'Between July 2024 and March 2025, URGE Collective designed, developed and delivered a green skills training programme for Casson Mann. With a forty-year history of designing museums, exhibitions and interiors, they are known for their beautiful, enduring cultural spaces.

The URGE team, consisting of Alexie Sommer, Ella Doran, and Bengt Cousins-Jenvey, worked with Casson Mann’s green team to survey their wider team of designers and create a bespoke training programme tailored to their needs.

Shared vision

The vision for the training programme is to:

• Build internal design team knowledge around the environmental impact of the permanent exhibition design process.
• Enable the team to take responsibility for the environmental considerations that are central to decision-making processes.
• Engage with clients, contractors and the wider supply chain and ensure the team understands how to undertake project-specific investigations.

Collaborative process

URGE designed the programme in close collaboration, using the following steps:

• Surveyed the design team to assess existing sustainability knowledge, skills and training needs
• Reviewed team roles, processes, and resources to identify gaps and the options to address them
• Analysed client briefs and project plans to develop a project-relevant sustainability approach and research questions or workshop topics
• Applied new knowledge and provided sustainability support to live tenders and projects to reinforce learning

5 Sessions

URGE delivered five monthly sessions:

• 01 Carbon Literacy
• 02 Materials Impact delivered with Rob Thompson from Spot Material
• 03 Specification Writing
• 04 Conversations with Clients
• 05 Conversations with Contractors

4 Objectives

The objectives of these sessions included the desire to:

• Help designers to visualise impact areas and - depending on their roles - where, when and how they can intervene or influence
• Educate the team to design with carbon emissions and material impact in mind, and provide an awareness of impact areas designers have control over
• Investigate alternatives for permanent exhibition materials and introduce 'circular' waste-reducing build techniques with case studies
• Enable the design team to understand their influence at each stage of the design process to apply the right criteria at the right moment

The program links with Alexie Sommer's work on the Design Council's Skills for Planet Blueprint, which launched in June 2025 and Bengt Cousins-Jenvey's analysis of the Design Economy research.  

3 Skills for Planet Areas

Mapping the training delivered for Casson Mann to the Design Council’s Blueprint Skill Areas, we noted that we significantly addressed three of the six Green Skill Areas detailed in the Skills for Planet Blueprint:

• Eliminating Emissions
• Evaluating Green Impact
• Influencing Green Behaviour.

Positive feedback

URGE surveyed the design team both before and after the programme, and it was encouraging to hear that team members were “...excited to continue building confidence and have a stronger voice with arguments by understanding the pros and cons of decisions and building a narrative to push for better ways to design things.”

As well as their appetite to apply the programme in practice: “..these sessions have been a good step in the right direction, and our next step is to look at specific projects and investigate how we can improve the sustainability with the resources we have.”

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Read the article here.