I'd venture to say that design is an inherently optimistic activity.
In design school, I found that I and many of my peers developed passions for addressing monumental planetary and societal issues. After all, the design practice utilizes many tools and ways of working that really lend themselves towards this. They allow us to see areas of opportunity and collaborate to create better paths going forward. We design because we believe things don't and shouldn't have to stay the way they are. Maybe I'm naïve but I don't think anyone designs with the intention to make something worse. Definitions of "better" and "worse" may vary between projects, individuals and organizations, but that is a conversation for another day.
Environmental sustainability became my personal investment over the past few years. Choosing different materials, understanding human behaviours and working around existing systems in order to keep an object from going to the landfill, ending up in the ocean or sending more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – that was my jam. The idea that we could theoretically make a difference through the cumulation of these design choices, gave me real hope for the future of the planet in the face of goliaths like pollution, climate change and natural resource depletion.
Hope is powerful, no doubt. Where its impact goes even further is when it compels people to act. Action brings those hopes, ideas and theories into tangible reality.
And reality is where we learn what really works and what doesn't... which can be scary. When things don't work, we might think that our hopes were baseless, and we might want to give up. This is exactly what happened when I began to do internships in sustainability. I saw mine and others' ideas fizzle out, encounter opposition, and make undetectable impact. It can be discouraging.
So what's the takeaway?
Ideas and theories are the how. They can be binned, remixed and pruned, and they will only come out better from it. Our hope for a better future is our why. The ideas and theories should be questioned and put to the test, but hope should not be put on the chopping block so easily. Our why is what keeps us going, to take what we learned from our experiences and the experiences of others so that we can try again differently. So keep going, and keep doing.
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