Putting the Planet on the Drawing Board
Design’s potential to create a sustainable planet is crucial. Our Top Read for this month aims to make it so.
What comes to mind when you think of the green skills revolution? Engineers building wind turbines? Data analysts plotting the carbon curve? Policy types poring over carbon budgets and taxonomies?
Designers might not be the first people you picture—but they should be.
This month’s Top Read, the Skills for Planet Blueprint from the UK Design Council, puts design exactly where it belongs: at the heart of the green transition. It’s bold, far-reaching, and refreshingly pragmatic. And, as we like from these type of things, it comes as a toolkit—one that opens up new ways of thinking about the power of design not just to mitigate, but to transform.
Let’s start with scale.
As the Design Council tells us from the off, the UK’s design economy employs getting on for 2 million people, or 1 in every 20 workers. And contrary to what the creative labels suggest, over three-quarters of those work outside of “design” sectors—in places like health, retail, construction, and public services. Over 866,000 of these roles are in digital design alone.
It’s a workforce that stretches across industries, shaping the built and digital environments we move through every day. And yet, it’s one that’s often invisible in policy conversations about green skills or net zero jobs.
This is where the Skills for Planet Blueprint steps in. It makes the case that design is not a niche, but a keystone, and points out that design underpins the ways we build, interact, consume, and even imagine change. And most critically, that green design is not an add-on, but core to what “good design” should mean.
Design is already influencing everything—from building retrofits to public transport accessibility to materials in packaging and textiles. It’s embedded in the circular economy, in behaviour change, in energy efficiency. But without the right skills—or the recognition—designers are being asked to deliver climate solutions without the map, let alone the compass.
The Blueprint gives them both.
Image: Design Council
At the centre of the Blueprint is a six-part developmental framework of green design skills. It’s elegant, coherent, and intentionally cross-disciplinary. The six headline skillsets are:
Regenerating Nature: Designing for ecosystems, biodiversity, and planetary boundaries—not just harm reduction, but ecological repair.
Embedding Circularity: Using cradle-to-cradle thinking, waste-as-resource logic, and life-cycle design principles.
Eliminating Emissions: Targeting energy efficiency, carbon removal, and climate-conscious material use at the design stage—not as an afterthought.
Empowering Green Communities: Centreing local knowledge, democratic participation, and place-based equity in design decisions.
Influencing Green Behaviours: Using behavioural insights to nudge sustainable choices through thoughtful design of services, products, and environments.
Evaluating Green Impact: Making environmental and social value visible, measurable, and part of the design brief from day one.
This is not a theoretical exercise. It’s a framework built from extensive engagement across disciplines, and clearly informed by what’s already happening on the ground. It’s as much about skilling up as it is about joining dots—and building momentum.
And that momentum is building. The Design Council has declared an ambitious goal: to upskill 1 million designers by 2030. That’s roughly half the UK design workforce. And they’re not waiting for someone else to take the lead—they’re actively recruiting educators, employers, and commissioners to be part of the Skills for Planet Mission.
Image: Greg Plominski
The Blueprint also lands with impeccable timing, given the gaps it seeks to close.
According to the Design Council’s own research, 66% of designers have designed for environmental impact in the last year—but only 43% feel confident in their green design capabilities. And just 27% say they have access to green design training and support in their workplace. Furthermore, only 19% consistently measure the environmental and social impacts of their work.
These are not minor gaps. They are systemic. They reflect the broader disconnect between intent and capability across many sectors of the green transition.
They also speak to a deeper issue: design is still not recognised as a foundational green skill, either in national labour classifications or in the UK’s industrial strategies. While recent documents—such as the Creative Industries Sector Plan (part of the UK Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy) or Skills England’s Sector Skills Needs Assessment—do mention design, they fail to grasp its cross-sectoral power. Design remains boxed into “creative industries,” when it should be everywhere.
This omission matters. Because it leads to funding gaps, training gaps, and data blind spots. And it sidelines the very people who are shaping our homes, our cities, our devices, and our experiences—people whose work profoundly affects how sustainable those things ultimately are.
The Green Skills Map, which we featured as our Top Read for May, shows this clearly. Design crops up again and again—across renewable energy, the built environment, green mobility, and more. It’s a “horizontal” skill in a world still thinking in verticals.
That’s why the Skills for Planet Blueprint resonates so strongly. It brings visibility, structure, and agency to a dispersed but vital field. It gives designers a common language to speak with educators, employers, and policymakers. It says: we’re here, we’re ready—and we need to be part of the solution.
Meanwhile, we find echoes here of other competency frameworks we admire—such as Engineers Without Borders’ Global Responsibility Competency Compass, which aims to reshape engineering mindsets for sustainability and justice.
Both frameworks recognise that real systems change doesn’t just come from better tools or smarter technologies—it comes from people who are trained to think differently. Who see connections. Who understand context. Who design with others in mind.
So, where would we like to see this going? Well, perhaps we might look for education providers embedding green design skills into mainstream design and D&T curricula—not as a specialist add-on, but as standard. And employers and commissioners using the Blueprint to upskill teams, frame project briefs, and assess design outcomes beyond aesthetic or commercial metrics.
Maybe we’ll see skills bodies and policymakers updating labour classifications and funding strategies to reflect design’s true scale and scope in the net zero transition. And we’d hope that the Blueprint finds a raft of allies across sustainability fields—engineers, planners, tech developers—partnering with designers from day one.
And most importantly: let’s stop talking about “creative industries” as if design lives there and nowhere else. The design economy is much broader, and its influence much deeper.