Can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?

Britain’s ‘creative industries’ generate £67bn of revenue and are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy. But as well as their economic muscle, these industries have a vital role to play in delivering a sustainable future.

Formally defined as the performing arts, arts & antiques, crafts, architecture, design, fashion, advertising, radio & TV, film & video, music, publishing, video games and software, the UK’s creative industries’ innovation and energy will be key in addressing the great challenges of our time – resource scarcity, climate change, waste, pollution, a growing population and poverty.

We’ve teamed up with the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network to help leading players across these diverse sectors come together to share their knowledge and build a vision for how these problems will be tackled. The project kicks off on 16th June with an event chaired by Jonathon Porritt. Contributions from Lord Puttnam and Sebastian Conran will accompany a panel debate in an innovative, interactive talk-show format with a panel that includes 10:10 and ‘Age of Stupid’s’ Franny Armstrong, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, London College of Fashion’s Frances Corner OBE, Naked Communication's Victoria Brooksand Exploration Architecture’s Michael Pawlyn.

This is no stab in the dark – throughout history creative interventions have driven important social change. The Bauhaus movement championed a design philosophy of fairness and utility, to provide universal access to good design, better housing, and better lives for all. Graphic and film propaganda helped galvanise our nation to successful action during WWII and social marketing over the last 20 years has helped educate, raise awareness and communicate better thinking and acting on issues as wide as anti-social behaviour on trains, healthy lifestyles and anti-smoking.

And already, new forms of social media – enabled by software and IT platforms like twitter, kiva or netsquared – are helping to bridge social divides, connect people without travel and encourage good deeds. Green architecture is now mainstream and many of our flagship examples of building excellence heavily feature sustainability considerations – think the Gherkin, EDEN project, Olympics Village, etc.

But this is not yet universal across all of the creative industries and some disciplines are certainly more engaged and active on sustainability than others. There is also a larger question of whether industries are really leading, rather than following or responding to sustainability.

We think that building a genuinely sustainable future – that is green, fair and prosperous – will need us to inspire and motivate people, businesses, communities and societies to quite radical changes. This is an opportunity, even an imperative, the scale of which we probably haven’t faced before. It offers a fantastic new set of innovation levers to rethink and reinvent the world which is exactly what ‘creatives’ do really well. That’s precisely why creative industry involvement will be key to making this happen. It falls to this generation of creatives, scientists, designers and innovators to imagine a world they want to live in and then build it to last.

We’ll be running a series of events and creating an online dialogue over the next few months – in an open process designed to exchange and capture the best thinking. So, if you’re from either a creative industry or are a sustainability professional, we want to hear from you.

To share your thoughtson the creative industries and sustainability orto find out how to get involved,email Louise Armstrong or message us on Twitter @forum4thefuture.