Welcome to Climate.Studio
Design provocation creating space for action in the climate crisis through declarations of context.
We must rapidly become a zero emissions carbon neutral world if humanity is to survive in the future, avoid runaway warming and catastrophic societal and ecosystem collapse, and pass on a world to the next generation that is in anyway liveable.
After decades of delay, the collapse has begun, and the last window for any kind meaningful mitigating action on climate breakdown is almost closed. We must help governments, companies, and individuals take radical action now, today, in this moment. We must understand this urgency, and embed this existential crisis into all of our thinking and everything we do.
Most of our daily activities are completely disconnected from this existential fight, and so creating alignment is a first critical step. Public declarations of context are then precursor to this alignment, as an acknowledgement of the disconnect, our current state, what needs to be done, our place in the world, our power, and the impact of our personal actions.
Opportunities to declare your actions within climate breakdown context.
Limited Edition of 2,781. One for each billionaire in the world today as of 2024. Numbered & Signed.
For those with power, for those with means, the world's most expensive tote bag. This simple and elegant fashion statement is available to a select few who's names will be known for a 1,000 years to come. For those who desire and are able to put their personal activities and power into global context in a visible way. Each tote is Numbered and Signed by the designer. Certificate of Authenticity.
Limited Series of 1,337. Equal to the current amount of CO2 in tons released globally every second in 2023. Numbered & Signed.
One of the world's most expensive tote bags, this simple and elegant fashion statement is available to a select few who desire and are able to put their personal activities into global context. Each tote is Numbered and Signed by the designer. Certificate of Authenticity.
Unlimited Implementation.
You can install the warming globe on your website by placing this single line of code just above the </body> tag on an html page.
Unlimited Implementation.
Include a slide with a context declaration, and use in your talks, presentations, lectures, reports, etc. Designer J. Paul Neeley has worked to include this statement in every public as well as private lecturing and consulting interaction since 2018.
I still vividly remember a conversation from over 20 years ago I had with my brother Matthew about climate change. We were riding in the back of the car on the way to the airport to head back to university after spending Christmas break together with our family. Matthew was studying physics at Stanford at the time, and he was telling us about a lecture he had attended the previous term with a climate scientist explaining the science of global warming and the horrors of what what was coming if we don't stop burning fossil fuels.
I'm embarrassed now to say that in the moment, I was very skeptical. It sounded alarmist, and I argued, responding with an array of global warming denial arguments that I thought were really smart (Plants need CO2!, Warmer Weather!), but what I now know were all oil company generated talking points that I had learned from the media focused on delaying climate action at the time.
But the conversation had an impact on me. It challenged my perceptions of the world in that moment, opened up my mind to new questions that I sadly hadn't asked before. Over time my understanding of global warming and related issues started to change. It was subtle to start. Back then, before facebook and social media, I think information flow, change, really everything felt slower. I remember I switched from reading the Wall Street Journal daily to reading the New York Times. My studies were shifting from economics towards design. And several years later, when I first saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth I was no longer skeptical, but fully bought into the danger and need for action. I remember even hosting parties to watch the film with friends.
In 2009 I moved to London and began studying speculative design at the Royal College of Art, a design practice where we engage with emerging technology and try to unpack future implications. This meant I spent a lot of time thinking about the future, and where things might be going.
My next decade was spent using these speculative design methods to help companies and organizations understand possible futures and how to prepare for them today. I worked on projects from AI, to Synthetic Biology, to Civil Discourse, to Happiness, to Mobility, to Climate Change, etc.
I loved the work I was doing to explore the future, but it was happening along side significant warming and inaction. I watched CO2 and other global warming gasses continue to reach record levels. I celebrated when Obama was elected, only to be devastated by his administration's inaction on global warming and expasion of oil and gas production. I celebrated with COP16 Paris when they agreed to a +1.5° warming limit only to be devastated by the practically zero follow through from global super powers. We all started to see more drought, cataclysmic flooding, crop failures, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and super charged hurricanes and typhoons.
I became more and more conflicted as much of the consulting work I was doing and the challenges that we were addressing, while worthy, seemed more and more out of touch with reality. If fact, everything seemed out of touch with reality. Our food, our work, our fashion, our travel, our consumption, our media, our politics, our education, our lives, and on and on.
Climate . Studio and the design of these Declaration's of Context have then been a play to inject reality back into our everything. To put everything into perspective, into a complete context. For me personally this effort, even just framing a talk or lecture or report within this context, has been meaningful, sparking new conversations, and changing priorities. It has become a form of activism that sets the ground work for alignment.
Now decades since that first conversation, we now are experiencing the severe consequences of inaction that the science warned us about. Climate breakdown is an existential threat to all life on earth, and with it modern society. There is still hope, but only if we radically embed this context in to all our actions. Only then do we have a chance at new way's forward, and can create the smallest of openings for preferable futures ahead.
J. Paul Neeley
2024
J. Paul Neeley (b. 1978) is an American Designer & Researcher based in London, UK, with expertise in Service Design, Speculative Design, Design Research, and Strategy.
J. Paul's current design work explores the social, cultural, economic, and ethical implications of emerging technologies, designing speculative futures that help us engage with possibility as a way of reframing and understanding anew our current state opportunities. Recent projects have focused on happiness, healthcare and wellbeing, self quantification, social polarization and civility, climate change, future mobility, AI, synthetic biology, and issues of complexity and computational irreducibility in design and business.
J. Paul consults in Service Design & Speculative Design at Neeley Worldwide, and has engaged with organizations like Google X, Microsoft, BBC, Honda, and others to imagine and then prepare for the future. He is also the founder of Masamichi Souzou, working on the optimization of happiness, Co-founder & Head of Design at Jadala, building tools to improve civil discourse, and Co-founder of Decarbonite, a non-toxic carbon negative fabrication composite.
In addition to his design practice J. Paul is dedicated to teaching. He is the Founder of the School of Critical Design focused on enabling emerging practices like speculative design in corporate settings, was an founding tutor in Service Design at the Royal College of Art, and has guest lectured at London Business School, Imperial College, NYU, Köln International School of Design, RISD, and others.
J. Paul holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art with Distinction where he studied with Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby, and is a graduate of Northwestern University where he studied Communications Studies with a concentration in Economics.
A seemingly simple and practical accessory, the tote bag boasts a rich history intertwined with cultural shifts, fashion trends, and environmental concerns.
While bags for carrying items have likely existed for centuries, the word "tote," meaning "to carry," dates back to the 17th century, with the term "tote bag" itself first appearing in 1900.
The modern tote bag's origins can be traced back to the 1940s when L.L. Bean, the iconic Maine-based outdoor brand, introduced (ironically in terms of current global warming) the "ice bag," a sturdy canvas bag designed for transporting ice from cars to freezers, a necessity in an era when household refrigerators were uncommon. It’s durable and versatile design quickly caught on, with people adapting it for carrying groceries, household items, and other necessities. By the 1950s, the tote bag had become a popular choice for homemakers, its practicality and spaciousness making it ideal for daily tasks.
The 1960s marked a turning point for the tote bag, as it transitioned from a purely utilitarian object to a fashion statement. L.L. Bean reintroduced the "ice bag" as the "Boat and Tote," adding a touch of style with colorful trims. We also began to see the rise of iconic designs, like the "Cashin Carry Tote" by designer Bonnie Cashin. Cashin's later work for Coach further cemented the tote bag's place in the world of high fashion.
The tote bag's popularity continued to grow in the following decades, with the 1980s seeing its adoption as a promotional tool by businesses. The New York bookstore, The Strand, was one of the pioneers of this trend, introducing its own tote bag featuring the store's name and logo. We also witnessed the more iconic fashion with the birth of the Hermès Birkin bag, a luxury tote designed by Jean-Louis Dumas for actress Jane Birkin.
The iconic nature of the tote has played out again and again in recent years. This includes the Yayoi Kusama collaboration with Louis Vuitton, who’s vivid signature polka dots turned the tote bag into wearable art. And even IKEA’s Frakta Bag, which became a cultural icon for its bold blue and yellow colors and practicality, was later copied in a leather version by fashion house Balenciaga as a commentary on the intersection of luxury and utility.
In the past two decades the tote bag has become a symbol of eco-consciousness, hailed as a sustainable alternative to single-use plastic bags, and a wearable signal of planet saving. Designer Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” tote was perhaps the pinnacle of this discussion, now sitting in collection at the V&A in London. But with a full accounting, ironically, studies have shown that the production of cotton tote bags requires significant resources, resulting in a higher carbon footprint compared to plastic bags. In fact, a typical tote bag made of cotton or organic cotton may actually need to be reused hundreds to even thousands of times to offset its environmental impact (although they do avoid the plastic waste).
The tote bag's story serves as a reminder of the complex interplay of utility, fashion, design, luxury, sustainability, and unintended consequences. The Climate Studio tote bag's Context (01) and Context (02) by designer J. Paul Neeley are a notable addition to the story of the tote bag, adding a critical discussion of context and power and value to the climate breakdown moment we are all experiencing.