This site helps Australian graphic designers learn about, and enact, practices which minimise material and energy waste. Here you can find two workshops (to run with a group of 2-12 of your design peers) and read a handbook for graphic designers with core sustainability information and material advice.
The Better Worlds Workshops were developed by me, Thea Kable, as part of my doctoral research at the University of Technology, Sydney. It all started because I wanted to be more sustainable as a designer, but struggled to find resources which supported me in moving from value to action. This website is contains two key resources; the Better Worlds Workshops and the Small Handbook. The workshops are designed for you to run with your peers/colleagues/friends to help guide critique, education, and planning for change. The Small handbook supports this, but is also a resource that you can come back to when working to inform material and process choices, and to find vetted resources for further research.
The workshops are made as 'scripts'; sets of instructions for you to read and follow digitally, and respond to by working with your hands. The Better Worlds Workshops are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. You can take these workshops and chop and change them to your liking, as long as you credit the basis for your idea and don’t profit off your version. The workshops and this site are constantly evolving. if you’d like to get in touch or recommend any changes or extra resources, please contact me via email at hello@BetterWorldsWorkshops.com.
If you’d like to meet other designers and experience a facilitated session, I sometimes run these workshops as in-person events. No currently upcoming sessions.
The Better Worlds Workshops would not have been possible without the support of my doctoral supervisors (Dr Zoë Sadokierski, Dr Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, and Dr Andrew Burrell) and the emerging designers who devoted hours of their time to the testing and refinement of the workshops. The designers who helped me test these workshops were: Eugenie Dawson, Monica Feng, Corey Lange, Melissa Lee, Crystal Li, Stephanie Lu, Hannia ‘Hanzagu’ Ngo, Ashley Tan, and Rachel Zhu. If you’d like to contribute your knowledge to this project, please get in touch with me, us.