Designing in reciprocity with Earth: Robin Wall Kimmerer on the importance of beauty
If you’re a designer like me, you might meet or read about other professionals working to measure and report on environmental changes, to develop and implement climate policy, and/or to protect the planet and its people from climate disasters, and think to yourself, What can I contribute as a designer and/or Are my contributions meaningful?
In a previous entry in this series, I shared about the Work That Reconnects, a process developed by Joanna Macy which is meant to help people personally come to terms with the climate crisis and discover for themselves what they will contribute to the pivotal moment we collectively find ourselves in. This process begins with gratitude, then leans into honoring our pain for the world.
In this entry, I will share more about what follows: seeing with new eyes. Joanna encourages us to peer both backward to ancient traditions and forward to consider future generations, as well as to consider the perspectives of non-human beings.
It’s with new eyes that I have personally been better able to see my own unique contributions to the climate care movement as a designer. In turn, it’s this recognition that has led me to see that as a designer one of my gifts is actually to help others see with new eyes too!
My journey seeking varied perspectives eventually led me to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist, nature writer, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. For me, her work and voice has deeply rooted the insight that we designers have not only a role to play in climate care but a crucial one.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Photo by Dale Kakkak
Is the climate movement beauty deprived?
In an interview on the podcast On Being, Robin shared her story of what drew her to pursue botanical studies:
“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old, telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow, and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle, rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely, in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together…
“I was told that that was not science; that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school — which was really demoralizing, as a freshman. But I came to understand that that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science as a way of knowing explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together…
“As it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics, and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complementary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists…
I just think that Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”
Robin’s story not only validated for me that asethetic fields have some valuable contributions to make to ecological inquiries, it got me wondering more deeply about what happens when these conversations, of color, of contrast, of beauty, are missing from climate dialogues.
This curiosity of mine was actually the focus of my undergraduate thesis a decade ago, when climate conversations in general were much more nascent. At that time, I not only demonstrated through my own creations but also wrote and spoke about how important it was that the climate conversation extend beyond academic and scientific realms, that creative people like myself become personally engaged and share their passion to reach and motivate more people.
Over the following years, I attended numerous climate convenings and witnessed how artists and creatives of all kinds continued to remain at the margins, usually only invited in to make some kind of temporary “splash.” Today I see that, sadly, this gap remains in the climate movement, even as public activism grows.
As urgency mounts, some people are pushing for more “splashes” and shake ups to spur emotions of a particularly ferocious kind. Of course some others are building on the legacy of nonviolent civic action, which appeals to values for cooperation and care. Regardless of the angle, behavioral science confirms that the best way to motivate people is through emotional appeals, and designers certainly play a role in such appeals, whether they show up in protest posters, digital advertisements, photographs of changing ecosystems, or data visualizations in news outlets.
Yet, while the cacophany increases, the question Robin poses - Why is the world so beautiful? - remains unanswered and in many respects unpursued, as if it’s not nearly as urgent. As designers, we understand that beauty is essential, especially when it comes to cognition, learning, and engagement. So, if anyone is tasked with at least imagining what it would be like to convene an international panel on this question, it’s the design community.
Creativity as reciprocity with the living world
From my view, the reason this has not happened yet is because designers, like most everyone else, are prone to looking through the spectors we’ve inherited, and thus, despite our gifts, our sight has in fact been limited. Design traditions and practices remain largely as extractive and exploitative as other industries driving climate collapse. The questions we tend to pursue are to serve specific ends, those that uphold business as usual.
In recent years, the Design Justice Network has emerged to articulate and coalesce around alternative philosophies and practices. One of the principles of Design Justice is to work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the Earth and to each other. Another is to honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
Again, we can turn to Robin as a wise teacher:
“The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is I think a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings are [about what it means] to be an educated person. It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is depauperate. The ecosystem is too simple. It doesn’t work as well when that gift is missing…
“I think of my writing very tangibly, as my way of entering into reciprocity with the living world. It’s that which I can give. And it comes from my years as a scientist, of deep paying attention to the living world, and not only to their names, but to their songs. And having heard those songs, I feel a deep responsibility to share them and to see if, in some way, stories could help people fall in love with the world again.”
These teachings and practices that Robin refers to are the kinds of new eyes climate designers need to adopt right now. It may not be easy but we need to ask ourselves if we’re creating designs simply to earn an income and make ourselves known in our profession, or if we’re creating out of respect and reverence for our life on this beautiful planet as well as our magnanimous and precious gift of being able to create beauty, order, and harmony.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin writes about the aforementioned asters and goldenrod in this way: “When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.”
I wonder, fellow designer, what beauty in this burning but still radiant world is calling you to respond? And what will you create, what will your heartfelt reply be?
As designers, we think a lot about beauty–the key word here is think. We’ve been trained to craft what will sell. I believe true beauty is something that emerges from a deep place within, that place that is connected to all of the living world.
I am reminded of something OG climate designer R. Buckminster Fuller once wrote: “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty… But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” If you’re familiar with his work then you know his use of the word “beauty” here is specific; he’s not referring merely to aesthetics, to form, he’s also referring to function, specifically a function that serves the whole of humanity and what he called Spaceship Earth.
Seeing with new eyes means we look at different sources of truth, and we reimagine our world and ourselves in relationship to it. We ask questions that get to the heart of the matter and that turn our existing frames and views on their heads. We also wonder about what still remains unseen, and we genuflect to the mystery.
In the next and final entry in this series on what I've learned as a designer from four women "elders" working on climate justice, I will share more about what climate designers can do as culture creators, how we can intentionally build culture that cares for climate justice.
So, call-to-action time
Head over to the Climate Designers community space on Mighty Networks and let us know what thoughts this entry inspires! Having read this far, what are some ways that you think that you do or could do to contribute as a designer? Let us know what you think and be on the look out for the final entry in this series!
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Perspective is a gift and with each new perspective the Field Guides get better.
Whether you are a prospective writer/contributor, a commenter, or a reader: new experiences, new connections, and ways of seeing the world leave us richer than before.
This entry was written by
Lydia Hooper
Lydia Hooper is a hybrid professional with special expertise in communicating about complexity, facilitating collaborative design processes, and guiding teams through transformation. She works as a UX Designer in the civic tech sector. Lydia is an active member of the Design Justice Network Communications Working Group, a collaborator on All Tech is Human's Guide to Responsible Tech, and co-author and editor of The Authoritative Guide to Designing Infographics. You can learn more at www.lydiahooper.com.