Dundee Design Festival 2024 has a big goal – it aims to be the most sustainable design festival in the world.
What this means in practice is that the festival will be created using a maximum of 30% new materials, with the rest re-used from previous exhibitions and local suppliers. It also speaks to the use of clean energy on the site, electric vehicles transporting attendees to the festival and several other measures.
Even the smaller elements of the festival, like this zine, have been created with careful planning around the origin and eventual destination of materials.
But talking about sustainability, environmentalism or the climate crisis has been described in the past as the feeling of homework you haven’t yet done. There is so much to consider, and so many ways to fall short of expectations, that the conversation about it could seem a touch overwhelming or completely nonexistent. None of it seems to hit the mark.
Part of this equivocation is also the question of whether we can ever do enough to turn around the climate crisis the planet is already in. It’s like we’re throwing pebbles in a river, trying to stop the current.
Juli Bolaños-Durman is one of over 180 designers participating in the festival. She describes her work as an attempt to re-imagine and repurpose waste materials to transform them into precious artefacts that tell a story, ‘I’m like a little magpie. I collect lost objects from my surroundings and play with them like they were lego.’
Key to her motivation is a practice of observing the objects that surround us and the ways they are discarded. To Juli, their purposefully short lifespan is at the heart of the reckoning designers must have with their environmental impact, ‘this system has failed us all.’ Design has a role to play, which in her practice is about asking a material what it can become after it’s thrown out, ‘I facilitate a beautifully flawed transformation.’
She accepts the frustrating feeling of throwing pebbles in a river is real and describes it as ‘a disheartening and stressful feeling that paralyses.’ But the designer sees a way forward too, ‘change will always be scary but we have to problem solve with optimism and take the leap.’
Sustainability on this level is a journey, it’s the ability of maintaining something over a period of time. And yet we seem to always talk about it as a destination, rarely using ‘optimism’ as a descriptor of what that mechanism should be.
Ron Woomble worked at the ex-Michelin site that will now hold the festival. His job was all about problem solving. He was tasked with finding issues along a process early enough so they would not compound into larger problems in the factory. ‘There’s always problems. There’s always problems to solve.’
‘And if you get something going wrong, you can very quickly have a lot of things that are not very right […] hundreds and hundreds of tyres that have got a slight defect.’
For Ron, if the way to stop those compounding issues was to catch them early enough, then the only way to do that was to ‘have an element of teamwork. There’s nothing that you know, that somebody else doesn’t know about either.’
No one single person holds all the knowledge in a factory. The ability to problem-solve needs to be baked in throughout the site so that potential issues are not able to overwhelm any given team. ‘So you tend to not be the only one who knows something, otherwise you’d never build or solve anything.’
Juli Bolaños-Durman’s view on sustainability is poetically resonant. ‘A society with a wide and diverse range of cultures, points of view and areas of expertise is a rich space.’
The fact that designers can share knowledge, approach and effort when it comes to sustainability, multiplies the impact any one person would have just by working on their own brand or personal approach. ‘Never underestimate connecting with […] your everyday community. This everyday impact will multiply many times over.’
The festival’s creative director, Stacey Hunter, acknowledges ‘sustainability discussions can be fraught and complicated.’ But she counters that ‘working sustainably isn’t inherently more difficult or expensive, in fact, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive.’
Much like design, sustainability is a process. It is about an approach that must be open for dialogue, critique and improvement.
From that space of learning, a shared approach to process can emerge. ‘All of the discussions we are having with suppliers, fabricators and delivery partners are enriching our collective knowledge of how to advance sustainable methods; we are all growing together.’
While DDF is holding itself to a higher standard and showcasing new ground for how sustainable an event of this magnitude can be, its biggest victory would be to inspire visiting makers. ‘Our festival is a platform for designers to demonstrate the conversations that are happening in the sector and to reveal new insights.’
‘I’m interested in broadening out the conversations we are having about sustainability in design because we need a collective approach to make significant and serious changes quickly’, says Stacey.
As one of those makers, Juli wants to focus on the how of sustainability which, for her, is all about how we collectively share knowledge. ‘I think collaboration is the road for the future of our evolution.’
Much like a factory that makes tyres, the festival is hoping it will produce something that helps us get to a destination, not the destination itself.
Written by Sam Gonçalves