As part of leading the Bay Area Chapter of Climate Designers I’ve produced a lot of events. Some are casual meetups. Many are lightly facilitated networking nights or speaker series. I enjoy event planning and crafting experiences that allow for education around a new topic and meaningful connection of those in the room. The following are some of my favorite events to date.

Climate x Design: Show & Tell

This was the first Climate Designers event I hosted, and one of the most memorable. We reached out to 5 different creatives to give short talks on their approach to sustainable design, taking care to curate across a range of design disciplines. I gave a short talk on my buy nothing interior design project to highlight circularity, creative reuse, and working within constraints. It was a cozy night in a friend’s design studio, and a great format.

Sustainability Struggles (and Wins!)

The event that started it all! I crafted this event to give sustainable design professionals doing the difficult day to day work a place to unpack the challenges and opportunities with others working in similar contexts, breaking groups up by discipline and workplace type. It was such a successful format that multiple other Chapters ran it, and now it’s the basis of the global organization’s online meetups. I’ve met a number of people who told me it was the best event they attended in a long time, as it allowed for very intentional and fruitful conversations with those facing similar challenges.

Solarpunk Salon

This event was a facilitated talk and workshop on imagining solarpunk futures, based on our corresponding newsletter. I am a huge climate fiction fan, solarpunk being but one of many variations on that theme. The genre has a lot to teach us about how to take the best technology of today with the connected ways of the past to build a thriving people and planet centered future. Following my talk introducing the subject, we broke into small groups to workshop two questions across three different focus areas of Tech, Food, and Cities: How could we do things differently? And what if we did it today? The results were wide ranging and fascinating.

Want to join a future Climate Designers event? Check out upcoming events from Climate Designers Bay Area and Climate Designers Global!