We send monthly newsletters and occasional additional announcements about new events, design opportunities, and other great resources for climate designers.
Supporting LA, and the latest from our podcast and blog
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Supporting our friends and colleagues in Los AngelesHi all, The devastation from fires in Los Angeles, California is heartbreaking. As you may know, one of our most active and long-standing chapters is Climate Designers LA led by Rachel Cellinese and Margaret To. Last year alone they programmed over a dozen events to bring the community together. They are now working to find ways to support their local creative community, and have compiled the following resources and organizations to support efforts on the ground. Direct Aid Resources for Designers/Artists/Creatives Remote Ways to Support LA
Our hearts are with everyone and every living being impacted by these fires, especially the creative community who live and work in the LA area. Just like the climate crisis, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself. Continue to hold the line for the upcoming weeks, months, and years to come. Remember, the best cure for anxiety is taking action, so connect with your community in any way possible. Even the smallest individual actions have far-reaching ripple effects. - Rachel, Margaret, and the Climate Designers team In the first episode of Doom and Bloom, Marc O’Brien sits down with John Bielenberg and Brandt Williams, the masterminds behind Thinknado, to dismantle the predictable thinking that’s keeping us stuck. It’s time to flip the script and ask the hard questions: Is our way of thinking broken? Why do we settle for the status-quo? And most importantly, how do we unleash the creative potential we all have but rarely tap into? Listen in as John and Brandt as they walk through their framework—a no-nonsense, four-step process to blow apart conventional thinking and generate radical new ideas. “Wait, Why?” – Question everything like a relentless toddler. Challenge the status quo. “Maybe...” – Explore the wild possibilities beyond what's familiar and embrace the discomfort of being wrong. “What If?” – Expand your imagination with unexpected connections. “Try This.” – Prototype your ideas with minimal resources and see what gains traction. But, this isn’t just about creativity, it’s about survival. Our climate emergency is the ultimate design challenge, and the Thinknado process equips designers to break free from destructive patterns and imagine regenerative, world-changing solutions and approaches.
Effective activism is rarely unfocused or unconsidered; even when action is spontaneous, it is usually built on or from preexisting plans and ideas. For designers looking to be effective climate activists, one of the first things we will have to do is take the time to assess our current roles and routines in order to determine what we should continue doing and what practices we need to stop; in short, we will need to be realistic. Let’s do that assessment by using what I am calling the Ctrl+Alt+Delete method. Windows users will recognize that particular key combination as the one that allows a person to stop and restart a frozen program. Those three buttons will let you reboot the system and start over and that’s what we can think of when adopting this framework. To start, we’re going to take inventory of all of the aspects of our design roles and sort them into three categories: those things that we have command or control over, the things that we can find substitutes or find alternates for, and those things that we should seek to eliminate or delete from our job responsibilities. Let’s get started…
Volunteer Openings at Climate DesignersCheck out our latest volunteer roles. You can read more about all of the following on our volunteer page. New Wave Strategist & Researcher Design Specialty Leads Chapter & Hub Leadership Team Communications Advisory Team Fundraising Advisors
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Opportunities
Current Design and Climate Jobs, Courses, and other Opportunities
Jobs
Head of Design at Isometric. Hybrid, London UK
Senior/Principal User Experience Designer at Kaluza. Hybrid/Remote, Victoria AU
Senior UX Designer at Sealed. Remote, New York City USA
Courses
Digital Product Decarbonization on Terra starting February 20th
Climatebase Fellowship Cohort 7 starting March 10th, apply by February 14th
Life Centered Design Foundations Course with Damien Lutz starting March 5th
Calls for Art
Symmetry: A Call for Artists, Scientists and Arts Organizations by Simmons Foundation, apply by February 20th
Planet Poster Awards by Icarus Project and the Climate Propagandist, submit by June 15th
Events
Upcoming Climate and Design Happenings
Online
Net Positive Drift at DesignTO Festival with Judith van den Boom on February 1st
Breaking Through with Climate Content: A Film Industry Guide with Kim Steele on February 2nd
Summit on Mental Health and Climate Change with MHCCA on February 4th - 6th
Sustainable UX Monthly Meetup Kickoff on February 6th (join their Slack to learn more)
Finding Hope in a Climate-Changed World: A Virtual Climate Café on February 12th
Charting Your Path: Careers in Climate and Clean Tech with Terra.do on February 13th
Inspiration
What we’re Reading/Watching/Listening to in Design and Climate
📺 Fires, Hurricanes, Extreme Weather: The Media Misses the Climate Link on Rolling Stone
Designers can use imagery and words to shift the narrative to put the spotlight on what is really causing these human-caused disasters—the fossil fuel industry. - Marc O.
📺 How a design concept may help save homes from wildfires on CBS news
It’s been interesting to watch this passive house go viral that survived the LA Fires, and bring attention to the role of design in building for fire resilience and adaptation, whether through passive house design, earthen building materials, or other design approaches to risk mitigation. - Natalie W.
📚 Solidarity by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor
More than ever before, climate activists need to stick together if we are going to weather this political environment. It is not an easy task in a world where polarization occurs even within groups ostensibly looking to achieve the same ends. What we need is a solid understanding of solidarity and how to build coalitions with people who are different from us, especially when our governments are looking to divide us into ever-lonelier subgroups and individuals. This book is a must-read for activists looking to create meaningful change. - Matt M.
📚 Taming the Righting Reflex by Dr. Renee Lertzman
At the Chase Center (home of the Golden State Warriors) I attended an amazing event where Dr. Renee Lertzman challenged us to role-play one of three changemaker styles—Cheerleader, Educator, or Righter—then shift into the posture of Guide and ask our partner: “What is your relationship / experience with x?” I enjoyed practicing Motivational Interviewing, an approach from the public health sector that makes behavior more possible, by directly addressing what’s at stake in the context of our own lives. Read more about this approach in Project InsightOut. - Leslie F.
📚 Use shopping basket returns for votes on sustainability measures from WWF
This is a nudge experiment done in a Japanese local supermarket. When people return the basket, they get a chance to vote whether they accept the change for the way foods are packaged for ecological reasons. These changes are small things, but I thought it was a smart way to communicate. - Toshi
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Climate Designers
We send monthly newsletters and occasional additional announcements about new events, design opportunities, and other great resources for climate designers.
Climate Designers at San Francisco and Los Angeles Climate Weeks Event Spotlight With both Los Angeles and San Francisco Climate Weeks happening, we couldn't miss this opportunity to produce a few events for both. Los Angeles Climate Week Event April 6th: Marc O'Brien, co-founder of Climate Designers, and Rachel Cellinese, LA Chapter Leader, will be facilitating a Thinknado session during LA Climate Week. During an interactive creative brainstorming workshop, attendees will focus on using...
Latest from Doom & Bloom Program Spotlight In episode two of Doom and Bloom, Marc O’Brien and Brian Stancheski explore why sustainability isn’t at the core of every project—and how to change that. Using the two-word mash up "jolly & sand", they brainstorm ideas around viral campaigns to sustainability beach festivals. They also discuss bold ways to make climate solutions exciting and impossible to ignore. It’s time to rethink sustainability as something desirable, unforgettable, and built...
Climate Designers community, As we close out the year, we would like to take this opportunity to celebrate all that we’ve done together. We would be nowhere without all of our amazing volunteers and Supporting Members. Thank you to all those who contributed towards furthering this important work. We are a 100% volunteer-led and member-supported organization. While what we offer is largely free, it is not free to run this organization. If you appreciate the work we do and would like to see it...