Becoming a Skills for Planet Trainer: designing for Wales, people and planet

I’m really pleased to share that I’ve been appointed as a certified Design Council Skills for Planet Trainer (and the first based here in Wales). It’s a role that means a lot not just personally, but because of what it represents for the work we do at Perago, and for the future of design in Wales. 

Skills for Planet is the Design Council’s movement to equip designers, leaders and organisations with the skills needed to respond to the climate and biodiversity crises. It recognises something I’ve believed for a long time: that design has enormous influence and a responsibility to shape our world for future generations. The decisions we make about systems, services, technology and experiences shape not just outcomes for users, but outcomes for the planet. 

As designers, we can no longer afford to treat sustainability as an add-on. It must be embedded into how we think, plan and deliver. 

Skills for Planet and Wales 

Wales has ambitious commitments around well-being, sustainability and regenerative futures, and rightly so. But ambition alone isn’t enough. To meet these goals, we need the skills, confidence and shared language to design differently across public services, businesses and the third sector. 

That’s where the Skills for Planet blueprint and training is so powerful. It focuses on practical, accessible green design skills that help teams understand their environmental impact, work systemically, and make more responsible design choices day-to-day. It’s not about perfection. It’s about progress, learning, and doing better with the influence we have. 

For Wales, this feels especially important. We have strong communities, a clear sense of place, and a policy environment that already values long-term thinking. What we need now is the capability to translate those values into everyday decisions, particularly in digital and service design, where change can scale quickly.  

Skills for Planet and Perago 

At Perago, I’ve spent years working with organisations to navigate complex change from, digital transformation to service redesign, always with a focus on people, inclusion and long-term value. Increasingly, that work has included questions like: 

• How do digital services reduce, rather than increase, environmental impact? 

• How do we design systems that support well-being without extracting from communities or the planet? 

• How do organisations make better decisions when trade-offs are unavoidable? 

Becoming the first certified Design Council Skills for Planet Trainer based in Wales feels like a natural extension of this work. It gives me new tools, structure and shared frameworks to support organisations in Wales to build planet-positive design capability, not just deliver one-off projects. 

What I’ll be doing as a Skills for Planet trainer 

As a certified trainer, I’ll be delivering Skills for Planet sessions that help teams: 

• Understand what green design skills are and why they matter 

• Embed environmental thinking into digital and service design 

• Work more confidently with complexity and systems 

• Make sustainability part of everyday decision-making, not an afterthought 

Most importantly, the training creates space for open conversations about constraints, trade-offs and the realities organisations face. All this with a mindset of still pushing for meaningful change! 

Summing it all up  

I care deeply about the role design can play in shaping a better future for Wales. Skills for Planet gives us a shared foundation to do that work more responsibly, collaboratively and impactfully. 

 I’m excited to work with such an incredible cohort of Design Council Experts to deliver this training and to support more designers across Wales and beyond to design with people and planet in mind. A big thank you to Cat Drew, Rachel Bronstein and Bronwen Rees at the Design Council for making this movement a reality. 

 These high-impact, in-house talks, workshops and bespoke training offers give your team the green design skills required to transform good intentions into measurable, responsible innovation. To find out more, book your session or discuss your training requirements, visit the Design Council Website, or reach out to me. I’d be happy to help!