Writing on Design & Climate
I write about the potential of design to help create a more just and sustainable society. My writing takes the form of books, book chapters, academic articles, think pieces, and climate fiction. ORCID ID | SCOPUS
Books Authored
Design to Renourish: Sustainable Graphic Design in Practice
Inspiration is everywhere when you stop to not just smell, but also to watch the roses. Mother Nature’s interwoven relationships with all life forms can be a powerful model for graphic designers to create sustainable print and digital work. Design to Renourish is a book for the graphic design professional that helps to integrate sustainability into their workflow through a design process called systems thinking. This process asks the graphic designer to approach a design problem by being more informed, aware of, and influenced by the impacts that material and vendor choices have on one another, the planet, and consequently on us.
Recent Peer Reviewed Articles and Conference Proceedings
Sustainable Design
Connecting Values: Teaching Sustainability to Communication Designers.
Hidden Connections: Holistic approaches to Design for the Common Good.
A Shift to Life-Centered Systems Thinking: Teaching Modules to Design Regenerative Futures.
Design
Systems Thinking and Connecting the Silos of Design Education.
The Serenity Logo: Otherness and Inauthenticity.
How to Explain Design Research to Your Friends.
Sustainable Materials Research
A Case for a New Case Paper: From Farm to Table to Desk to Bench.
Invited Online Articles
Chapters in Books
Sustainable Design
“Best Practices to Design Sustainably,” in SustainAble: A Handbook of Materials and Applications for Graphic Designers and Their Clients, ed. Aaris Sherin.
“Publishing and Sustainability,” in Rethinking Paper and Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution, ed. Melissa Brumer & Janine Eckhart.
“Designing Sustainable and Equitable Relationships with Communities,” Developing Citizen Designers, ed. Elizabeth Resnick.
"Design Education in the Anthropocene: Teaching Systems Thinking," in Right Research: Modeling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, ed. Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier, & Geoffrey Rockwell.
Writings on Medium.com
Design
“Medium is the Message,” in The Graphic Design Process: how to be successful in design school, ed. Anitra Nottingham & Jeremy Stout.
Climate Fiction
“Over-consumption, the natural environment, and Earth that was," in Serenity: Essays on Joss Whedon’s ‘Big Damn Movie,’ ed. Frederick Blichert.
What was promising from 2023 and inspires Climify guests in 2024
A hopepunk climate fiction story set in 2047 in Stillwater, Oklahoma
I have been hoping to write about design, the environment, and science fiction for quite a long while, and the recent explosion of AI in our design software and daily life has provided an immediate opportunity to do so. So, thank you science.
I have struggled over the years to figure out how to inspire climate action through design. Through this journey, I wondered often if an important way we could encourage more progress was to rethink and rebrand how we communicated climate action to the public.
What the Five Principles of Soil Health Can Teach Designers
Systems Thinking is “the way”
The planet and humanity needs designers to change the way they make things.
Beyond your professional design life, there is a lot you can do in your public and personal life to improve the world.