​This week and next, the International Design Awards have handed the their Instagram account over to its jury to share their thoughts on design. Having taken the account's reigns today, an IDA judge since 2008, I shared the qualities that I look for when casting my votes, which are:

• Designs that seek to heal, not harm the natural world.
• Cathedral thinking [thinking beyond the needs of the current generation].
• Designs that seek to reconcile the fact that many beautiful materials, such as fluorite (pictured above) come from often ugly extraction processes.
• Designs that emulate the processes of nature, such as they that formed the Glass sponge (Hexactinellid) pictured below.
• Through the prism of geological time, great design, like the light patterns you see below, is ephemeral. ​

A signatory of the #SheChangesClimate letter to the UK government, urge all female peers working with climate issues to join me. Find out more, together with the link to add you name to the growing list, here.

Extract from SheChangesClimate.com

Leadership teams that are representative of the world we live in are better at their jobs. That's why She Changes Climate is campaigning for a 50:50 split of men and women in the top levels of the COP26 leadership team.

Our ethos is founded in the scientifically-proven fact that diverse boards and leadership teams are better at being leaders, better at governance, and more successful in the work they do. They're better at negotiation, get better results and can make more inclusive and balanced decisions because they are able to draw on wider knowledge bases and experiences. 

When it comes to climate change, being representative isn't about looking good, it's about setting a good example and doing the best job possible. Not just for the nations being represented, but for every single one of their citizens.

Our current focus is on getting COP26 to achieve a 50:50 split of men and women in its top-level leadership team in the UK, but our global missions is to ensure ALL delegations have at least a 50% representation of women at their top levels."

Joining over 250 signatories from 30 nations around the world, I am calling on policymakers to engage more with the growing risk of societal disruption and collapse due to damage to the climate and wider environment. Each specialists in subject areas that related to the various challenges, we commonly believe it is time to listen to the sum of the scholarship on humanity's predicament. Our letter is available in both English and French, and extracts are published in today's edition of The Guardian. Find an extract from our letter below, the version in full together with the list of signatories here, and follow the commentary on social media using the hashtags #scholarswarning and #breakdownwarning. 

"Subject: Only if we discuss collapse might we prepare

As scientists and scholars from around the world, we call on policymakers to engage openly with the risk of disruption and even collapse of our societies. After five years of failing to reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Climate Accord (1), we must now face the consequences. 

While bold and fair efforts to cut emissions and naturally drawdown carbon are essential, researchers in many areas now consider societal collapse to be a credible scenario this century (2a & 2c). A range of views exist on the location, extent, timing, permanence and cause of such disruptions; but the way modern societies exploit people and nature is a common concern (3a & 3b).

Only if policymakers begin to discuss this threat of societal collapse might communities and nations begin to prepare and so reduce its likelihood, speed, severity, harm to the most vulnerable, and to nature."