15, September 2025
World Design Congress 2025: The Time for Nature On the Board Has Arrived
We just got back from World Design Congress (WDC) at the Barbican in London. WDC has been taking place at cities all over the world since 1959. This year, for the first time, the focus was on ‘Design for the Planet’ – a long overdue but much welcomed theme! Our Brand Director, Simeon Rose, was there to take part in a panel discussion ‘Designing with Nature’.
We go to a lot of conferences, but this one felt different to the ones in the sustainability space that we’re used to attending. As Simeon puts it:
“Design exists to change things. It’s a creative act of questioning why things are and offering a way of improving them.”
And that’s how Nature On the Board (NOTB) began. In 2022, we became the first company in the world to appoint Nature to our Board of Directors. The decision was inspired by the global Rights of Nature movement, which campaigns for natural entities (like rivers, mountains, ecosystems and species) to be given legal personhood. The thinking is that rather than being seen as commodities, these natural features should have the legal right to exist, thrive, regenerate and evolve. It’s about having an ecocentric (Nature-centred) worldview, as opposed to an anthropocentric (human-centred) one. It’s about making sure the natural world is not viewed as separate from humankind but something that we are part of, something that should be respected and protected from harm.
Along with Anne Hopkins, our Creative Director, Simeon questioned whether the principles and frameworks of the Rights of Nature movement could be applied to the way businesses are run. They looked at the Whanganui River in New Zealand, which became the first in the world to be granted legal personhood in 2017, and wondered why Nature couldn’t also be granted legal rights within our company. Working with legal experts from Lawyers for Nature in the UK and Earth Law Centre in the US, they developed a legal structure and rewrote our company constitution to give Nature a voice and a vote in the boardroom. Now, using a guardianship model, the natural world is represented in all our board meetings by an independent Nature Guardian.
It was this pioneering initiative that Simeon was at WDC to talk about. But as he prepared to make the case for Nature in the boardroom in the panel discussion, he noticed something.
“I could see how much the conversation around Nature and corporate governance has already spread since Nature On the Board began in 2022,” he says.
Not too long ago, the idea of Nature’s rights being considered in the boardroom might have seemed obscure, especially at a conference for people not in the sustainability sector but the design industry. At WDC 2025 though, the topic just kept coming up.
The second day of the congress was opened by Leyla Acaroglu, award-winning designer, social scientist and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Champion of the Earth (that's her speaking in the picture above). In her keynote speech, Acaroglu spoke of the power of the Rights of Nature movement, the recognition of the Whanganui as a legal person and NOTB in action – both at Faith In Nature and House of Hackney (the second company to appoint Nature to their board).
Later, author Julia Watson (described by WDC as 'a connoisseur of localised traditional ecological knowledge’), also mentioned the Whanganui and the importance of the Rights of Nature discourse. Then Cecilia Brenner, Managing Director of charity Design for Good, closed her panel by recommending all organisations give Nature a voice within their governance structures. And in his presentation, architect Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, called upon the audience to move from ‘ego structure’ to ‘eco structure’.
The time for Nature On the Board has arrived. Not just because it is so urgently needed, but because it is being platformed and spoken about by so many influential people.
“Awareness has been snowballing for a while,” says Simeon. “I can only hope that action now follows. I said when we first launched this initiative: ‘this becomes meaningful when it’s not just us doing it’.”
And it isn’t just us doing it. When we appointed Nature to our Board, we wanted to prove that the idea could work within the private sector. Three years on, we’ve proven that. Soon, we’ll be releasing our third annual report about working with our Nature Guardian. Ten organisations (and counting!) have now appointed Nature to their boards. The most recent of those is the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales. Hopefully, it won’t be long before we see that NOTB works in the public sector as well.
If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Nature On the Board at your business or organisation, our open-source guide has all the information you need.
Enjoyed this? You might like:
“Who Speaks for Nature?” Introducing our New Nature Guardian and Why We Can All Be Lichen!
This UK River Just Became the First to Have Its Rights Recognised
