Visualizing structural challenges in the climate crisis for designers (and everyone)
A manifesto/ semester-long-course-in-a-15-minute-video/ story full of questions
For as long as I can remember I’ve always enjoyed writing, which is likely why I found myself attracted to Substack as a publishing format. As someone who struggles with defining myself as just one thing, my writing also doesn’t always end up in the same format. Maybe it’s the educator in me who knows that everyone learns differently and sometimes content needs to be delivered in scholarly articles, sometimes interviews, or sometimes videos. As I think about different ideas to share as part of this conversation to restore and rejuvenate ourselves and our planet - some of them come to me in animations, diagrams, and images, which is why this post is mainly a video I share with you.
In my Sustainable Systems in Design course I typically assign students to write a manifesto as their final assignment. Last semester, after my class presented all of their outcomes a student asked me if I had my own manifesto. In some ways, this video might be it. This ‘manifesto/ semester-long-course-in-a-15-minute-video/ story full of questions’ attempts to visualize some of the big concepts behind the structural challenges we face in the climate crisis.
Watch, listen, read, ponder, share, enjoy…
And if you liked this video, here’s another one I made last summer that lead me here.
I’m very happy to meet another Donella Meadows fan 😄 I first came across her “points of leverage in a system” concept, and the mental model of the lever, a few years back, and I love it. But one thing I’ve been pondering as Ive gotten older and slightly less Quixotic is about those two juicy points at the end of the lever- mindset shifts and paradigm shifts. I think a lot of us put a lot of effort in the mindset shift space based on our own paradigmatic understanding of the system we’re attempting to change. But if our model of the system is even slightly off, our actions can have immense unintended consequences- who knows where that boulder will roll off to 😂 So maybe there is value in focusing on the leverage points closer to the fulcrum, to more accurately understanding the (ever-shifting!) nature of the system itself. Often, the people whose minds you are attempting to change have a completely different paradigm, and it’s not necessarily wrong- they often understand aspects of the system we share with them that we do not yet.