UW Notebook

July 14, 2025

New UW course connects the climate crisis to communications and design

A new University of Washington course teaches students how to examine the climate crisis and environmental problems from a communications and design perspective.Aidan Moeck/Dominic Muren/Adrienne Russell

On the second day of “Communications & Design for the Environment,” a Communications Leadership course held for the first time this spring, Adrienne Russell and Dominic Muren took their students to the Apple Store and told them to implode it.

Figuratively, of course.

The concept comes from Donna Haraway, a scholar of science and technology studies, who famously challenged her students to “implode” everyday objects to unpack the way the world works. Russell, a University of Washington professor of communication, and Muren, a teaching professor of design, applied the technique to their course by challenging students to examine the objects around them and how they connect to the environment and the climate crisis.

The concept of “implosion” challenges students to examine the objects around them and how they connect to the environment.Aidan Moeck/Dominic Muren/Adrienne Russell

For example, in a zine created for the course, Russell and Muren used the implosion method to examine a ceramic mug. The mining, shipping and firing of porcelain clay generates carbon emissions. The industrial molding process creates a low-cost product, but material and energy are wasted on mugs that break easily. A joke giftware mug, which likely gets little use, still leaves behind carbon emissions. This all means that a ceramic mug often has a carbon footprint ten to hundreds of times greater than a glass or plastic mug.

In the Apple Store, the students came prepared with a printed list of things to observe and questions to ask. They went through the implosion process for an hour and a half before returning to the classroom. They then discussed the dissonance that emerged when considering the welcoming store layout and clean brand design with the environmental impact of mining, refining and producing the company’s products.

The course teaches students how to examine the climate crisis and environmental problems from a perspective beyond the hard sciences. From a communication standpoint, this means considering which topics resonate with audiences, whose views get amplified while others are silenced, which ideas are backed by money and more. The design viewpoint means exploring how people get around, what they wear and where they live. Russell and Muren are working on designing a certificate program for CommLead, in which students will take a series of courses focused on environmental design and communication.

“The climate crisis is such a huge issue,” Russell said. “A lot of people get stalled trying to deal with it. But what we hope students take away from this class is that no matter where you are or what you do or what your expertise is, there’s an entry point where you can think about things and how they relate to the environment.”

The idea for the course took root at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Russell and Muren happen to be neighbors, and, like so many others, they started a book club to get through lockdown. Much of their respective work revolves around the environment and climate change, so their reading list did, too. And since they were already immersed in research on the topic anyway, they started planning a class.

“The way communication and design allow you to understand the climate crisis is really different from the scientific or political tradition,” Muren said. “Both of those traditions are powerful, but there’s not a lot that an individual can do within them. You basically need giant actors to fund these huge things for climate change to get addressed by science or the government. We approach it from a more bottom-up, influence-based perspective, where ideological threads can be encoded into objects, spaces or organizations.”

With this in mind, students completed projects that were tailored to their interests and skills. One student, who worked as a user experience designer, was interested in designing more sustainable websites. While redesigning the website of a popular clothing store, she learned how to create websites that use less energy and made a how-to guide for other designers.

Another student, inspired by her Native Hawaiian ancestry, focused on loʻi kalo — traditional Hawaiian wetland farms where taro is cultivated in terraced ponds. She considered the perspective of an organization that’s trying to restore the system, explaining the science and why they’re pursuing it. She created multiple vehicles for the information, including a zine and a presentation that explicitly discussed the reason kids are important to the revitalization’s success.

“One of the things everybody always wants to hear is what they can do about the climate crisis,” Russell said. “The fact of the matter is, there’s no way we can solve this if we just put the most vulnerable people out there and expect them to do it.”

But, Russell said, there are many ways people are engaging with environmental issues. Some professors, for example, work the climate crisis into their everyday classes. There are also alliances like Clean Creatives, a movement of advertising and public relations professionals who refuse to work with fossil fuel clients.

“Our fundamental idea behind this course is shifting people’s mindset to think about how whatever you’re doing can intervene and not exacerbate the climate crisis,” Russell said. “This is very different from talking about individual solutions, and it’s not shifting the responsibility away from governments and corporations that are doing most of the polluting. It’s a mentality shift so people don’t feel so discouraged, and it’s also about the ways we can shape our smaller communities.”

This kind of reframing also allows people to address problems like emissions while simultaneously building resilience.

“We had a farmer come in and present his work on community food sovereignty and racial inclusivity around food,” Muren said. “He’s trying to bring wine and people of color together in community. That’s a joyful side effect of trying to solve the climate crisis. It doesn’t have to be all about these negative things if you can think about it in clever, more holistic ways.”

For more information, contact Russell at adruss@uw.edu and Muren at dmuren@uw.edu.