The PlasticFree Directory was launched in January this year alongside Made Thought Designs, and features a list of over 100 plastic-free materials and system solutions that can be categorized by properties to inform design and business decisions.
Following news of the directory, designers including Pearlfisher, Smile Plastics, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Mather & Co and Nissen Richards offered advice on how the industry can transform. Relationship with plastics
“We should always be asking ourselves, 'What other options are there?'” says Joe Bernard, founder and creative director of Morama. “When designing, it's easy to jump to conclusions because it's the way it's always been, or because it's the easiest solution. This is why we inevitably turn to plastic – it's an incredibly versatile material and it's not always clear what other options are available.”
“This change won't happen overnight and for some projects plastic-free may not be the answer right now, but we should never stop trying to find the answers,” she continued.
As AI begins to change the way designers work, Tom Gilbert, Executive Director of Experience Design at Design Bridge, talks about what design consultancies will look like in the near future.
The field of AI is changing incredibly rapidly, with huge advancements made in the past 12 months alone – for example, the hands of “job-taking” AIs were once multi-wrist mutants, but are now perfectly acceptable appendages.
Ultimately, Gilbert concludes, “What we can be sure of is that the design industry is constantly evolving and it's our job as designers to be at the forefront of this. By embracing technology, reimagining how we think of the studio, focusing on strategy and original ideas, nurturing creative and technical teams, and measuring our impact, we can ensure the design industry stays at the forefront and continues to make a positive impact on the world.”
According to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, there were 121,205 women studying design or creative subjects at university level in 2021/2022 compared to 67,275 men. This has been a trend for many years, but there are still fewer female design leaders than males.
Ahead of this year's International Women's Day, we asked senior female designers from FutureBrand, Superunion, True North and more how the industry can help more women take on and sustain leadership roles across the industry.
In the same month, we Further exploring inequality in the industryDesign leaders report that for the industry to avoid a “path to obsolescence”, it must create and embrace real change.
We spoke to neurodiverse designers and inclusion experts about how the workplace can become more accommodating. Embracing people with diagnoses such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and Tourette's syndrome and making the most of the unique perspectives they bring.
Practical considerations outlined in the article included giving team members control over the music and playlists in the studio, and placing desks facing outwards in the corners of the room to reduce anxiety.
The whole team was also encouraged to be consulted on decisions that would have an environmental impact, such as new lamps, but above all the designers encouraged a laid-back and open culture.
“My struggles have never felt like a problem,” says Gabi Duxbury, a designer at Lancashire-based branding agency Studio Up North, “and it's never been something I'm embarrassed or uncomfortable talking about. It's just normal.”
During February, Recruitment data showed that design consultancies were reluctant to hire junior talent in 2022, opting instead for more experienced workers who are less likely to need mentoring or training.
With this in mind, we asked designers how they feel about this trend and explored why consultancies make such decisions when hiring – and also highlighted the benefits to design studios of having more junior designers on their team.
In his series about what it means to be creative, illustrator and author Ben Tallon explores how feeling stuck might be the result of prioritizing one type of creativity at the expense of another.
“So much of creativity is about duality and balance. I've always enjoyed challenging the parameters of a commercial brief,” he writes. “The work I've loved most in my career has been work that demanded equal parts emotional creativity (for me) and intellectual creativity (for my client and their audience). This has been the case with most of my projects, because I felt the need to use my portfolio as a statement of intent, a showcase of what I've done and what I'm capable of. That intent has led to work that gives me the opportunity to express myself.”
“When I'm busy working on client work, I get annoyed at the pile of purely emotional side projects I have, but I've realized that if I don't attend to the emotional part of creativity, I'm giving up something important and what used to fill my heart with joy becomes just a job that I don't love like I once did.”
We asked designers when to say no to a client and how they know when it's appropriate to back out of a deal.
“There are many reasons why we might not take on a project. A red flag for us is when the brief, objectives and measures of success aren't clear from the start, or if they change mid-project without the client holding themselves accountable and adjusting the scope of work accordingly,” he said. John Glasgow, co-founder and executive creative director at Vault49;
“And we won't take on a project if an unpaid (or low-paid) proposal is asked for or if we don't have access to the decision makers.”
Joss Harrison, global head of brand experience and design at Reckitt, spoke about how FMCG brands can use their design skills to move away from the harmful 'consumption mindset' that the industry has created.
“Designers all effectively live in the future. They're always trying to articulate what the future looks like and bring it into the present,” said Harrison. This is particularly important for FMCG, he said, because FMCG products “have to be planned and produced years before they're ever used.”
Originally trained as an industrial and product designer, Harrison argued that designers are also well-suited to tackle the “enormous intricacies” of parts that need to be taken into account.
“I think industrial designers and design strategists in particular tend to have a mindset of managing complexity and combining a lot of contextually significant information and then integrating that information to move forward,” he said.
Designer Alaïs de Saint Louvent, with help from Edinburgh-based design consultancy Studio Lutalica and web design studio Lattimore + Friends, developed Understanding Accessibility, a free website that explains the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in a simple way.
This website aims to provide web designers and developers with clear instructions to make their websites accessible to as many people as possible, and a simple step-by-step guide to help them design for disabilities.
According to the 2023 WebAIM report, 49,991,225 different accessibility errors were found across the home pages of one million websites, with an average of 50.0 errors per page.
Ravensbourne University Research Our research reveals a high demand among 18-25 year olds to pursue a creative career, but many perceive it as unattainable. We asked various stakeholders in the design industry how to improve this situation.
“As the creative sector, we can't engage with secondary school students who don't understand the myriad opportunities across the creative industries,” says Liv Beresford-Evans, designer and cultural ambassador at Taxi Studio. “We must take the initiative to educate young people on the diverse aspects of creative business, from design and client relations to strategy and management. You don't need to be the next Picasso.”
Meanwhile, Vinay Mistry, executive creative director of the design studio, argued that there is a need to engage with young people, teachers and mentors “upstream and share the rich and exciting opportunities the industry has to offer, long before they make a decision about further education or training”.
He continued: “The industry needs to be more transparent about the range of opportunities available. Too often all we see are the highlights, polished showreels and finished work for big brands. Instead, showcasing the whole process and the range of experts who contribute to different projects can help people understand how diverse the creative industries offer choice.”
