Tomorrow, 24 May 2018 is Demo Day. On the first day of WDCD Live Amsterdam the thirteen winners of the WDCD Climate Action Challenge will present the final versions of their projects. Anticipating the presentations WDCD’s Richard van der Laken and Elizabeth McKeon and Radu Dumitrascu of WDCD’s partner IKEA Foundation reflect on the challenge and their cooperation.
By Annemiek Leclaire
‘I’ve been working in philanthropy for thirty years now,’ says Elizabeth McKeon, Head of portfolio for the IKEA Foundation, ‘and I’ve seen a lot of brilliant ideas from the laboratories of elite universities intended for villages in Africa, but without the people coming up with these ideas ever having spoken to a single person from one of these villages. It is only by linking the inventiveness of the local population to the creativity of designers and the knowledge of engineers that solutions that people actually want to apply can be found. This is also the factor that will most determine the sustainability of the winning submissions: whether their products or services will actually be used.’
Refugee Challenge
IKEA Foundation’s partnership with WDCD dates back to 2015 when the charity decided to support the WDCD Refugee Challengetogether with the UN’s Refugee Agency UNHCR. After this first collaboration, IKEA Foundation wanted to continue partnering with WDCD, shifting the focus to climate change. The WDCD Climate Action Challenge, launched in 2017 – also with support from Autodesk Foundation –, asked for solutions that can help people to adjust to the consequences of climate change. The challenge received 384 submissions from 70 countries, from which finally thirteen winners were selected. The winners – announced on 23 November 2017 at WDCD Live São Paulo – are sharing a € 900,000 package of prizes, including a five-month ‘acceleration programme’. Tomorrow, all thirteen will tell where this accelerator has brought them so far.
Ice stupas
One hope is that solutions that are made for particular locations can then be exported to other areas with similar conditions. ‘Take, for example, one of our winners – the ice stupas from Tibet,’ says McKeon. ‘Water that would normally sink into the groundwater is stored during the winter in the form of ice. These stupas are built in such a way that they won’t melt before the end of spring. The stupas are intended to provide water to a high-altitude desert in the Himalayas during the summer season, now that the disappearing glaciers are less able to do this; but once you have understood the technology and the design, they can be used anywhere where there is water, cold, and the possibility of drought. The inventors are currently in discussions with a community in the Swiss Alps.’
Dronecoria
The three give another example of a solution to a local problem: ‘Dronecoria’, drones that can sow seeds to help with reforestation. ‘This was thought up by two Spanish designers to counteract the effects of the forest fires on the Iberian peninsula,’ Dumitrascu says, ‘but it could be equally effective in Romania, where I am from. Our national parks there are also being affected by deforestation due to climate change.’
Van der Laken: ‘Dronecoria was one of the projects about which little debate was needed among the jury, because it was just so clear to everyone that this is a winner.’
In his opinion, the ice stupas and the drones are also good examples of “the seductive power of design”: ‘getting people on your side for ideas because of the attractiveness of the way they are designed.’
Dronecoria
The power of design
A crucial criterion for the selection process was that submissions had to contain a design element, and not be purely a great feat of engineering. ‘This is the whole reason we got together with WDCD,’ McKeon says. ‘We believe in the power of creativity and design to come up with better solutions for people’s everyday lives. This is what we want to show. What creative imagination can produce.
‘And we’ve seen so many different forms of design in this challenge,’ she continues. ‘Whether in relation to concrete products such as Twenty – which eliminates the need for water in products such as shampoo, making smaller packaging possible. Or whether it concerns the shaping of behaviour, such as another winner: Change Rangers, which designed a futuristic youth organisation that teaches teens skills that can enable them to make their communities more sustainable.’
Radu Dumitrascu
Positive solutions
One of the criteria the winning submissions had to fulfil was ‘excitability’. ‘That’s an aspect I paid extra special attention to,’ says IKEA Foundation’s Communications Manager Radu Dumitrascu, who previously worked for Greenpeace. ‘Excitability is something the climate movement can really use.Climate change is a sensitive subject. People are distancing themselves from it because they feel powerless. With this challenge, we are changing this pessimistic story by showing positive solutions.’
McKeon: ‘One of the greatest messages of this challenge is that there are solutions for climate change that don’t necessarily reduce our quality of life. For decades now, the environmental movement has suffered from the idea that we have to choose between polar bears or our cars. But solutions can come in forms very different from just taking things away from people.
‘Another thing that gives me a lot of hope, is that the people making the winning submissions are almost all remarkably young. There are a few highly experienced designers among them, but many of the best ideas are coming from a whole new generation.’
WDCD’s creative director Richard van der Laken
Success goes along with failure
According to Van der Laken, Dumitrascu and McKeon, the success of Climate Action Challenge and its sequel due to be launched in September will depend not just on the impact of the winning submissions. McKeon: ‘For us, success is also the growth of WDCD as a platform for design practice, allowing submitters to share their failures and their solutions. Success is also the attention we attract in the media. Success is also getting a project to the next stage thanks to the professional support we offer. Half of these projects may fail, but there can be no success without perseverance, so we will continue to give attention and patience; we will continue to follow them.’
‘And we go pretty far in this,’ Van der Laken says. ‘We nominate people whose submissions are then fine-tuned by professionals, so they can present their projects to an international jury. They even get paid for it. So even if you are not (yet) a winner, you will receive funds with which you can improve your proposal. I’ve never seen this before in my entire career as a designer.’
McKeon: ‘I believe this considerate aspect is an exceptional element of this competition. But it also characterizes how we work as a foundation. This is also how we deal with the organisations we support. We don’t just give money, we test the entire organisation for strengths and weaknesses. And then we ask: “What do you need for your plans to succeed?”
‘Organisations such as WDCD, which depend on external finance, run the risk of acquiring an episodic nature – slogging from one conference to the next. The IKEA Foundation wishes to ensure that WDCD can become a sustainable organisation. Not only with the aim of making the second climate challenge possible, but also to allow it to become a permanent institution for positive change.’
Climate Action Demo Day, 24 May 2018, 14:00-16:15hrs, De Balie