THE FORM OF
CATASTROPHE
ROLES OF DESIGN IN THE ERA OF
ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION
Anni Pokela & Jenna Viro
01 / 04 / 2025





"Excuse me. When do you think this can happen, professor? When?", asks one delegate at the UN climate conference. "I don't know. Maybe in 100 years, maybe in 1,000. But what I do know is that if we do not act soon, our children and grandchildren will have to pay the price", responds the atmospheric researcher. "And who's going to pay the price of the Kyoto Accord? It would cost the world's economy hundreds of billions of dollars", challenges the United States representative. To which the atmospheric researcher responds: "With due respect, Mr. Vice President, the cost of doing nothing could be even higher."



The climate crisis made its first appearance in 2004 in Roland Emmerich's film The Day After Tomorrow, from which the above scene is taken. Disaster films had dealt with natural upheavals and threats before, but Emmerich's film was the first to name human-caused climate change as the culprit. Twenty years later, the climate risk addressed in the film is more relevant than ever. During 2024, news broke of research showing there's a high probability that the catastrophe depicted in the film – the collapse of the AMOC circulation – will occur within the lifetimes of younger generations. Here in Europe, this could mean a dramatic drop in temperatures and even a crisis in agriculture in northern countries.

While especially in light of this research the above scene feels uncomfortably real, otherwise the film turns climate change into an absurd spectacle with a clear beginning and end. This couldn't be further from the truth. In The Day After Tomorrow, the apocalypse happens in about ten minutes. In reality, it's difficult to define pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds. Unlike in the film, we won't experience a week during which New York is buried under ice or the African continent burns to the ground. We don't have a deadline given in advance. No one says, "stop producing useless junk or else on January 1st, 2050, a tsunami will wash Helsinki away."

How does this relate to design? In many ways, actually, since design is inseparably part of our everyday life. Utilitarian objects like chairs, shirts, and washing machines are always designed by someone. Design surrounds us constantly. Design's current nature is largely based on the birth of applied arts, when craftsmanship gained a new scale through industrialization. What's significant for design is the economic-historical change caused by the industrial revolution. Industrialization meant new methods of operation for design, materials, larger production volumes, and the birth of the working class. The working class meant both production machinery and consumers for design. Thus, capitalist ideology has been organically intertwined with design from the very beginning.

This is still visible in today's language: design speaks of fulfilling "consumer" or "customer" needs. These needs can be completely fabricated, created by the market machinery, whereby design tries to constantly maintain its own growth medium. Design products are produced in a continuous feed, pursuing profit and growth. Even though design today can be immaterial, its aim is at best to increase capital. This also applies to applied arts design.

The idea of growth and consumption contradicts the survival of the planet and ourselves. During the climate crisis, the question we're avoiding is how to live a life worth living with less.

Design's purpose is to create functional and aesthetically pleasing or interesting objects that would improve people's lives in some way. Despite its quality-of-life-improving mission, design is one of the accelerators of ecological catastrophe. Higher-profile fashion and design houses can release up to four new collections every year. When this is already too much, fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion are completely absurd. Yet in everything – not just ultra – the pace is accelerating, something new is always on offer. Design as a whole is part of the problem unless it radically changes its practices and values. 

Design and good taste have always been seen as connected. Design isn't something separate from reality that solely determines what's stylish. Drinking champagne on a private jet is no longer stylish (it used to be!). It's not seen as necessary, but as oversized luxury. The climate movements' message about the suffering that the private jet lifestyle causes has inadvertently penetrated trend consciousness. That's why Kylie Jenner's sub-30-minute flights appear to us as disgusting and detached from reality, despite all the Kardashian-Jenner clan's style influence. Design has power.

The Day After Tomorrow's imagery is ruins, hurricanes, and ice ages. The film's imagery is still present in a certain type of climate discourse: we've ruined the planet, so let's enjoy ourselves to the fullest before catastrophe arrives. Let's go wild with natural resources before the deadline.

The antidote to this is sincere imagery where the value of things and fashion isn't determined only by capital growth or novelty; design defined by reimagination and abandon. Humans are truly miserable without play, and design is at its best exactly that. Play is freedom to imagine, experiment, and amuse. We don't need constant novelty, but things that feed creativity and imagination, and that help us imagine different futures.

Play is threatened by the concept of timelessness. It's based on the idea of a universal form that's stylish regardless of time and place. Timelessness can manifest as conservative or boring design, even as a fascist ideal. We're stuck with the idea that our play always has certain rules. Even disaster films revolve around the same imagery. When we imagine the future amid catastrophes only in a certain way, we're hopeless in the face of actual catastrophe.

Design must find balance between timelessness and trends, since we can't abandon our interest in how things look. An ecologically sustainable future isn't sustainable in the long term if we have to abandon self-expression, courage, and diversity of tastes. What the surrounding world looks like is always a current question. For precisely this reason, it's more urgently than ever also vital for the planet's survival. Let's dare to be bold! At its best, sustainable and playful design can create faith in the future in our cynical times.