Sustainable Sunday

For the last few months, Sunday afternoons have (mostly) been ripe for a stroll in the park or a pint in a beer garden. But with the bracing cold setting in, we need to find some new ways of whiling away those precious hours pre-Monday morning.

Thankfully, The Design Museum has come to rescue with a bit of Sunday afternoon education. This Sunday, designer Yves Béhar will be giving a lecture as part of the Puma Safe Annual Sustainability Lecture series, discussing the responsibilities of designers to work in a more sustainable manner.

The lecture will be the first in the series of three annual talks to be held at the museum. It is hoped the series will feature addresses from thinkers in the fields of design, technology and science, to create a more sustainable future through exploring the relationship between society and the environment.

Béhar says,  ‘Sustainability will change design: new tools and strategies will reshape how, and why we design.  In turn, design will be able to change complete industries in ways more profound than our profession has ever been able to accomplish.’

As well as discussing design’s impact on sustainability, Béhar will also give an insight into his own design practice, describing the rationale behind his Puma packaging that featured in the Design Museum’s Sustainable Futures exhibition in April.

Sustainable Futures saw Béhar teamed up with the Design Museum to launch packaging for Puma that reduces paper, water, diesel and energy consumption by 60% and eliminates 10,000 tons of carbon emission per year. This resulted in his Clever Little Bag, which will be available next month.

Mark Coetzee, Puma Vision Programme Director and creative chief curator, says, ‘The establishment of the Annual Puma Safe Sustainability Lecture is the first of three significant addresses we will support each year intended to document the critical conversations of leading thinkers whose work deals with creative, social justice, peace or environmental issues globally.’

The lecture will take place at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 on Sunday 24 October, 4pm.