Climify

What are the best strategies to co-design in a community to create positive change? How can the designers’ work better reflect the aesthetics, lifestyles, and values of a predominately BIPOC community? Anika Goss, from Detroit Future City joins Eric to share how her organization co-designs with the people of Detroit to tackle, in particular, the Drawdown Climate Solution Sector of Food, Agricultur...

Have you ever felt helpless as an advocate for climate at your job or wondered where to find good paying jobs in climate action? If so, then this episode of Climify is for you! Jamie Beck Alexander, from Drawdown Labs , joins Eric to kick off Season 3 of Climify where each episode is themed by one of the Drawdown Climate Solution Sectors . In this first episode, Jamie shares her journey into clima...

Welcome to season three of Climify! This season, I'm talking to women across the globe who are at the forefront of climate science and climate action. Each guest is a thought leader in one or more of the Drawdown.org climate solutions sectors. What you may ask are the Drawdown.org solution sectors? Well, important topics like renewable electricity, soil and agriculture, architecture, oceans, healt...

How important are oceans to our climate? How vital are they to our general health? Did a video of an injured turtle really change the world? Marine Biologist and educator Carissa Cabrera joins Eric and explains it all through her work in media, science, and activism. You’ll learn from this episode that indeed there is an ocean of opportunity for designers for climate action; dive in.

What is it like to be a freelance designer who cares about the climate crisis? What are the challenges? What are the best practices to thrive? Recent graduates from the Univ. of Illinois graphic design (Michelle Nguyen) and SCAD industrial design (Gianna Romero) programs share their stories of trying to “design for good” while paying the bills. They also explain what ways their design education co...

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 tw...

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 educatio...

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 strategi...

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 clima...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 wor...

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 t...

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 wor...

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 t...

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 sto...

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 d...

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 bran...

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 bo...

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...

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,...

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.