During my second year in college, my geology professor spoke two words that have since changed my relationship with design, Global Warming. At that moment, I had a vague memory of feeling extremely concerned as a child listening to my teacher lecture about the polar ice caps melting and the catastrophic flooding they would create. I’m from Houston, so I was pretty sure there was no chance of me surviving this. She continued on, exclaiming that millions of people were going to die and there was nothing we could do about it. However, while I listened to my geology professor describe the impacts of Global Warming, I no longer felt like a helpless child. I could not understand how this was the first time I was hearing about it since my childhood. It was eight years later, and I was a sophomore in college. I had just entered into the Design Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and it seemed strange to me that even my design professors were not discussing the issue. I was determined to learn more about climate change and why people were in denial about it actually happening. I was struggling to find the answer to why human behavior is dominated by the short-term rather than the long-term. We have the knowledge and ability to design systems and products to stop the current decline of our society and environment, but our egos and arrogance get in the way. My search for answers to these questions led me to the graduate Industrial Design program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I have realized that so many “design solutions” fail because designers often present an end product to their audience with little explanation of the processes necessary to accomplish it. As designers we have to learn how to develop systems that allow people to accomplish change incrementally, through short-term behaviors that work in concert with the long-term goal. To find out more about my work please visit my website: http://www.meganbraley.com