We have felt despair about the world. We have felt small in front of the too big things: a heating planet, a dying sea, a politics that has no will or capacity to act. We have felt the particular loneliness of caring about something that the people in charge have decided not to care about.

And, like many before us, we have made things. We helped put a pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus and watched as people power filled the void of disrupted traffic. We have planted trees across a bridge. We have blocked roads and confronted oil and water bosses. We have filled a shipping container with songs of joyful resistance and watched strangers enter in despair and walk out with a sense of purpose. We have made posters, films, memes and many banners, so that the form of the words carries the same argument as the words themselves.

We don't think of art as decoration, or design as propaganda. We think they are our only hope of making people feel a future that doesn't exist yet, and feeling it is the first step to fighting for it. A statistic tells you the planet is dying. Good art lets you enter that fact until it becomes yours. Good art, beauty and clarity takes people from knowing to feeling to acting. It is the closest thing we have to magic, and it's the whole reason the studio exists.

We work in a long tradition: text as artwork, action as artwork, what Beuys called social sculpture – and we work in it the way movements do. A banner is a text piece come to life by the twelve people who painted it. A symbol is an edition of millions, designed from the start to leave the hands of its designer. A march is a composition that no one authors and everyone makes. We don't don't fully control our work, and we think that's not a compromise of the art but the point of it: the work only works once it's used with purpose by those who need it.

We refuse the line between art and activism, between cultural work and political work. We don't make work about the crisis, we make interventions into it. We treat the IPCC report and tomato soup as equal materials. We design things that respond to the people standing in front of them, because we don't believe people are something you talk at – they are what you need to work together with to make change happen.

We came out of a movement and we still belong to it. We're not neutral, and we're not trying to be liked. We're here to make the things that help people imagine a liveable world clearly enough to go and build it, and to do it alongside the people already doing the building.