‘Our future is defined by the path we take and choices we make today. The question we pose is, what role will design and creativity play when it comes to taking climate action and designing a circular future here in Aotearoa New Zealand?’ – writes Bree Asmus

The world we’ve shaped around us—along with how we live, work, and interact within it—draws on earth’s resources and uses them in a multitude of ways. From how we grow our cities, buildings and communities, to how we power the infrastructure of our vehicles and journeys, to our food, clothes, phones, and the very fabric of our everyday life.

These systems have us all so incredibly connected, yet with such striking disconnect to the natural world we are part of.

Faced with the inarguable impacts of this current state, we have an incredible opportunity to pause—to reimagine—and actively redesign the systems of our products, services, businesses, industries, and economies for the change we need, and to change trajectories.

A circular design mindset offers us a way to reshape our systems, and design out the cause of their devastating impacts. With less than 10% of the world operating in a way that is circular, and growing demand from citizens for solutions that answer this – the potential is immense.

The act of creativity—in how we design solutions, ideas, innovations, and collaborations—is at the heart of the change we need to make.

As Joe Iles of Ellen MacArthurFoundation so aptly puts it, “In the process of creation, upstream decisions determine how things work and whether they become just another part of our current linear model, or whether they help make our world increasingly circular and regenerative.” You can hear more about this from Joe in his conversation with Circularity on The Redesign of Everything podcast.

So what role can design and creativity play in climate action and a circular future here in Aotearoa New Zealand?

We invited a panel of practitioners to explore this question in conversation at XLabs LIVE, New Zealand’s cross-industry circular design sprint. Bree Asmus of Circularity led the conversation alongside Jade Tang-Taylor (Creative Social Entrepreneur and Innovation Director at Tech Futures Lab), Anzac Tasker (Creative Director specialising in the Te Ao Māori, and Co-President of the Designer’s Institute of New Zealand), Sheena Denmead (Softgoods Product Designer of Make it Better Co), and Noel Blackwell (Strategy Director and Co-Founder of LIKEMINDS, and Co-Convenor of NZ’s Value of Design award).

Each panelist brought to the conversation a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise across product/industrial design, business leadership, brand strategy, social innovation, and te ao māori wairuatanga.

A few threads began to emerge in answer to this provocation… We have documented them below, and hope they will ignite conversation, action, and participation.

1 / Creativity is innate, design is intentional.

Despite varying titles, roles, and career paths, creativity is innate in all of us. The potential is in how we use it intentionally. It’s in the art and the action – the heart and the head. By looking at problems differently, to boldly imagine the possibilities, and then designing ways to make them a reality.

In our panel discussion, we talked about liberating the traditional rules of creativity, and the importance of a clear intention to guide how design is used. Without this intention, or the ability to push the boundaries in achieving it, design can fall short of fulfilling its potential for change.

“We need to free up the understanding of what design is. We're all designers, just like we’re all creative. Design is an intentional response to something. It’s a plan to do something. It doesn’t matter if you’re designing with words, with CAD drawings, with materiality, with collaborative structures, or for policy. The problem is, we’re wasting a lot of time. We need well designed solutions that achieve results and don’t over burden our resources. Be they human, or environmental.” — Noel Blackwell
“Creativity will be a great part of solving the problem, but first and foremost we need to make sure the intention behind what we’re doing is right. When we talk about projects in te ao māori, we talk about kauapa. ‘He aha te kaupapa?’. What is the intention we’re putting our energy behind? That’s what it always circles back to. We can rely on the creative abundance within New Zealand – but it's what we’re asking of it... that’s the main thing.” — Anzac Tasker

The question for our readers is, how are you engaging with design as a tool for change? Are you enabling your teams to unleash their creativity in reimagining, planning, and working towards a braver vision for the future?

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2 / The power is in the process, of creating together.

As we look to untangle the disconnects, impacts, and inequities of our systemic challenges, it’s important to acknowledge a future designed for all of us to thrive requires us all to be involved. Creativity can help bring us together in its making.

As a panel, we spoke about the need for a multidisciplinary approach to solutions. Of designing with people, not for them. Of working collaboratively, not competitively. This requires openly inviting in the challenges of different perspectives.

“It’s not going to take one idea, one design, one creative discipline to solve these wicked problems. You need a multidisciplinary aspect. It's not enough to have a beautiful or brilliant idea anymore, it's how well you bring others on that journey. And it might be at a leadership level to create system change, or it might be at engagement level to connect more grassroots communities along the way. Collaboration is the key.” — Jade Tang-Taylor
“I think it's really exciting that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. That there’s all these other people out there working on the same thing, you just haven’t met them yet. And when you start to network with all these other individuals, and companies, it's much more possible these days than it was twenty years ago. It’s faster. And we need to go fast, and we can go even faster together.” — Sheena Denmead

How might you bring together divergent perspectives and voices to the challenges you’re tackling? In ways that invite involvement, inspire creative solutions, and create more meaningful impact for all of us? What could that look like in your world?

3 / Design is a culture of exploring, learning, unlearning and returning.

We often think of design as a beautifully finished state, but its power lies in how it’s put into practice – not just the ‘end result’. In fact, good design is rarely ever finished. Look to the intelligence of nature’s designs; constantly evolving, changing, adapting, learning, and responding to the surrounding world.

When posed with the question of ‘what does the redesign of everything mean for you’, many of our panelists reflected on their own continuous practice of design as the exploring, learning, unlearning, and returning to truths.

“Design is never really finished. Especially if you think in a circular way, it's never finished, it’ll come back around and hopefully get recreated into something else. It’s a continuous process.” — Sheena Denmead
“I’m really curious about that concept of redesign. I think for a lot of Māori, it's going back to what it was always about to be indigenous. When we talk about circularity, we're talking about being indigenous and being tapped into the natural frequencies of our environment. So I'm not too sure if it's about redesigning — it's about traversing old pathways to find new ways forward.” — Anzac Tasker

So, how is your business creating an environment and culture that encourages people to learn, unlearn, return, and creatively imagine what comes next? Are you allowing space for solutions to be fully explored—and to fail fast—in order for them to be radically improved?

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4 / Creativity can make the world sit up and wonder.

With intensifying media and headline overload, creativity has the potential to cut through. To answer complexity with clarity, apathy with agency, and fear with hope. Humans are beings, governed perhaps more by our hearts than we care to admit. Creativity can be a language that calls to us, rallies us, and shows us a different way forward.

We can disrupt the impacts of industries, sectors, and behaviours today, by creating new exemplars of progress. In fact, the very definition of creativity is ’the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns — and instead create meaningful new progressiveness, or imagination.

“If you really believe in something, or it connects deeply to you and your sense of purpose, then you will figure out a way, even when current systems aren’t at play yet, there’s ways of bringing people with you to redesign some of these systems, or at least influence them.” — Jade Tang-Taylor
“Creativity can make the world sit up, and wonder. You can grab a problem, but you can redesign with optimism. You can use creativity to get people excited. To see the possibilities. To create an energy that feels exciting and less overwhelming.” — Noel Blackwell

We could spend hours—or years—debating the impossibilities and risks of our problems. But sometimes, we just need to start… So let’s start reimagining what’s possible.

Businesses are well set up to manage risk and opportunities, it's often in their DNA. But it’s time to start exploring new ways and new places, to find better and bolder answers.

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5 / Bold solutions thrive on brave creativity.

The most game-changing ideas and solutions are often inspired by something completely divergent to the field they operate within. This is the beauty of creative problem solving. Of stepping outside the known parameters to find new solutions, rewire systems, and radically shift expectations.

Good points were made in discussion on how businesses can invite in the challenge of creativity, and recognise the value of design.

“There's a reciprocal responsibility between those shaping the brief and setting the intention, with those creatively bringing it to life for people to experience. There needs to be an invitation to challenge each other, and to embrace that challenge. To hold each other accountable if we aren’t delivering on our promise.” — Anzac Tasker
“What we’re seeing is companies being inspired by the natural world to find creative solutions, and within that, the key thing is taking responsibility. A company that won New Zealand’s ‘Value of Design Award’ last year was UBCO, with their electric bikes out of Tauranga. It’s radical what they did. Flipping the whole model to become subscription-based so they could take complete responsibility for every single part of the bike. But what’s interesting, is they saw the value of trying to sort out their impact, and they made that happen. That’s what we’re trying to encourage, a more holistic look at the impact that design can have. — Noel Blackwell

How can your business participate in the challenge of creativity, and realise the true value of design through new business models?

6 / Solutions and progress are made to be shared.

It’s easy to fall into a trap of waiting until something is ‘perfect’ before sharing. But improvement and learning only ever truly starts once it’s shared and experienced. And it will never be perfect. Open and continuous progress is what’s important as we work to solve these complex challenges.

Our panelists spoke about sharing creative solutions early and often; with prototyping, iterating, failing, learning and growing. ‘User testing’ can be done everywhere and with nearly anyone. Coffee shops. Elevators. Dinner tables. Using every chance to refine your ideas, answer gaps, connect dots, and weave in the improvements of many, many perspectives.

“Releasing your product, or your solution into the real world is not the end, sometimes it’s really just the beginning of finding out what’s going to happen. You might get the opportunity to update it, remodel it, and then keep going... Many projects aren’t fully circular, they’re two steps to being circular, or one part of the product is circular. But if we release it out into the world, then that creates more pressure. And the pressure keeps building, until you can say, ‘okay now can we make it circular.’ It's all incremental.” — Sheena Denmead
“It’s all of those incremental pressure points that move us in the right direction. We might not be able to achieve it tomorrow, but if we start to shift our design culture, and our stream of thought into that direction – all those pressure points over five, ten, fifteen, twenty years will move us into that space. So long as we have a very long set of goals, large aspirations, and we remain ambitious.” — Anzac Tasker

Find your protagonists, your challengers, and make the solutions work harder to truly win them over.

How will you bravely share the journey and progress of iteration? Imagine the outcomes and pace of progress if we all do this.

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7 / Aotearoa’s future economy needs to be designed by us, for us.

As we shift towards circularity, it can be easy to get caught up in the pace of change. And that pace is so incredibly important for a liveable future. But we must consider the gravitas of how we design our future economy. In ways true to Aotearoa, designed by the people of this place, and in ways that bring us closer together as we move forward.

“As we shape this conversation of circularity, it's great to have frameworks from afar that can start to illuminate this pathway for us. But here in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are already indigenous frameworks we can lean into. When we talk about kaitiakitanga, it’s about being proactive in the way we go about designing for our natural world, and for our future generations. We have all the right ingredients in mātauranga māori, our indigenous origins, modern science, and abundant creativity. We can be leaders in this space for the world, but it needs to be uniquely of Aotearoa" — Anzac Tasker
“For us in te ao māori, there’s a bit of a rejection towards ‘human-centered design processes’, and the main reason for that is it’s ‘human’ centered. In te ao māori it's always been more about wairua-centricity. When we talk about wairuatanga, it’s acknowledging that our environment has a spirit to it, our generation yet to come, has a spirit to it, and our generation that has gone before, has a spirit to it too.” — Anzac Tasker

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There is no one way to go about this. There are many ways, many conversations, and many strands that need to be woven together for our future.

But one thing is certain, we will not shape a successful circular economy by using the same mindsets of today’s linear systems. And that means we need to embrace a culture of bold creativity and design – of learning, unlearning, returning and growing together.

So how does one start?

It can be as simple as creating space to let creative thought in. Take time to find inspiration, to connect and talk with others. To observe and imagine anew, to find and boldly design better paths forward.

Because as we are all well aware, the solutions we need for a liveable future have to bravely change the game, and surpass the status quo to succeed.

— Written by Bree Asmus

What role can design and creativity play in reimagining impact?