World Design Day, June 29, focuses on environmental solutions to the world’s problems

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Today a series of workshops, conferences and exhibits all over the world showcase the importance of design in solving environmental problems; from coat hangers in South Africa to building with recycled plastic bottles in Colombia, you can follow the events on Facebook.

Today, June 29 is World Industrial Design Day. The theme of this year's event is ‘Humane solutions for a resilient world,' and designers are encouraged to produce designs that can aid in the solutions to the world's problems, for example, climate change and other environmental issues.

A series of workshops, competitions and conferences are being held the world over to draw attention to design and the solutions it can offer to global problems. Countries holding events for World Industrial Design Day include; Australia, Canada, Belgium, Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Iran, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the UK amongst others. A number of countries hold events lasting several days in order to celebrate World Industrial Design Day.

Some of the designs and shows involved include "RE USE 2" from June 29 to July 4 in Colombia, which shows designs made entirely from re-using plastic bottles, low carbon designs in Beijing, and a contest in South Africa where local designers compete to design coat-hangers made out of recycled materials. The aim of these events is to show how designs can help solve environmental issues.

World Design Day can be followed on Facebook: the global page, which is in English, has over 2,400 fans, several photographs of previous events and links to related news. Several different countries including Colombia also have localized World Industrial Design Day.  Further information is available at www.icsid.org .