Every year Designs for a Cooler Planet celebrates change, creativity and multidisciplinarity and highlights their importance through every exhibition, proving that sustainable choice might as well be the most attractive one.

Get to know themes and projects from previous years below to get a glimpse from the better, wiser and more sustainable future.

Makers of the Impossible – Designs for a Cooler Planet 2024 

Many things we now take for granted seemed impossible just a few years or decades ago. 

The Designs for a Cooler Planet festival's 2024 theme 'Makers of the Impossible' encourages you to dream big, roll up your sleeves and start experimenting. We talk a lot about our footprints, yet a more sustainable future is shaped by our hands, in the now. 

In our current quest for perfection, we often overlook potential solutions and ignore the beauty of fading, aging and irregularity. 

Challenge your perception of the possible by exploring the handprints of the Aalto community's cross-disciplinary experiments. 

The festival was organised 6 Sept – 3 Oct 2024. It reached over 10,000 visitors, showcasing nearly 20 exhibitions and over 30 events.

Read our news articles:

→From space technology and shimmering wood to shapeshifting textiles

→Broaden your perspective

→Aalto University Maqazine – September issue

Invisible – Designs for a Cooler Planet 2023

Like an iceberg, we only see a fraction of reality at first glance, and we often operate with limited knowledge. But what if we could see below the surface? Would we make different choices?

In 2023, Designs for a Cooler Planet projects aimed to shed light on the hidden and noteworthy. Fascinating prototypes, experiments, and perspectives that on display have the potential to transform the way we see, think and act.

Visitors had the opportunity to explore the Invisible through over twenty creative and experimental research-based projects that encourage us to look beyond the surface and consider what lies beneath.

Life 1.5 – Designs for a Cooler Planet 2022

Imagine a life where everything we use is recycled, upcycled and wisely produced and global warming is capped at 1.5 degrees. A gentler life – for you, for future generations and for the planet.  

Designs for a Cooler Planet 2022 highlighted that each tree, building, garment or even a portion of food has a life of its own, an own individual footprint and a life story. We should relearn to respect our belongings and surroundings. We should treat resources with care, not as disposables.

Life 1.5 refers to the 1.5-degree lifestyle – a science-based approach to recommend concrete actions to meet the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement. Every year, we use 1.7 times more ecological resources than our planet provides. We have to take action to reduce further global warming and decrease the threat to biodiversity.

Resource Wisdom – Designs for a Cooler Planet 2021

What is wise to design for future generations in a world of plenty?

Designs for a Cooler Planet 2021 showcased radical ideas and creative prototypes contributing to a resource-wise future. It offered glimpses to that future with thirty of Aalto's research-based projects under three subthemes: Better to Wear, Infinite Materials and Loving Environments.

Resource wisdom means using raw materials, energy, products, time, and facilities with care. Wise design respects our common future. It advances wellbeing and carefully considers the impacts of our choices on future generations, society and biodiversity.

Designs for a Cooler Planet 2021 was a success, engaging over 2,000 people. It was also covered by both domestic and global media (e.g., Dezeen, Kauppalehti and Tekniikka&Talous).

Race for the future – Designs for a Cooler Planet 2020

We are in a race for a cooler planet.

The clock is counting down. Current issues concerning energy production, single-use products and packaging, aggressive urbanisation and unsustainable consumption are alarming and require radical change.

Achieving our goal of a sustainable transition requires focused, novel approaches from all areas of society. Designs for a Cooler Planet 2020 showcased over 30 Aalto-based projects that show how collaboration between designers, researchers and stakeholders can lead to better solutions for people and the environment to help us reach the Sustainable Development Goals.

It’s our future, so there’s everything to play for. The four teams racing for the future in 2020 were: Farewell to fossil fuels, Close the loops, Hack our habitat and Consume consciously.

Designs for a Cooler Planet 2019

The first Designs for a Cooler Planet was organised on 2019. In eleven exhibitions it introduced over fourty projects providing solutions for more sustainable lifestyles, from future homeware and ecological luxury textiles to a carbon-free city district. It highlighted the fact that sustainability requires substantial changes within the next ten years in how we move, where we live, what we wear and what we eat. But those changes might as well be the most attractive ones.

The core idea has remained the same ever since. Designs for a Cooler Planet showcases interesting and cross-cutting development projects often done in multidisciplinary teams. Whereas research does not automatically create visual outputs, multidisciplinary collaboration often produces concrete prototypes and models, which are highlighted in the exhibitions.