5 ways design can inspire social and sustainable action
I’ve been using design to create positive social and environmental change for many years now (I’ve almost lost count!). I’ve designed everything from brand identities, behaviour change interventions, comms campaigns, digital ads, to physical pop-up installations and even bins. Over the years, I’ve noticed there are a few stable creative ingredients that can help cook up change.
Design isn’t just about how something looks, it’s about how it works and how it makes you feel. I believe design has the power to turn heads and inspire action, especially if it’s physical, visual, fun, simple and impossible to ignore.
1. Make it physical
We spend so much of our time online, looking at screens and experiencing the world digitally. I think people are craving in person experiences where they can meet and physically interact with spaces, especially following the Pandemic. It’s been refreshing to see the rise of physical experiences and design being used to engage people on-the-ground, and provide much deeper engagement.
As a designer, it’s so rewarding to see something you’ve imagined in your mind being used in the real world and especially rewarding to see someone physically interacting with your design (and getting joy from it!).
I experienced this last year through working on Hubbub’s Bring Your Own Cup campaign. We used positive messaging, a memorable visual identity and call to action to tackle single-use waste, focussing on positive reinforcement and habit formation. The campaign featured a pop-up coffee van (created in collaboration with Positive Experience) in Cardiff, Manchester, and London offering free coffee to anyone with a reusable cup, alongside messaging on the benefits of reuse.
This physical, interactive element of the campaign was a hit! The audience loved the added social benefit of the pop-up and 99% of people survey wanted it to visit more UK locations.
🤔 How can we design physical spaces to engage people more deeply in social and environmental issues?
2. Make it visual
There’s so much information competition for our attention. It’s overwhelming. And it makes it even harder for messaging and ideas to cut through and connect with people. Design and visual storytelling can help show rather than tell people about the message we’re trying to convey. For example, a visual infographic that tells a story is much more likely to engage over a word heavy report.
Design can also be a powerful tool to visualise more abstract, complex topics such as air pollution, microfibres or food waste for example. For my branding of Bioly, an initiative collecting food scraps and turning them into local circular energy for communities, I used playful, simple visuals to show the process of transforming scraps into energy. This proved a successful way in engaging communities with the concept.
🤔 How can we use design to cut through the noise and make complex, abstract topics more memorable and easier to understand?
3. Make it fun
Amongst all the heaviness in the world, I’m a firm believer that design can make taking positive action fun and desirable. I also believe play is a great way to unlock new ways of thinking and bring people together.
Inspired by creative facilitation exercises, I wanted to create a game ‘Bonkers Ways To Save The World’ that used randomness to help spark ideas and get people thinking about taking action in a new way. I created a list of 50 objects, catastrophes and people to engage players to come up with creative ways to save the world.
As part of this I created illustrations of the objects and people to decorate the cards and used visual language to make the game understandable, accessible and appealing to an audience who might not consider themselves creative.
🤔 How might we draw on gamification and the entertainment industry to make social and sustainable action fun and desirable?
4. Make it simple
One of the hardest, but I believe, most valuable design skills, is the ability to cut the fluff and keep things simple. It’s so easy to overcomplicate things and throw too many ideas at one design but really hard to stripe things back. I’ve learnt, especially when designing signage or interventions linked to changing everyday habits, that good design can help simplify the message and make it memorable.
This was the case when designing the brand identity and interventions for Leeds By Example, the UK’s first on-the-go recycling initiative. People spend less than a few seconds looking at a bin so the message and design needed to make the recycling messaging really clear and stand out from general waste. Rather than asking for all sorts of recyclable material, we honed in on ‘plastic bottles and cans’ to have just two simple icons and made the bin one bright colour to stand out.
🤔 What other products or interventions could benefit from being simplified through design?
5. Make it impossible to ignore
Colour. Copy. Context. The holy trinity of making something stand out and grab attention. I love it when design is used to create interventions that disrupt the everyday or reimagines the mundane into something impossible to ignore.
One thing that’s often ignored? Litter on our beaches. The Streets Ahead campaign is an example of using bright, bold, playful design to draw attention to a hidden issue. Placing the design in the right context was key to engaging the audience in a timely way, at the beach, when they are more likely to respond to the issue.
🤔 How could we use design to draw attention to other hidden issues?
👋 I'm Michelle. A multidisciplinary designer creating positive change. Get in touch if you’d like to chat about how I could help you inspire social and sustainable action through design: