I’ve just returned from the World Design Congress 2025: Design for Planet, organised by the Design Council at the Barbican Centre in London.
The Barbican is an oasis in its own right: concrete towers rising above hidden gardens, pools where water ripples in the middle of the city’s roar, and pathways that twist like a maze. It was the perfect setting for a gathering about design and the planet. As I walked through its echoing halls and out onto its terraces, I kept noticing the mix of nature and structure, soft and hard. It made me think: if design shapes our surroundings so completely here, it must shape our survival everywhere.
At the Congress, I was reminded that everything around us is designed. The streets we run on, the kit we wear, the food we eat, even the laws that govern us. Design is not just about creativity: it’s about whether our future will be regenerative or destructive.
As The Green Runners, we focus on four pillars: how we move, how we kit up, how we fuel, and how we speak out. The Congress touched on them all.
How we speak out: beginning with hope
The first voice we heard was Jane Goodall’s. Her words carried through the auditorium like a quiet bell: “What’s the point if there’s no hope?” The room stilled, and for a moment I swear you could hear people holding their breath. She reminded us that hope is not naïve. It’s the engine that drives action. Without it, why try? With it, there is always a reason to act. Her Book of Hope explores that idea in full, but even in a few minutes, she planted it firmly in our minds.
Over the course of two days, speakers returned to the same striking figure: about 80% of a product’s environmental impact is decided at the design stage. Before a shoe is sewn or a road is laid, its footprint is already determined. That fact hung in the air like both a warning and an invitation. If so much is decided upfront, then design is one of the strongest levers we have for change.
Economist Kate Raworth offered one way to pull that lever. Her Doughnut Economics model describes a safe space for humanity. Inside the ring, everyone has access to basics like food, housing and education. Outside the ring, we avoid overshooting ecological limits like climate stability, clean water and biodiversity. The doughy middle is where we must live. Cities like Amsterdam and Brussels are already testing the model in practice. Hearing this in London, surrounded by the buzz of a capital city, I wondered what it would feel like if our own running communities measured themselves against the doughnut. Could we meet every need without pushing the planet past its limits?
Designer and systems thinker Leyla Acaroglu gave us a compass for the journey ahead. “We’re a part of nature, not apart,” she told us. The phrase was simple, but it lit something in the room. She explained that the labels don’t matter much: circular design, sustainable design, regenerative design. The only question worth asking is whether the things we create restore the systems that sustain life. Shifting industries rooted in extraction will be hard, but she said it with a calm certainty: it can and must be done.
That idea of redesigning systems reached even into governance. Faith In Nature , a UK-based soap and skincare company, has become the first business in the world to appoint Nature itself to its board of directors. Every decision now has to consider what’s best for the natural world. Sitting there, it struck me as bold and obvious all at once. Why should Nature not have a seat at the table when it sustains us all?
How we move: cities and hidden systems
The architect Norman Foster spoke about cities. He reminded us that compact, walkable cities have about half the carbon footprint of sprawling ones. The healthiest city is the walkable city. Trafalgar Square was one of his examples, transformed from a busy junction into a place where people could gather, sit, and breathe. The choice to design for people instead of cars changes everything, from the air we inhale to the carbon we emit.
But movement is shaped by invisible systems too. The Congress drew attention to data centres, the silent warehouses that hold our GPS routes and race registrations. They hum with servers and cooling fans, each gulping electricity and water. Globally their footprint is growing, though some in the UK are beginning to switch to water-saving and more efficient cooling. It was a strange thought: even logging my miles on my Garmin is tied to a vast and thirsty infrastructure.
How we kit up: the stories our clothes tell
When fashion designer Priya Ahluwalia spoke, it felt like she was telling us a traveller’s tale. In 2017, she walked through markets in Lagos, Nigeria, and noticed clothes that seemed oddly out of place: a London Marathon T-shirt, tourist tops with obscure British slogans. The sight stuck with her. Where had these garments come from? Following that question took her to Panipat, India, the global centre for recycling textiles. What she learned became her first book, Sweet Lassi, and shaped a design philosophy rooted in upcycling and ethics. Listening to her, I thought about my own pile of race shirts. Each one carries a story that stretches far beyond me.
Sharon Baurley from the Royal College of Art added a scientist’s lens. She spoke about “product cultures” and about weaving repair and durability into products from the start. I pictured running shoes designed not to wear out, but to be fixed and returned. Jackets meant to last a lifetime, not a season. Her vision felt like an antidote to fast fashion in sport.
How we eat: food, packaging and waste
Food and packaging brought some of the most hopeful stories. Rodrigo García González, cofounder of Notpla showed how thousands of plastic bottles could be replaced with something edible and biodegradable, such as their seaweed-based capsules handed out at the London Marathon in 2019.
Then came Desolenator, a solar-powered machine that turns seawater into safe drinking water while recycling the brine left behind. No chemicals, no membranes, just sunlight and saltwater. Sitting there, it felt like a glimpse of a different kind of future.
Designer Rhea Thomas introduced Seasprout, her way of transforming discarded seafood waste into biodegradable plant pots. Almost half of all seafood is wasted. Seasprout turns that loss into growth. It was a reminder that waste itself is only a design choice, and one that can be reversed.
The conversations on food carried a harder edge too. Climate change is already threatening major food-producing regions. Heat and drought can trigger shortages and unrest. Regenerative farming, stronger supply chains and smarter packaging are not luxuries. They are lifelines.
Leaving the Barbican, I stepped out into the city noise: buses grinding, sirens flashing, footsteps echoing against stone. Yet I also carried the sound of fountains in the Barbican gardens and the memory of voices from the Congress.
Jane Goodall’s reminder that hope is our fuel. Kate Raworth’s doughnut, showing us the boundaries within which we must live. Leyla Acaroglu’s compass point: design as part of nature, not apart. And the proof of possibility from Faith in Nature, Notpla, Desolenator, Ahluwalia, Baurley and Seasprout.
For The Green Runners, the message was clear. Design is everywhere. It’s in our runs, our kit, our food and our voices. And if design shapes everything, then we can choose to shape it for good. Out on the trails, around the campfire, at the start line. Let us keep designing for planet, together.