Size matters not: enabling designers to take small actions on climate
Focusing on meaningful change rather than big impacts
Being a designer has never been easy; not if you take the responsibility seriously anyway. But being a designer — let’s face it, just being a person — on a planet that is undergoing a climate crisis is even harder. A designer’s job can be complicated and stressful even without thinking about climate change, and, I know that maybe for some people reading this, the anxiety that comes with thinking about climate change is too much to process along with all the other things you need to worry about—and I understand that. It’s overwhelming for me too, but it doesn’t mean we have no agency or ability to make a change to better the climate if and when we choose to act.
The good news is that we need to reexamine how we define “change.” If we are conditioned to think that anything short of becoming the next Alexandria Villaseñor or Greta Thunberg isn’t doing enough, then we don’t have a healthy — or realistic — idea of what effective change really is. If we don’t think we can make a change, we will burn out easily or potentially never even try. This essay is about doing just that: taking a look at what constitutes real change and enabling all of us to be activists in any way that we can.
I’ll be referencing Sarah Jacquette Ray’s incredible book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (hereafter known as AFGTCA) a lot in this because it has been a breath of fresh air for me as I navigate my own journey as a climate designer who is looking to make their effort count. I also would like to acknowledge that I know that jobs are at a premium right now and that in a pandemic we have to do what we can to live and pay our bills, but living to fight another day is better than dying on a hill of our own making. We can lighten the burden that we feel by realizing that we have the ability and power to make a real, tangible, important, and unique impact on climate action right now and that the baseline for effective action does not start at changing the world or launching a foundation, a non-profit, or a startup; it’s starts in our own actions, our own communities, and our own mind.
“Social movement theory holds that change happens on myriad fronts, not just in individual, spectacular moments of triumph. In the climate battle, the frontlines are everywhere, which magnifies our choices and gives us many directions to choose from, even if it can make impacts less visible. Sometimes, the work we do will be paid, but sometimes it will not. It may take years to polish off the layers of other people’s expectations of us that have covered up the true form of our calling. Learning to focus on what you love more than on what you think you are supposed to pursue will help you figure out where to devote a lifetime’s worth of energy.” (AFGTCA, pg. 54)
There is no action too small
When it comes to climate work — as a designer or otherwise — it’s helpful to begin by acting in small arenas. We might find that we never progress beyond those small actions and that is more than just okay, it’s completely normal. Remember as we go that small is sustainable; we can’t fight anything if we are battling our own fatigue or self-doubt about the task we’ve set in front of us.
Social media
Most people have some form of social media profile today, from Twitter and TikTok to LinkedIn and more. We have networks of people who follow us and who we follow and these networks are perfect places to get started in climate action. The people in our networks are (typically) people we trust, people whose content we want to see, and people who want to know what we are up to. This gives us an advantage compared to shouting on the street corner or in the depths of some Reddit thread; we already have an audience of people who have opted to hear or read what we have to say and we should not take that for granted.
For instance, your conservative uncle may care about the environment because he is an outdoorsman and so he may have a natural interest in doing something to protect it, but he is perhaps unlikely to listen to Al Gore or Naomi Klein.¹ Having the correct information is important, but the source it comes from means a lot too. In fact, it might mean everything if he is turned off by anything he can label as “the liberal agenda.” Your Instagram stories about cleaning up the beach, your Tweet with an infographic you made, or your LinkedIn post about your new job in conservation can be an important thing for him to see someone he trusts become involved in.
Your social media accounts are a great place to post your designs as well. The circular packaging project you worked on, the branding for a new sustainably-powered business you designed, the illustration you made for an NGO. We designers all think about social media as tools for self-promotion, and they are; but along with the latest photos of our dogs, our social posts can be a great spot to display your values as it comes to climate change. Post what you are reading, what you are designing, what you are thinking; when you share what you do and see, it makes your followers aware of those things too. And share the work of others! A retweet is free of charge and that artist needs the exposure just as much as you do. We can’t afford to be devoted to just our own work when the scale of climate change is global. The benefit of working small is that we have room to build community and camaraderie — the global outlook, the reminder that our work is a part of the tapestry of international climate action is what allows us to not get burnt out. The rolling counter of climate actions counts up even on the days we have to take off. We have other people’s backs and they have ours as well.
There are no leaders without followers, so neither is really more important than the other. Don’t be afraid to shout to the rooftops about this studio’s branding effort for a new sustainable ride-sharing company, because that is how momentum is made. Please don’t discount the impact of just a simple share — there are no viral posts without social media algorithms and those algorithms don’t put your posts in front of new users without your network’s engagement.
Self-initiated projects
Before we leave the topic of small actions, I want to touch on one type of small action in particular and it is one that is very close to my heart. That is the subject of self-initiated projects (SIPs). SIPs are great ways to get work for your portfolio and learn new skills while being in complete control of your time and the scope of the project. The reason that I want to talk about SIPs is that as a designer, they may be the first opportunities that we get to combine our passion about the effects of climate change — and the fight for climate justice — and our skills as designers. I contrast self-initiated work with work for free (or spec work) because both propose to give you “experience” and “portfolio work” but they go about it in very different ways and leave you with very different results.
Both can be rewarding, and offering to design something for free for a needy client can be a gracious offer that is worthy of praise. But exposing yourself to people who just want your — value-adding — design work for free isn’t the career boost that you need. SIPs are different in that you have work in the end for your portfolio, but your work is all yours. The concept can be yours, the execution, the work-in-progress notes, the final piece, all yours, under your control. These projects can be immersive attempts to practice a skill you’ve never tried before, or they can be extensions of your existing talents that connect to a topic you don’t get to touch in your day job. The best part is that as they can be educational or experimental, the stakes can be as low or high as you want. SIPs are tools that allow you to step into the work that you want to do, even if you can’t do it professionally yet. Post your work on social, ask for comments, advice, etc. and listen and learn. The Climate Designers community is a great place to post in-progress work—especially climate-oriented work—and get support. I know because I have needed the support of this community from time to time and they have given me the lift I was looking for. (You can join Climate Designers here if that sounds like a space you’d like to be.)
So what can a SIP look like? Well, what do you want to do? Maybe you snap portraits all day at a studio with your own camera but really want to document the lives of refugees; team up with a writer and talk to the immigrants in your area to learn why they came here, what they do and who they are. Share the project on social and mention that you want to do more work like it. Design logos for green companies that don’t exist (the best part there is that you can always reuse bits of those designs in real work that you do later on) to show your interest in doing that work professionally. You could use SIPs as learning opportunities to branch into a new discipline. Personally, I realized that I really wanted to illustrate more in my work about a year or two after I finished college, so I decided that I would learn illustration by combining that urge to learn with my favorite movie to make something that I knew that I would commit to completing. At the end — a few months later — I was left with a very detailed vector illustration of one of the Jeep Wranglers from Jurassic Park and the confidence to declare that I could handle vector illustrations. Self-initiated projects can be potent ways that you can take your career progression into your own hands. And all of those projects (even my Jeep) can have or lead to, meaningful change just by posting them and supporting the efforts of others that post them as well.
Redefine “change”
You can see that we have many options at our fingertips when it comes to what we can do with our social media accounts and our own talents, so what we need to do now is look at how we define what “change” is. How do we do that? Well, we might first need to inspect what we think action is; as we’ve seen, action isn’t just leading a climate march or passing a national law — action can be liking a post, giving a status update, or even sharing a meme. We should not measure an action by how large its impact is, but by how meaningful its results are.
This is a quote from Ray’s book and it is a little long, but I think it is worth quoting at length:
“Yet there is action in things that we are not accustomed to thinking of as arenas of social change. Is changing somebody else’s mind an ‘action’? Is changing your own mind an action? Is inaction ever an important form of action? What assumptions shape our ideas of what counts as meaningful action, and what we do to perpetuate them? For example, adrienne maree brown suggests that the need for dramatic, visible action is a symptom of patriarchy. To fetishize action and reject the less visible and less glamorous work of caregiving, community organizing, or going to meetings is to subscribe to a gendered view of the kind of work that matters.” So, you can see that action comes in many shapes and forms. Action is not made valid by its size, so neither should we think that meaningful “change” is only made when many people are affected. There is no action too small to be valid, so by definition, there is no change that is too small. That is an encouraging thought!
“A perception of ourselves as powerless emerges not from our actual inefficacy, but from our ideas of what it means to have the capacity to shape social change. This view is caused by the instrumentalist conceit that the only actions that matter are the ones that make impressive, immediate, large-scale change.” (AFGTCA, pg. 64)
Our effectiveness is influenced by our mindset
We’re coming to the end of this post, but before I finish I want to say one more thing about change and this wisdom comes fully from Ray’s Field Guide — I did say I’d visit it a lot, and you should too, so see if your library has a copy. We stated before that we cannot be effective activists if we only define action and change on a grand scale. That is important to know because when we see big problems that we know need big solutions, our smallness really stands out and that can be demoralizing. From Ray:
“The very scale of the problem makes people not want to do anything about it. Considering climate stories through this lens, it’s astonishing that so many climate change advocates still rely on the sky-is-falling approach to getting people to care about climate change. Perhaps they think that heralding the end will propel more listeners to action, and thereby help us avoid that end. But cognitively, it doesn’t work this way, or at least, it won’t in the long term. The bigger the problem, the less fixable it seems, and so the more likely we are to do nothing instead of something. We are finished before we even start. To fix this, we need to actively combat messages that tell us that the problem is too big to fix, and to remind ourselves that small is all, and that small is enough.” (AFGTCA, pgs. 75–76)
Working small and setting realistic goals, in community with others doing the same, is the renewable energy that we need to stay in this struggle. Remember that “to burn out trying to resist a system that is fueled by burning things out is not resistance.”* We have to believe in ourselves and each other in order to be effective activists and we have to remember to celebrate the achievements that are often overlooked if we are ever going to change the paradigm about what “effective change” actually is. After all, you can’t have a city-wide climate march if someone doesn’t go to city hall to do the unglamorous job of asking for a permit. You don’t get a circular packaging system if someone doesn’t research materials and processes. Big things can’t happen without the small ones.
I know there is a lot that you want to do to make this world a better place. And whether you start now, or when you can, don’t start big, don’t do it alone, and remember to trust your abilities. Believe in yourself—you’ve got this, and we’ve got your back.
*AFGTCA, pg. 41
¹This example is taken almost directly from Ray’s book (it didn’t make much sense to arbitrarily re-write it) and can be found on page 36.
