcoming difference, zooming in and zooming out, being able to see the bigger picture, collaborating and connecting, testing and growing ideas, and finally being regenerative and circular. So these are six principles that would act as a really, really good starting point with a client right at the beginning of the project. So that's the first thing that I would do. And then as you get into or before you get into the project, I would really, you know, have planet at the center of the brief and really have that kind of as a consideration, but always be looking kind of bigger, I suppose, looking at the wider impact. So I was thinking just before I came on this, what are the things that service designers need to know about design for planet? And I wouldn't say that service designers have to become technical experts in sustainability or knowing, you know, all the kind of ins and outs of particularly which materials to use. I think service designers need to have an overall mindset and way of thinking which looks at the bigger picture, which unpacks and helps the client see the wider consequences of that work. Like what is the supply chain? What are the conditions of people who are producing elements in the supply chain? Do we actually really want to be kind of getting people to, you know, increase the consumption of this product if it's been bad, you know, if it's bad for the environment? So I'd say it's kind of more of those questioning, you know, showing the wider system and then supporting the client to kind of consider the environmental consequences. It sounds to me like you really need to find the right clients. And this can be like also a very competitive advantage from a service design perspective that if you, I don't know, specialize or position yourself as somebody who is aware and designing with the planet in mind, you'll probably attract, you'll hopefully attract the right kinds of clients because I can see already like a big struggle trying to convince organizations who aren't maybe yet ready for this or have different priorities and maybe that struggle isn't worth it. Like it's maybe better to put yourself out there. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think there's a wider thing and this isn't for service designers to necessarily kind of have to tackle by themselves. There are wider things within business. I mean, business I think is where waking up to the fact that, you know, climate change is a massive opportunity. And actually, if they don't start thinking about it, they will get left behind. I mean, that is the language that that's the messages that are coming out of, you know, the Bank of England business leaders like in the UK, the CBI is on the one hand, businesses absolutely need to think about their scope one and two emissions and making sure that operations and net zero. But actually, if they can get ahead of the game and actually being being creating products and services that are inclusive and good for the environment, then actually that's going to be a big market. So I think actually, you know, it's a strategic opportunity for businesses. And I think, you know, service designers showing their green credentials, you know, is a really, really attractive prospect because design, you know, businesses don't necessarily know what to do. I think there's a certain amount of kind of lack of confidence, worry, concern. So, you know, this is the role of the service design and not just designing the service, but almost being a coach to the clients and helping them through this. And service designers are pretty adept at knowing how far they can push things, you know, when you're working in a systemic way, you always kind of work on two tracks, one which is doing something to make something better for the here and now and to win trust and goodwill and all the rest of it so that you can then open up the bigger questions. So, I mean, I wouldn't kind of say absolutely no, no to working with clients who are not kind of a thousand percent sustainable because actually part of the service design job, I think, is to probably help the client go on that journey. Yeah. Yeah. And we've been doing that with the from the perspective of user centered, human centered. So we should know a little bit about how to do that. It might sound like a daunting task to actually add a new element to that, while many clients maybe aren't even ready yet to think about human centered. But somebody has to do it. And I think the design community is in a very good position to actually push this forward. Now, you mentioned something briefly about asking the right questions, having the right mindset. What's the thing that we're currently missing or that would help us to ask those? But which questions aren't we asking that we should be asking? I mean, I think it's one of those really, really deep reframing questions. So kind of, is this going back to basics? Like, is this the right product to be creating in the first place? Or going back to like, why are we doing this? What's the overall outcome? So, if it's to help people get around the city quicker, then there's lots of different ways of doing that, which are kind of more sustainable than kind of pushing a certain product or service. So I think kind of always getting the client to really be able to articulate the kind of the overall outcome, which then opens up the space for different kind of ways of getting there. And I think also really being open minded and asking everyone to consider the wider impacts of what is happening, wider impacts both in a negative way. So what are the kind of bad unintended consequences of the thing we're producing, but also the wider positive benefits. So to go back to the wetlands example again, which a friend and colleague, Teo Adebowale, shared with me, she's an amazing designer who's been helping with the Salford wetlands. That project started off as a, we need to put in a flood defence and, you know, usually the traditional and technical answer would be a concrete flood defence. But kind of Teo's approach was to work with the local community. So this is something that service designers would absolutely do, work with the local community to understand their needs and what wider benefits could be achieved. And so through putting in a kind of wetlands rather than a concrete flood defence, it also met the wider benefits of the community of providing somewhere to go, to relax, to run, to walk, to be out with nature. So I think that if you can kind of ask these bigger questions, both about why we're doing something in the first place and also about the consequences and benefits, it helps the client see the wider possibilities. What's emerging for me from this conversation is the word responsibility and taking responsibility maybe beyond your narrow influence. Is that something that you've been hearing as well? Yeah, for sure. And with that responsibility comes a kind of, you know, opportunities for collaboration. And this again is something that businesses are going to have to go on a bit of a journey on probably. So the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, who've been doing loads of work to kind of put circular design out there and really create a market for it within businesses, they're doing some interesting work to think about how companies need to work together in a circular way. Because actually if the waste of one product can be the ingredient for someone else and you're reusing things, actually that's an opportunity for companies to be responsible together and to collaborate and not compete. So I think responsibility definitely. And I think the other thing is that designers, you know, designers don't have unions. There's no kind of legal representation for them. And so they often feel, you know, quite conflicted and not very confident about kind of standing up to a client. And so that's the other bit of work, I think we need to do at Design Council is to help them give confidence and permission to kind of ask some of these questions at the beginning to help everyone be responsible. Now, if we design for Planet, I don't know how long has it been on the agenda of the Design Council publicly? So we launched it on the 23rd of September. Okay, so, you know, it's quite recent. Now, let's, and I'm sure you have some thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams about this. If we fast forward to three, five years, what do you hope will have changed? Well, we just had our strategy planning session. There we go. This is good timing. You should be able to drum design. So, you know, in three years, we expect to see a significant increase in the level of understanding and opportunity among designers to be designing for Planet. We will have a global skills and innovation hub that the wider, you know, the wider design community can also access and will be sharing latest frameworks and practice and bringing designers of all sorts together in what will now be an annual Design for Planet Festival. And we'll have done some really transformational projects, programmes of work with some kind of sectors that could be quite traditional. So, you know, the energy sector or kind of retail or some of these sectors where, you know, businesses are not saying, yes, we have to change and be responsible. You know, our job to make that market is to go out and work with some really pioneering leaders in those sectors to show what is possible and that those businesses actually, when they design for Planet, can make profits so that that opens up the market for other businesses and designers to follow. I'll follow up with that on that in a few years. Next to all the resources and projects that you've already mentioned, which again, we'll try to link in the show notes. Are there any other recommended resources that you can recommend for people who want to dig deeper into this topic? Yeah, well, I'm going to give you a bit of a heads up. So, we've got a new website being launched before the end of March, which will start to bring together all of these resources. But I would just give a quick shout out to the Climate Framework, which has been put together by Mina Hussman, which is an amazing resource for people working in the built environment and services on need to work in the built environment as well, which just brings together a load of research and evidence about what works in that space. I mean, Ellen MacArthur Circular Design Hub is a great look. But two things coming up, Design Council, I just mentioned, is we have an amazing community of 450 Design Council experts from all sorts of different design backgrounds and across the country. And we bring them together on a monthly basis so that they can share their collective intelligence about what works in particular areas of design for planets. So we've done three so far on inclusive and sustainable transport, on design for agriculture, for sustainable agriculture, and food, and one on designing places with nature. And all of those write-ups are on our Medium blog. So do do check those out, some really, really good. Our Design for Planet Festival site, designforplanet.org is still open. People can register and access all of the amazing talks and workshops that we had there. So those are all open for people and just an incredible resource. And then finally, we have just started a really exciting program of work called The Design for Planet Fellows, where we've brought together nine designers from very different backgrounds from AI and tech, service, product, fashion, architecture, engineering, film. And their job is to use their kind of collective intelligence and all their networks into their different fields to bring together a new set of practice around design for planet. So we'll be publishing reports and data visualizations of that every month from now till September. Awesome. Sounds cool. A lot of resources. People, anybody who wants to can already start doing this. There is no excuse to delay or procrastinate on this. So get sort of heading towards the end of our conversation. I'm curious, if somebody remembers just one thing from this conversation, what do you hope it is? Design Shapes the World has got an awful lot of power and with that comes responsibility. So that responsibility for designers is please put Planet at the center of the brief and look at our 92nd film that will help you have that conversation with your clients. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for addressing this topic. I hope that we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months, years, and that we'll have some people inspiring service designers here on the show, maybe who are actually putting this ideology attitude into practice. So we'll have some more role models. So thanks again, Kat, for coming on and sharing this. My pleasure. Thank you so much. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kat and got something useful out of it. If you want to check out some of the resources, they're all down below in the show notes. And while you're there, make sure to leave a comment on this episode. Thanks again for watching and I'll catch you very soon in the next video.