It is not an impossible ask. This generation can be exalted, remembered and leave an impact as epoch-making as the Victorians’ with their Industrial Revolution, which lifted millions of lives out of economic, educational and social poverty. By bringing in a Green Revolution we can leave a positive footprint every bit as lasting and beneficial as our forebears’, and start to heal previous environmental oversights. The once-derelict Victorian canals and old textile mills and workers’ terraces that the new urbanites are colonising are a sign of an age of progress and investment, and also a sign of our current society’s ability to reuse and reinvent.
But to achieve this new ‘revolution’ we have to harness ‘high-energy’ creative minds and embrace those who push and question. In the UK we have started to replace our loss of manufacturing with a creative economy that is now second to the service sector, with a worth of over £14bn to the economy overall and employing 1.8 million creative minds. Some of Britain’s major corporations are enjoying significant growth and success by engaging with designers at board level who ‘stick pins into’ the economists and are proving that the public respond to retailers who do more than ‘greenwash’. My mum and her peers have enjoyed flocking back to M&S, now that they know that Stuart Rose and his Plan A really do mean a more ethical, environmentally friendly and good animal-husbandry-aware retailer.
What is more, Design Council research is proving that creative education is good for us, with significantly lower truancy levels in art and design subjects (yet Government continues to push for less time doing what our kids enjoy and more time on maths and English).
Sustainability has been at the forefront of designers’ thinking long before it hit the pages of the Daily Mail. The creative mind is usually one that grasps societal issues at an early stage. It really is a no-brainer. If we like being creative, if it can contribute so significantly to the economy, then we need to ensure that this creative energy from creative minds permeates through all levels of life. We need such minds and the energy they bring to work alongside the analytical ones in Parliament, on our Council Town Planning departments, in our educational establishments, in hospitals and for industry that has been hitherto slow on the uptake to put creative minds on the board.
I don’t want to sound like a hippy, but the best kind of new energy we can embrace is that which comes from a creative mind.
