Climate Action Intern – Natsune Suzuki

Natsune Suzuki has been the creative driver behind Negative’s graphic and web design. Her studies as an architecture student at the University of Auckland has given her key creative skills to create the visual diary of Negative. Natsune’s love for outdoor adventures and her home-away-from-home, Queenstown, have made her passionate about preserving these natural beauties. This climate change internship has been a natural choice for Natsune to make a difference.

I was brought up in Queenstown, a place with 360 degrees of stunning natural landscapes, and spent so much of my time surrounded by nature. However, until then, I had been sheltered from knowing the negative impact of human activity, which was particularly highlighted through my travel through the concrete jungles in Asia/Europe and my move to Auckland in the last couple of years.

During my architectural study, a particular conversation with my architecture tutor touched on the relationship between innovative and sustainable design and the real-life economic implications of implementation. In architecture school, we are particularly pushed to explore the conceptualisation of innovative living ideas; however, it is quite the opposite for most graduate students when they start practising in firms. The reality of most architects is that they cannot hold firm design decisions after being creatively restricted by regulations, tight budgets, and client needs. This conversation piqued my interest in exploring designs that imbed feasible sustainability at the foundation of my decision making.

This is where I stumbled upon this CAVI internship programme which I saw as an opportunity to gain real-life experience on how sustainable operations and design can be implemented into businesses and proactively extend my creative problem solving, teamwork, and pitching skills through this program. My experience with online learning this year has pointed out that we must adapt our communication and workflow approach as our work environments become increasingly digitised and saw this as an opportunity I shouldn’t miss.

What I believe is a super cool thing about being the designer of the team like Negative is that you get to play a key role in the process of transforming something that was just an idea into a visual form which can be communicated clearly to the rest of the world! This has been a key part of my role at Negative where we have ideas for a feature for our website or have a message we want to put out. It’s always great to see everyone’s reaction and a burst of motivation to pursue the project when they see their idea come to life!

For the future of the climate action space, I’d love to see a big step in self driving technology and car sharing. I’m a big fan of technology and I really support companies that pursue innovation so hopefully these changes will reduce the amount of emissions from personal transportation as public transport can only go so far!

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