How well are we preparing our design students for a career? Do we talk about climate and sustainability enough or effectively? What are our design students thinking and feeling about their education and future? Marc O'Brien guest hosts and learns from four California College of the Arts (CCA) design students about their insights into those questions and ideas to improve design education in part two of this two-part series called Climate Design in the Big World.

How well are we preparing our design students for a career? Do we talk about climate and sustainability enough or effectively? What are our design students thinking and feeling about their education and future? Eric learns from two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign design students Sadeen Allhalabi & Adam Dziaba about their insights into those questions and ideas to improve design education in part one of this two-part series called Climate Design in the Big World.

The need for effective climate communication and storytelling is paramount to reach a public tipping point on important individual and political action. Good design and communication can shape any worldview and influence change. That is the good work Brooke Havlik had done for over a decade. In this episode, Brooke shares her vast experiences working in climate communication and effective strategies designers can use to turn the tide toward a better climate future.

What media(s) could we use to tell better climate stories? What is the message that we should send to increase not only climate awareness but climate action? [John Jennings](https://www.johnjenningsstudio.com), professor, comics artist, author, and design theorist shares with Eric a brief history of social justice in comics and why he thinks they are a valuable resource and medium to inspire climate activism for all ages. This podcast is sponsored by...

Feeling down? Anxious? Stressed? Try getting your hands dirty in the soil. California-based soil expert Dr. Laney Siegner shares with Eric the amazing power of healthy soil and its fascinating story about how it can lessen the impacts of hurricanes, increase our overall health, and sequester carbon to decrease the impacts of climate change. Tune in also to learn the five principles of regenerative farming and how those can be translated for designers to create more responsibility to combat...

What convinces someone to commit to climate action? Why isn’t the terrifying data enough for some? Politics? Religion? Geography? Culture? Do we need better design? All of the above. Scientist and information designer Gabrielle Mérite explains why if you want to help convince people to act on the climate you want to connect to their culture and community, and maybe not mention the word climate at all.

Did you know low-lying clouds cool the climate or that communities designed in a grid can limit extreme weather events? We didn’t, and it’s likely fair to say you might not have either. In this episode, Atmospheric Scientist and Professor Stephen Nesbitt shares his expertise in clouds, meteorology, and climate technologies illuminating ways designers can create more climate resilient communities and engaging climate stories.

What do you want your community to look like? What would you like our future to be? We are all part of the problem and the solution. The future isn’t written and the climate crisis will unfold based on our collective and individual actions. It can be a terrible global catastrophe or a more managed set of problems that we can adapt to. What if we chose to restore our communities and the natural world instead of falling into despair and inaction? Urban planner and afrofuturist Chandra Christmas...

It took just a hundred years time to devastate thousands of years of knowledge and culture when colonizers stole North America from the indigenous peoples. To this day, much of the Western world ignores their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which holds many solutions to our climate crisis. What if agribusinesses healed the soil, instead of depleting it? What if designers knew how to make their own inks from plants, papers from grasses, and other objects without damaging the planet?...

How we rebrand climate change is the million-dollar question. The solution is not one big rebrand, but many specific messages that connect better with different diverse groups of people, where recipes for climate action inspire others to make their own sustainability decisions. Learn more in this episode about what is needed to change your unsustainable habits and people you know, what doesn’t work to motivate others to act, why we need to celebrate climate progress, and the importance of...

Our current human-centered cradle-to-grave design process only exacerbates our waste woes and worsens the climate crisis. How then can the designer transition their process away from this to one that creates to value and improve all life? A first step could be to understand the potential negative impacts of our work, to avoid them in the future. To see what those impacts could be, designers need to understand that everything is connected; a principle that is embedded in life-centered systems...

Do you wonder if the little things you do to help fight our climate crisis matter? You’re not alone. Maine-based paleoecologist Dr. Jacquelyn Gill shares with Eric the amazing power of embracing hope over wallowing in despair to battle for every fraction of a degree. Tune in to learn more about why little things do matter, Jacquelyn’s thoughts on how designers play an important role in telling stories of climate data, and why designing on longer timescales helps make the most responsible...

Climate Designers co-founder Marc O’Brien joins Eric to discuss their eight major takeaways from season one of Climify. What did the climate experts think we should teach in the classroom? What impact did Climify have on the design community? What should we discuss on season two and who should we invite to the program?

In this episode, we are inspired by behavioral design and how this type of design can actively create change. We talk about giving power to creativity and vision while pushing away negativity and “doom”. We think about breaking down behavioral design into smaller steps and smaller initiatives to see measurable change. Rachel specifically reflects on her minor in Psychology and discusses the ways design psychology can be improved for future students. Furthermore, we discuss how we would like...

In this episode, we discuss consumerism, the impact of consumerism with a sustainability lens, and how design contributes to, or combats, consumerism. We’ve discovered that the impact of fast fashion goes beyond just the types of fabric in use, but also affects social injustices like ethical labor and systemic privilege. We talk about consumerism tactics like greenwashing within marketing and branding, and how greenwashing leads to consumer distrust and consumer manipulation. We think about...

In this episode, we talk about design thinking and, more broadly, design systems. We’ve found that design thinking is far removed from what we do at our day jobs at an agency and freelancing, since our jobs move so quickly. We wonder if there’s a way to speed up design thinking to bring it into an agency lifestyle, so that we can start building products and services that are truly impactful for both the people and planet. But we don’t just limit the conversation to design thinking. We also...

In this episode, we talk about our own experiences with eco-anxiety. Eco-anxiety is defined by the Climate Psychology Alliance as the heightened emotional and mental distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system. We’ve all felt it at one point or another, and if you haven’t, maybe your climate bubble just hasn't popped yet. Eco-anxiety can be difficult to talk about, but the more you talk about it, the less anxious you’ll feel. And if you don’t have anyone to talk about it...

In this episode, we’re talking cross-pollination – within and outside of design, that is. Why are we so siloed in our ways of learning and working? Is staying within one focused discipline *really* the best option? Are there better ways we could collaborate and learn from one another’s expertise? There’s lots of benefits of bringing in other collaborators of different ages, interests, backgrounds, etc. And there’s a lot to be learned from a discipline outside of your own!

Rachel Cifarelli joins Eric to share her story of finding sustainable design after leaving school, why she wished her teachers taught her the topic, and explains why she started the New Wave research project to help design students take the lead on climate action when educators didn't.

Ruth McElroy Amundsen and Alden Cleanthes from Norfolk Solar join Eric to go in-depth on how our way of life and how we design is truly broken. They argue that we need to rethink every system in our modern lives to stave off the worst of climate change and that harnessing the vast power of the sun is actually an easier-than-you-think way to power almost everything.

Raz Godelnik joins Eric to share his years of research and teaching sustainable design and ethical business models. He discusses what went into writing his new book “Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis - A Strategic Design Approach” and why it's so important now that design and business alike work together to write a new story about sustainability.

Former Climify guests Katie Patrick and Lisa Zimmermann rejoin Eric for a panel discussion on this special episode recorded at the 2021 AIGA Design Educators Community ShiftED Conference. Each tackles tough questions about how and why all designers must address climate change in their work teaching in the classroom and creating in the workplace.

Akilah Stewart joins Eric to discuss how sustainability is all about people and why it must be inclusive and acknowledge indigenous peoples' wisdom who gifted us this knowledge to live in harmony with the planet. Akilah also shares the work of her company FATRA which is already redirecting plastic and textile waste streams into a more closed-loop system creating products that educate, alleviate, and inspire.

Sahara James joins Eric to discuss how designers can be an integral part of climate solutions by creating large systems-based sustainability solutions in supply chains and how she's tackling the climate crisis as a business consultanthelping communities make the switch to renewable energy and reducing carbon emissions by making their homes more energy-efficient.

Katie Patrick joins Eric to discuss why if educators and designers really want to create climate action they must use a behavioral science toolkit to actually get people to act. Only teaching about the climate isn't enough to create a big enough change, but instead using environmental or energy data to design fun competitive reward-based games will create that positive climate action we need.