We’ve been creating positively impactful design for over 20 years.

Today, the role of design as a catalyst for positive change is as powerful as it’s ever been, and the multitude of environmental and social issues it can address is ever increasing. To mark our twentieth ‘birthday’ we are, once again, igniting the dialogue around the role that design plays to raise awareness and lead sustainable change with a yearlong series of educational and industry facing projects.

Founded on the activist principle that design should be environmentally and socially engaged, the studio, led by Sophie Thomas, has continually created design solutions that engage their audience in a dialogue around responsible design for the last 20 years: What Comes Around Goes Around / No Shop / Your Ocean / Ten Ways / Three Trees Don’t Make A Forest / Greengaged / The Great Recovery / Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean.

November saw the launch of TM20 with a Twitter campaign Know Shop to raise awareness about Buy Nothing Day and highlight the opportunity to harness: people power through purchasing decisions. This campaign continues to invite businesses and brands to identify their ‘best buys’ and explain their point of difference.

Since January 2018, the team have been working on a series of educational projects with the Royal College of Art‘s Book Test Unit and the Sorrell Foundation. These projects focus on how we can equip future designers with the ambition and know-how to apply their skills to tackle the problems the world faces?

The RCA Book Test Unit (BTU) is an experimental platform comprised of RCA students, alumni and external partners and is concerned with exploring the multiple critical perspectives on the future of the book and publishing. We have be guiding BTU students  to dissect, discuss and expand the understanding of sustainability, beyond just the environment, to the sustaining of knowledge through systems of distribution. Their resulting publication: A Guide to ______ing Sustainability, sponsored by Pureprint,  launched alongside an exhibition of related conversations and experiments.

In partnership with the Sorrell Foundation we have delivered a series of Masterclasses with 13-16yr olds to encourage and empower them to address big issues. The results of these Saturday Clubs will be exhibited at the Sorrell Foundation Summer show at Somerset House in June.

We concluded our year long series with an anniversary exhibition ‘Collaborative by Nature‘, which celebrates the studios’ collaborations with Grant Associates and Feilden Clegg Bradley over the past 20 years. Our shared attitude towards sustainability, people-centred design and creating better places are fundamental threads that weave the studios together.