The Design Council announces the return of its award-winning Design for Planet Festival – supporting the UK’s 1.97 million-strong design community to address the climate emergency.

The 2022 hybrid festival will take place at Northumbria University from Tuesday 8 November – Wednesday 9 November 2022, to coincide with COP27, providing a series of virtual events and live broadcasts.

This year’s theme of ACTION will help designers make their sustainability plans a reality, with free workshops, tools and panel talks.

Speakers to include Biologist and Wildlife Film Maker, Patrick Aryee, Circular Fashion Designer Phoebe English, Model and Ecologist Zinnia Kumar, Architect and Systems Thinker Michael Pawlyn and many more.

The festival is free to all designers, universities, students and businesses alike – with registrations open from today.

Today (Thursday 8 September 2022) the Design Council opens its free online registration for the Design for Planet Festival 2022. The aim of the festival is to mobilise the UK’s powerful design community to create ways out of the climate crisis.

Faced with the climate and biodiversity emergencies, the scale of what the UK needs to design – and re design – to achieve net-zero targets by 2050 is immense. As the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, COP27, gets under way in Egypt, the Design for Planet Festival will bring together leading minds from the design and sustainability landscape to provide free information, tools, practical workshops and stimulating conversation, in a bid to accelerate design innovation across the UK.

The Design for Planet Festival will be hosted by Biologist and Wildlife Film Maker, Patrick Aryee – who after training in Molecular & Cellular Biology, went on to work for the BBC’s Natural History Unit alongside Sir David Attenborough.

The festival will feature over 100 experts from many diverse disciplines of design, from biodiversity and materials to supply chains, energy, food waste and much more. Speakers announced today include circular fashion designer Phoebe English alongside Innovator and Podcaster, Sara Vaughan who will lead an online discussion on Resourceful Fashion and Architect Michael Pawlyn alongside Strategist, Writer and Curator, Sarah Ichioka who will discuss How to work with Biomimicry, and Youth Climate Justice Activist Daze Aghaji.

Sign up today to the Design for Planet Festival HERE. Visitors can expect talks, practical sessions, design tools and a full list of speakers to be announced over the coming weeks.

The Design Council’s flagship event was held at the V&A in Dundee last year, and brought together 120 sustainable design leaders, 6,000 online attendees and was awarded gold in the GOV Design Awards 2022.