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Eco Hero: Sophie Thomas

Sally Hill | 28.07.10

‘So not your average designer’, Sophie Thomas is an agitator of the everyday. An active campaigner for sustainability in the design industry, she stirs things up and get people talking, challenging, changing and creating. She sees her biggest design challenge as helping to re-design society and inspire a mind shift towards a happier and sustainable future.

Over the past twelve years, as founding director of thomas.matthews Sophie has led and delivered a vast array of award winning projects across the world. Through her work and writing she has strived to demonstrate how creativity can inspire people to change behaviour.

Sophie plays a vocal part in promoting sustainable thinking in design and is a co-founder of the social enterprise ‘Three Trees Don’t Make a Forest’, which is building resources for the communication design community, enabling sustainable practice.

Sophie also worked with partner Matthews on No Shop, a three-day installation for Friends of the Earth that tackled issues of consumerism and consumption. Last year she helped to set up and run Greengaged an organisation helping to advance the design industry’s capacity to respond to environmental challenges through knowledge sharing.

Leading by doing, Sophie is dedicated to sustainable design and determined to make a difference. Here’s her take on the issues she’s working on.

How would you describe yourself?

A creative agitator, an agent of change, I am up for trying and not afraid to fail and learn. I get called a campaigner quite a lot, but my training and my passion is in creativity. I get the biggest kick out of going into companies who show commitment to change but are not sure how and don’t know how to take their consumers or audience with them on this journey. Sustainability should be integral to the way we do things, and it’s a really powerful mix when you put this agenda in with creativity.
I’m an action person as well, I’m not one of these people who sits around talking about it things, I’ll go and try it. And that’s why I don’t sleep enough.

What’s your mission?

My mission is changing. So many companies are now writing sustainability into their mission, bringing it into the heart of their companies. But aside from the benchmarking and efficiencies they may not see other opportunities and value it could add. My expertise is to help them understand how this can be used as a trigger to great things. There is huge scope for fun, engagement and through this mind shift and lifestyle change.

I’m very interested at the moment in materials within the design process.

My mission is to be continually engaged and interested in the subjects that I’m working in. We’ve been doing sustainability for so long here at t.m and everybody is catching up now which is great, but we have to push it further.

It is about making sure people are engaging properly. There are so many areas where we fall down because of bad communication. For example, why aren’t people recycling efficiently enough? At the moment we could be recycling 20-30% more than we are. Why is that? The infrastructure is probably there. Why aren’t we coming up with an engagement plan for all communities? There’s a design challenge there. I’d like to deconstruct that process and design it properly. It’s a great creative challenge.

What do you care passionately about?

As I said, I’m really interested in materials. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with chemists and material scientists about our understanding around how we use the raw materials to realise design. We are currently not designing efficiently in material terms and we don’t design for recovery. All these materials are locked away in landfill so we lose that material.

So, for instance, if you look at the periodic table now, and if you looked at it in 80 years time, it would look very different, because half the elements will have disappeared. They don’t fall off the planet because they’re elements and you can’t break them down any further, but they get locked up in a product and you can’t uncouple them.

Take a mobile phone. There are over 30 different elements in phones and if it was designed so we could take it apart once it had been discarded we could recover a whole lot of gold, titanium, indium…these are useful elements

If you talk about peak oil, you have to talk about peak phosphorus, peak platinum, peak uranium, peak indium. Indium is an interesting material that not many people think about often but which we use a lot in LCD screen technology.
The way we’re using it at the moment, business-as-usual, we have about 5-10 years left of it. But we’re going to need it for all our future PV’s [photovoltaics]. So if our future energy is going to come from the Sun we need to start designing to recover all our indium.

The future planning of materials, resource efficiency, resource depletion, is a really interesting area, and these depletions could hit us around the same time as peak oil. It’s another big challenge for design.

I’m very interested in learning from mistakes. Sustainability has been talked about for such a long time now, and we still don’t seem to be as far ahead as we should be. I’m interested in working out why this is. Changes have happened, but the design industry is a slow beast.

What would you like to achieve in your lifetime?

I’ve achieved so much, I should be grateful for where I am but because I’m an active person, I get on with stuff.

It’s an interesting time for design. The economic climate will not be brilliant for designers for a while so we’re looking at the future and asking interesting questions - what they’re calling ‘reinvent or die’. What’s next, what’s on the horizon? There’s a huge growing area of social design and I think there’s a lot to be done in creative engagement with businesses and communities.

The great thing about being a designer is having the opportunity to do things that a lot of people can’t do. I think I’ll be very happy when I retire.

What top green principles do you live by?

I’ve got a bicycle, I grow my own vegetables. We’ve got a very sustainable house, a retro-fit Victorian terrace. We’re about to put PVs on the roof now that the feed-in tariff has kicked off. Our studio has a very low carbon footprint, we’re now 14001 ready, we’ve been auditing the studio for quite a long time. We recycle everything apart from compost here. At home I recycle everything.

What one thing do you wish everyone would do?

I wish that everybody would open their eyes to the environment around them. People have such stress in their lives and this bubbles up as anger or disregard. If we lived better, and got on with each other and had an understanding and respect of our surrounding environment, we’d have a much better time in a much better place, particularly in cities like London.

How long have we got to save the planet?

I did a project at Fabrica a couple of years ago called ‘99 months’. It was about the time when we have 99 months before the tipping point for climate change that was about 24 months ago. It depends on the view, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.

I always get asked ‘are you optimistic about the future?’. It depends what mood you catch me in. I worry, because I have two kids and I wonder what the future will be like. I believe we’re not doing anything to the scale we should be doing.

I think it’s inevitable that we will become extinct eventually but when- that’s for us to decide. The question is, how much pain can we take in the process of change?
I believe in leading by example, and design is a great galvaniser and inspirer. It’s a powerful combination – creativity and sustainability.

Who’s your eco hero?

When I was younger I always wanted to be a Greenpeace campaigner climbing a chimney that belched out smoke or stopping nuclear waste being thrown off a ship. These kinds of organisations have a very important role to play to bring enemies of the environment into the public eye and to showcase very bad practise.

I’m very interested in David de Rothschild’s Plastiki expedition that is on its last leg and has passed near the Pacific Garbage Patch. I have great respect for the people of Hawaii who live near Kamilo beach and have to put up with our plastic rubbish swamping their shores on a daily basis. I also am humbled by those that muster a living on landfill sites like the communities in Lagos and Mumbai.

At the beginning of my career I worked at The Body Shop and had the privilege of meeting Anita. She is a very important role model for me. Even though I was a junior designer at the time, I had respect for the fact that you could do something commercial and use your voice to campaign about things you really believe in and get leverage to make change.

As a designer I am also a really big fan of Tibor Kalman, who was a brilliant American - he did the original colours magazine. He put humour and impact into communications and design and I like that. Sometimes our lives are just so serious that we forget to relax and laugh about stuff. That’s why I love working at my studio – there is a lot of laughing!