Tag: climate design

Typographic Thresholds: Addressing Climate Urgency

Design methodology and outcomes for two projects—a group exhibition and a large-scale installation.

Megan Irwin
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

As the climate crisis accelerates, designers are faced with pressing questions concerning how design contributes to awareness and action. Typography—bridging language and visual form—offers a unique capacity to make environmental issues tangible. This presentation examines how experimental typographic practice—through material processes, formal disruption, and spatial installation—can move beyond representation to translate the urgency and complexity of our ecological moment.

This presentation features design methodology and outcomes for two projects: Climate for Change and Tipping Point. Climate for Change, a group exhibition addressing the current environmental emergency, employed an expressive typographic language across the exhibition design. Physical manipulations with water and melted letterforms worked alongside digital experiments to distort and dissolve type—evoking themes of fragility and urgency. The typography disintegrates and then rebuilds, carrying an additional message of change, restoration, and hope.

Tipping Point, a large-scale typographic installation, evolved from research on ecological thresholds. The typography spans a grid of 25 panels, each representing a vulnerable environmental system. As viewers engage with the work, panels flip and disrupt the typography, triggering a transformative cascade of events from the wall to the floor. This participatory experience invites action and reflection upon this ecological instability.

Together, these projects demonstrate typography’s power to engage the public with urgent climate issues. By synthesizing language and visual form, designers can mediate between scientific discourse and public understanding—offering frameworks for reflection, engagement, and collective action.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.2: Annual CAA Conference 2026 (In-person only) on Thursday, February 19, 2026.

Sustainable Design Pedagogy: A Fifteen-Week Case Study of Sustainable and Climate Design Methodology and Outcomes

A look at foundational systems thinking.

Maria Smith Bohannon
Assistant Professor
Oakland University

Graphic design as a profession often perpetuates rampant consumerism through the art of persuasion, which is directly at odds with working toward sustainable and ecological discourse. To explore the possibilities of sustainable capitalism and foundational sustainable and environmental design themes, I developed a special topics course to understand and investigate the designer’s role as a climate design activist and sustainable designer. The emphasis of this course will focus on sustainable design thinking, praxis, and ideation with the investigation of green or recycled materials as part of the prototyping process—both print and digital—all in the pursuit of reimagined design futures. 

 This course study will look at foundational systems thinking from environmental design pioneers, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and how designers can successfully implement sustainable methodologies and utilize environmentally friendly materials to craft sustainable solutions today. By identifying and framing complex problems plaguing the world, we can examine the possibilities and challenges in addressing these issues broadly or within local communities. 

As sustainability and eco-friendly solutions are imperative for future generations’ ability to prosper, sustainable pedagogy must become foundational in graphic design education. By adopting sustainable design pedagogies, educators provide future designers with the tools—and understanding of sustainable design history, process, methodologies, and materials—to question capitalist tendencies and develop sustainable solutions.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.2: Annual CAA Conference 2023 (Virtual) on Saturday, February 18, 2023.