Design Council launches Design for Planet Fellowship

The leading advocates of the UK design community, Design Council, announced the launch of the Design for Planet Fellowship, which will bring together nine experts who are working on sustainability and regenerative design.

The fellows were selected from a range of different disciplines and will spend seven months prototyping new ways of working, building knowledge and creating recommendations to inform climate action. The fellow’s main objective is to highlight the important role design plays in connecting people together from across disciplines and communities. They will explore themes such as designing adaptive and resilient places and conserving and restoring natural resources and systems.

“A wealth of designers are already creating new technologies, partnerships and ways of working with communities to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency. However, a lot of climate action still tends to happen in silos. We want to break down these barriers through the Design for Planet Fellowship and celebrate the role design can play in bridging disciplines and sectors to create new opportunities for change,” says Bernard Hay, programme lead for Design at Design Council.

Design Council will publish monthly findings and recommendations from sessions with the fellows and release an overall report in September 2022. This aims to weave together insights from the workshops and provide practical guidance for those working in climate action and design in the UK.

“Through their [the fellow’s] work, we can encourage people to move more quickly, bravely and ambitiously than if they were working alone. The climate and biodiversity emergency means we need to act with urgency. Learning from each other is a crucial way to start doing that,” adds Hay.

The Design for Planet Fellowship is part of Design Council’s ‘Design for Planet,’ a new approach to galvanise and support the UK’s design community to address the climate crisis. The Fellowship programme is funded by The National Lottery Community Trust, the largest funder of community activity in the UK, and supported by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).