Regenerative Design / Future of Architecture

Colin Rohlfing, sustainability and regenerative design expert, architectural engineer, TedX speaker and global opinion leader on all things regenerative design. Colin has been recognized and awarded by many organizations and publications. Over the last 20 years, Colin has been actively involved with President Obama’s Export Council Sustainability Committee, the United States Green Building Council, the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment, the Biomimicry Guild, and the International Living Future Institute. This is the architect you want to listen to when it comes to the future of architecture and going beyond sustainability.
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 25 | Colin Rohlfing |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. I have Colin Rohlfing on today. He is vice president director of sustainability development at HDR. For those of you who don’t know who HDR is, they are a worldwide architecture firm with more than 200 locations around the planet. Colin has been in the space for more than 20 years. He’s also held different types of leadership roles, including President Obama’s export council sustainability committee, the United States Green Building Council, which is where LEED comes from, the American Institute of Architect committee on the environment, the Biomimicry Guild, which I really hope we get to talk about today, and lastly, the International Living Future Institute, which I’ve never even heard of so I really hope we get to dive into that one.

Colin has given over 100 speaking engagements throughout the planet, including TEDx. I saw him at South By earlier this spring. I was the one who was probably asking all the questions at the end of the session just because Colin was the first person that I’d ever heard that really focused on some data on where we’re headed, this unknown territory, and how we have to build for it because of climate change. After his session, I went up and introduced myself. I asked Colin, I said, “I really enjoyed your talk. I think a lot more people need to hear about it. Would you be on the podcast?” and he agreed and here he is. Colin, please fill our listeners in with anything that I missed along the way or anything you want to add.

Colin Rohlfing
[01:45] Yeah, well, Taylor, thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it. You were definitely one of our best audience members who asked the most pertinent questions. Thank you about that. You nailed the intro. I’ve been in the design and engineering industry for the past 20 years or so. I’ve had a key focus on sustainability and regenerative design integration on all of our design projects. I do work for a global architecture and engineering firm. We do everything from hospitals to lab buildings to urban planning to interior space, you name it. Anything but single family residential, we touch it, which is really great, because in order to really have an impact, you have to touch a lot of square footage, a lot of projects around the globe. That’s our intention is to get to net zero if not net positive design solutions by 2030 and beyond.

Taylor Martin
[02:39] Yeah, net positive, man, I can’t agree with you more there. That’s something I’m reading that book Net Positive that came out. I can’t remember the author. I’m just getting my toe into it. Looking forward to getting through that. Regenerative design, whenever I hear that it also makes me think about resilience. I hear that word floated around a lot with architecture. Can you discern the difference between the two or are they hand in hand? How does that work?

Colin Rohlfing
[03:02] We’ve had to go through a lot of nomenclature deep dives in the industry for the past five to ten years. People are always asking what’s the difference between sustainability versus resiliency versus regenerative design versus biophilic design, biomimetic design. There’s a lot of definitions we have to focus on. The best way to describe these is maybe using three definitions. Sustainability has always been this idea that we are keeping in homeostasis. We are leaving the planet better for future generations. We’re not having a negative impact. The problem with sustainability over the past 15 to 20 years has been that things keep getting worse. We’ve gotten to a tipping point where we have to regenerate back to levels predevelopment, pre-Industrial Revolution, preagricultural revolution. Because quite frankly, we’ve just messed it up too much. Regenerative design is not just keeping homeostasis. It’s having that positive benefit, so sequestering carbon, reinfiltrating water, providing regenerative health and healthier spaces that go back to earlier metrics. Now, resiliency is a very important definition, too, because of climate change, because of uncertainty, there will be impacts in the future that we have to bounce back from. Resiliency is planning for those bumps, planning for the ability to bounce back from an event. It could be a climate event. It can be a social event, but you have to bounce back. I’ve always said that regenerative design is this large umbrella and that in order to be regenerative, you have to inherently be resilient. We want net positive impacts and then we want to make sure that we’re planning for any future impacts. They are different but they’re very closely connected.

Taylor Martin
[04:57] Okay, that was a mic drop, boom, man. That was excellent, well described. That was the best explanation I’ve ever heard.

Colin Rohlfing
[05:05] I did not rehearse that. That was off the cuff. Hopefully, it made sense.

Taylor Martin
[05:09] It totally made sense. That was great. Getting into regenerative design, because I know that’s your wheelhouse, again, I was really impressed with all of the things you talked about. One of the things that you talk about, you just mentioned now, is about how we’re on a deficit. Regenerative design is now our future because when you were talking at South By and you mentioned we don’t look at 100-year floods. We look at 1,000-year floods. It’s like you are looking at the world in totally different lens, because like you said, we screwed things up and we need to build for that. Can you speak to that?

Colin Rohlfing
[05:45] Yeah, if anybody has read the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from the UN, it’s indicated that we have eight years left until we hit a catastrophic tipping point. Some scientists believe that we will hit that 1.5-degree Celsius increase in temperature within the next five years. There’s a 50/50 chance. This is happening a lot faster than we all thought. Although our industry has been planning for this decarbonization for the year 2030, it might not be enough. We have to then think about not only decarbonization but design for climate adaptation. We’re going to have to design for these realities and realize that we may have missed our target date. There are some optimistic outlooks here. This is not all pessimistic. We can geoengineer our way out of this eventually, but there will be impacts. We have to realize that those impacts are going to happen a lot sooner than we thought.

Taylor Martin
[06:47] Are your clients coming to you and do you have to educate them on this or are they coming to you and saying we already know this? Where’s that at?

Colin Rohlfing
[06:54] It depends on the climate. People always ask, are you seeing this everywhere? Does every one of your offices do this? It depends on various geopolitical factors. If we are in parts of the country or the world that are more conservative and maybe not as trustworthy of the science, then we do less of it, even though we push it internally. If we’re in places where there is more progressive thought on this, we’re targeting net zero carbon from day one, electrification, they know these things. They’re starting to push us a little harder. It's very regional, although we have internal mandates to push this wherever we work, but we’re definitely seeing this more in the pacific northwest, in Europe, for a lot of our higher education clients. All of our healthcare clients now, the HHS is just committed to decarbonization so every single health organization has tried to put together decarbonization plan. We’re busy. Let’s just say it like that. It’s very stressful. We’re very busy, which is a good thing. We want to be busy doing this work.

Taylor Martin
[07:57] Yeah, in terms of the community that are around these different social structures, how do your buildings impact the community? Do you bring some of the voices in the community in? Is there a social connection society wise?

Colin Rohlfing
[08:10] Yeah, you cannot have true regenerative design unless you understand the broader community and unless you engage the community. If you’re just thinking about your project as a site that’s held within project boundaries, you’re not considering broader interconnected systems. Broader interconnected systems include community members, various social organizations, a lot of aspects of social equity. You have to understand how your project is going to impact disadvantaged communities. All of the energy from our site is derived from a power plant that’s miles away. That power plant may release toxic chemicals, like PM2.5 or ozone, that are directly impacting the health of a nearby disadvantaged community. Unless you understand those connections and identify social equity concerns that may be impacted by your project, you’re not truly being regenerative. You have to look at that broader picture. Now, we don’t always get the opportunity to bring in various community organizations depending on the project structure, but we have to at least do the research and make our own assumptions about what is really happening in the community. All of our civic projects and transportation projects, they have community input. Some of our private clients and developers, they don’t have community impact. We have to then make that part of our design process if it’s not going to happen as part of the engagement.

Taylor Martin
[09:40] It sounds like you go into this field into architecture and then sustainability comes up and now it’s like tentacles everywhere. You guys are having to think about so many different things. You’re thinking about the climate. You’re thinking about the future. You’re thinking about how things are changing. Then you’ve got to think about the society and the community around which you’re building. I mean, it’s like, where does it end? It seems like you guys are having to think about everything.

Colin Rohlfing
[10:01] Yeah, people ask me sometimes what I do and the easy description is I work in architecture and design, but quite honestly, we’re all dabblers. We dabble in human behavior. We dabble in financial payback. We dabble in environmental science. We dabble in climate science. We dabble in all of these different elements that impact a project. Unless you’re a dabbler that can see connections beyond just strictly design, then you’re not going to hit these targets for [inaudible] design. A beautiful design sometimes can just be sculpture. Unless there’s a function behind it and unless you’re thinking about all these different areas of expertise that you dabble in, you’re just creating a beautiful sculpture and that’s it. That’s not what architecture really should be. Architecture should be more than that. It should be about community engagement. It should be about broader systems and you have to really sharpen your skillset in order to do that and learn day in and day out about different industries.

Taylor Martin
[11:04] What are the top five things that you try to instill in your projects that are big gamechangers for your clients?

Colin Rohlfing
[11:10] The big game changers I think are probably the things that excite clients the most. When you bring certain things up and you’re trying to push efficiency and sustainability and maybe they’re not too interested in operational energy savings or even in carbon, you still have to sell it in different manners. When you talk about health and wellness are the individuals in the space, they never say no to that. In order to have a healthy building for the occupants and the community, you have to have an efficient building. You’re almost selling the idea of sustainability through the lens of health and wellness. We were always trying to push that concept because it gets the most excitement from our clients, it has the most compounding impacts to impact energy and carbon, but it’s more focused on a human, an individual in the space, which they can relate to because they’re in that space, too. That’s maybe one of the most exciting things we do is human-centered design around health analysis which has these broader ripple effects.

Taylor Martin
[12:16] I think that’s probably the most important, because I mean, it has so many effects. By doing that, it’s going to be more sustainable, more equitable for all the people that enjoy the space, but also productivity. Business people want to know is this space going to excite the people that come here and the people that are going to be employed here, and is it going to boost morale, boost productivity of the company, produce our bottom line. It is an investment that’s somewhat intangible but it’s an investment that I think people are really starting to see and understand, like you said.

Colin Rohlfing
[12:50] Yeah, we’re starting to try to make those numbers more tangible, right? The industry right now, every design firm, every researcher out there, we’re trying to quantify dollar amounts for increases of productivity, dollar amounts for decreases in sick days, dollar amounts for patient length of stay and healing in hospitals or students being more productive and having better test scores. If you can just get your entire staff to be 1% more productive, those savings are astronomical compared to your energy savings. They’re about 30 to 50 times higher than your energy savings are ever going to be. The problem is some of the science is not quite there yet. We need more research. We need more datapoints in order to prove that to clients and say, hey, if we install this high-performance façade, your occupants are going to be more thermally comfortable. There’s going to be less glare. There’s going to be less acoustic noise from the exterior, and therefore, they’re going to be 1% more productive. That’s going to save you a ton of money, right? It’s also going to save you energy and carbon but the productivity is a much higher value.

Taylor Martin
[14:04] Yeah, and even long-term thinking, resell the building. When you make a class A, A+ building, it’s more sexy to own and to operate and to sell sometime down the road. I mean, there’s a strong sense of investment. Going back to the pessimistic side of if we don’t fix our future now, those buildings have to last. That resilience part really comes into play. What are some things that you wish clients would be more interested in but maybe they’re not? Is there anything like that or is it just something that you have to just bug them about everything? I want everyone to know that Colin is now smiling and he’s going side to side here.

Colin Rohlfing
[14:49] This is like 20 years’ worth of therapy in this industry. This job is tough. I’ve spent the past 20 years trying to convince people to do certain things, trying to convince clients, trying to convince design teams. You can’t just open up this can of worms with my emotions. What do I wish clients would do? The obvious one is short-term thinking, anybody who’s really extremely concerned about first cause and first cause only I think are slightly shortsighted or not seeing the bigger picture. They’re not seeing those connections that we had talked about. If every client allowed us to do full lifecycle cost analysis of the building for however they’re going to – however long they’re going to own it for that included human health benefits, community benefits, the social cost of carbon, if we could add all of those intangible costs into the lifecycle cost analysis on every project and we push to show them the true cost of their building, that would make me very happy. I would have a lot less stress if that was the way things worked on all projects. It’s getting better but it hasn’t always been the way for the past 20 years.

Taylor Martin
[16:05] Yeah, I mean, I could think that numbers are great. I love data, very analytical here, but I could see you having – you guys did a backwards test on the last ten big projects that you did and you had an average commonality of numbers and you could have that as a report. You might not have your data on everything or the project at hand, but you could have something that could speak on your behalf, yeah?

Colin Rohlfing
[16:30] Yeah, I mean, we take data from other projects and apply it to all of our future project. This strategy worked on this project and had this amount of payback so let’s try it again, but we don’t have deep data on human productivity for every project because it’s not always quantified. We need a bigger dataset for that in order to make this more of a reality for future projects. Yeah, having that data, we’re a data-driven design firm. We use a lot of computational models to run a bunch of iterations and thousands of design solutions from past projects to help us make informed decisions. The more data, the better.

Taylor Martin
[17:07] Yeah, I totally agree with that. At the end, it’s always you need a human to quantify and to really figure out what it means. Again, I just feel like that’s just another responsibility that falls on your shoulders.

Colin Rohlfing
[17:19] Yeah, when we – oftentimes we’ll do some analytics just as part of our design process. Even if the client is not asking for it, this is good design. This is how we work. We have the tools and so we’re going to use them.

Taylor Martin
[17:30] Yeah, so when clients – you engage with them and they understand, you do your dance, you do your walk. What is the process like now that you have all these extra components? It seems like it’s going to add a lot more to the lead time, the beginning generation time on design and things like that on your side. You can’t just whip out some designs overnight because you also have to pull all this data about the site, the community around it, and all that stuff, right?

Colin Rohlfing
[17:58] Yeah, we have to – there’s always this big argument about, well, that’s going to cost a lot of extra time and we don’t have time. There is some really damn good design principles who just know how to do this. They start Day 1, this is their design process. It’s a very efficient lean process because they’re in charge of the design, they know what should be done and they just go. Now, because of the current situation, we’re being asked to do net zero carbon lab buildings and net zero carbon hospitals, which is a really hard task. In order to make those right decisions, you do need extra time for modeling and extra time for research. We have a lot of energy modeling software. We have a regenerative design tool that is GIS-based that has a ton of datasets from the US and other countries that allow us to grab site information as quickly as possible. We need to get all of our data within the first two or three days of a design process. Because at some point, someone is going to start drawing, and if we don’t have all that data Day 1, we’re already behind the eight ball. The biggest thing that we do is make faster and smarter tools that allow us to analyze a ton of data in a very short amount of time because projects are not slowing down. We’ve always tried to push more research, more design, more production into early stages of design. It’s actually the MacLeamy curve, which was coined in the industry to push information forward for building information modeling for our actual 3D models, the same is true for sustainability. We do all of our work Day 1, and the more we do upfront, the faster we do it, the better we’re off.

Taylor Martin
[19:44] Yeah, I empathize with that a lot. Whenever we have to communicate on a client for a client’s behalf, we can’t do any designing until we’ve done our research about who they are, the market that revolves around them, and so on. Let’s jump back into regenerative design. Can you speak more to breaking the components of that down? We did talk about the society and the community impact of regenerative design. We talked a little bit about having to design and build for more resiliency for natural and unnatural disasters, things of that nature. What other elements can you talk to about breaking down regenerative design?

Colin Rohlfing
[20:20] Yeah, we can start with the simple metrics of regenerative design. As I talk to these, you realize that they’re not siloed. They’re not their own pieces of the pie. They’re all interconnected. We had to focus in on the most obvious elements of regeneration is it’s net positive carbon, net positive water, net positive waste, right? Your building can’t just reduce energy to a certain level and therefore reducing carbon. Your building has to actually sequester carbon from the system. Whether that building is sequestering carbon on site or whether it’s installing renewable energy to give electrons back to the grid therefore removing carbon from the system elsewhere, you have to have net positive sequestration for carbon. That’s from an operational carbon standpoint. We’re also one of very great large trends in the industry is how we [inaudible] reduce embodied carbon. Embodied carbon is all of the energy in carbon that is required to make building materials, extracting them, shipping them, manufacturing them, installing them. There’s a lot of carbon associated with building materials. As we reduce the operational carbon in the building, what’s left is the carbon in the materials.

We’re looking at things like mass timber, rapidly renewable materials, various mixes of concrete that actually infuse sequestered carbon or use less cemented self to reduce the amount of that embodied carbon where we’ve actually designed buildings that over their lifecycle have sequestered more carbon than they emit because of the mass and the amount [inaudible] mass timber. All that mass timber is sequestering carbon over its lifecycle before it’s processed and then installed in their building. The building is really a carbon bank. It’s storing all of that sequestered carbon from the environment and then having net positive embodied impacts. From a regenerative standpoint, carbon is an obvious factor. Water is another obvious factor. If you reference the living building challenge, you have to use only water that is captured on site, captured water, you filter it, you process it, you use it for on site purposes. You’re trying to have net positive water impact. Those are the more obvious ones.

Some of the less obvious metrics for regenerative design are things like biodiversity or exterior acoustics. Can we match the biodiversity levels or the acoustic levels of a pristine site? That’s a key component of regenerative design is you have to pick an ecological baseline. Is there a site that exists that functions how it did predevelopment, preindustrial design? Can we hit those targets? Can we regenerate back to those metrics? It’s very difficult because talking with a lot of our environmental scientists, we try to ask them how do you set ecological baseline? Are there sites around the world or in the country or in the same climate zone and biome as your project that we can consider pristine, untouched by human development? Their answer is really a sad answer. They say, “No, everything has had some impact because of human development. There is no pristine site left on the planet.” We do the best we can. We pick Class 1 areas defined by the EPA that are preserves our natural habitat areas. We can get some good metrics from them. Some of the data we pull in from the regenerative tool about the ecological baseline relates to water infiltration. In lieu of meeting code for storm water infiltration within urban environments, what does that pristine site do? That pristine site has a certain mix of vegetation and soil and it infiltrates X amount of water per rainfall event and [inaudible] the rest. Why shouldn’t our site do the same so that we can restore what was the original hydrological flow of that location? Just meeting storm water code is not enough. In order to be truly regenerative, you have to look at natural systems and hit those performance metrics.

Acoustics is another interesting one for a pristine site. Species are less likely to mate or reproduce or thrive if there is acoustic pollution. You see massive decreases in biodiversity throughout all of our cities and even the suburbs because of the acoustic levels and the light pollution levels. If we can hit various acoustic levels or at least reduce acoustic noise or pollution within our projects, we can impact biodiversity, we can impact human health in the same manner that that ecological site is doing. We’re trying to learn from those natural systems and hit those same targets. It’s hard. You can’t necessarily hit the same sites in an urban site as you can in a rural site. You have to weight your values. Then finally, those are more ecological metrics. From a social standpoint, we have to figure out what kind of social ills are happening within the community. Is our project contributing to those social ills? How can we design for equity? The regenerative design process requires us to reach out to community organizations, ask their feedback about how we can address equity in our project, and hopefully design for it with their input.

Taylor Martin
[26:05] Okay, that was a lot, man. That was a short novel there.

Colin Rohlfing
[26:10] Yeah, I wrote an entire whitepaper about this about 150 pages. I could read the whole thing but it’s a lot. It’s not a simple process.

Taylor Martin
[26:20] No, it’s not. Everything we’ve talked about up to this point is not simple. You’re having to analyze and observe many different factors and try to review, analyze, and sus out the truth of all of it. That’s a big hurdle. When I was a kid and I thought architecture, none of this was on my mind. I was thinking about pretty buildings. What we’re talking about now is so far beyond that. Colin, tell me more about – we’ve covered some pretty good direction on regenerative design, which is awesome. I thought you did a great job there explaining all that. I know there’s a lot more we could get into, but what about biomimicry? I know that you’re involved with a biomimicry institute. What is that about? Can you give our listeners a better understanding of what biomimicry is?

Colin Rohlfing
[27:04] Sure, my engagement with them has been in the past. We used them at my old firm as biologists at the design table. It was another way of thinking when approaching design was to have biologists inform our design decisions. They have a great institute. If anyone wants to get online and look at asknature.org, you can figure out how living organisms can provide inspiration for design solutions throughout the entire world. Literally biomimicry is imitation of the living. We are looking at design and solutions that are modeled after biological processes or organisms. That’s the technical definition. The easiest way to understand this is when you have a design project, you look at all of the organisms that live in that climate zone, in that eco region, and you try to take inspiration from them. Your design solutions are not supposed to look like them. That’s biomorphic. Your design solutions are supposed to mimic the same principles, the same performance metrics as those organisms.

For example, prairie dogs, we have a project in the Midwest right now and this is over the old design solution from the guild. Prairie dogs have these dens and they have an innie hole and an outie hole. Because of the way the innie hole and outie hole are oriented with prevailing winds, it causes a negative pressure with inside their den and a stack effect ventilation so they get actually fresh air into their den throughout the day. It’s a really great way to design for natural ventilation within a building by mimicking the design principles of organisms that exist on the site. This can be anything from how fish filter water, how bugs capture water and process water, how birds reflect light to create color in lieu of using toxic chemicals, it’s looking at spider silk and how strong it is, its textile strength. Essentially, it’s drawing inspiration from these performance metrics to inform any design solutions for a project.

Taylor Martin
[29:27] Observation, there it is again, everybody, those of you who have been listening to my other podcast. So much boils down to observing and learning from that. That was a good explanation. What about the International Living Future Institute? You’re also a part of that. You’re involved.

Colin Rohlfing
[29:43] Yeah, if I could say one more thing about the Biomimicry Guild, I really liked how you just mentioned observation and being inquisitive. I think oftentimes in our industry, designers feel they have to be very clever. They feel like they have to be the end all, be all answer to every solution. That’s where you get this concept around design ego and the black cape architects. Quite honestly, I’m here to make a pitch for removal of ego from design and replacement with eco. People with egos do not, in my experience, they don’t try and open to these ideas. It’s their idea. It’s not listening. It’s not observation. When you design with biomimicry in mind and regenerative design, you’re more of an observer and learner, right? The Biomimicry Guild would always say quiet your cleverness and listen instead. That’s what I think we have to do more often in these design solutions is quiet your cleverness and listen.

Taylor Martin
[30:45] I know we could drill down into that one. I can’t agree with you more. Like I mentioned earlier, when we’re working on projects, we don’t think anything about a solution until we get information and observe what’s going on in the world. This is exactly aligned with that. It’s almost like a little bit of a – I hate to say it, but I know a lot of architects, and I’m not saying all of them, I’m just saying that I have known architects to be a little bit headstrong. This is in the face of that, which I think is a good thing because the observation of what we’re talking about in regenerative design and biomimicry and learning from those, I think only good can come from that.

Colin Rohlfing
[31:24] Yeah, I’m hoping the next generation of architects throw out the ego.

Taylor Martin
[31:27] Yeah, fingers crossed. Now, tell me about the International Living Future Institute because I have never heard of that and I kind of like to read. I’m really inquisitive. What is this about?

Colin Rohlfing
[31:39] Yeah, the International Living Future Institute, ILFI, was an organization started, I’m going to get this wrong, maybe 15, 20 years ago. Jason McLennan, another amazing thought leader in sustainable design throughout the world, was one of the founders. The intention was they didn’t think LEED was doing enough to drive true performance or true design change in the industry. So the living building challenge was a rating system they made up which was very stringent at the time. It required net zero energy. It required net zero water. It required net zero waste. You had to hit these targets if you wanted a certification. Some of the most sustainable buildings in the world are living building challenge certified. A lot of the regenerative metrics that we’re looking at today for our rating system and our design projects are spring boarding from living building challenge metrics. That’s really the closest thing in my mind to regenerative design. We’re taking things a little bit further with unique place and climate elements drawing from our GIS database for our projects, but it’s really rooted in a lot of the living building challenge thinking and all of those predecessors and people who came before us who paved the way to make this happen.

Taylor Martin
[33:05] Does regenerative design or ILFI, do they have a certification like LEED does for the Green Building Council?

Colin Rohlfing
[33:14] They do, yes. It’s the living building challenge certification. It initially started out as you have to do all of these things as prerequisites. It’s zero energy, water, waste. Now they have multiple different certifications. You can do petal certifications. The whole analysis of the rating system is based upon a flower. You can choose. You can do net zero energy and a few other things or net zero water and a few other things. They’ve allowed to be more flexible because they really want broader adoption. For many, many years, only the most boutique top end projects were achieving the certification because it’s very hard. In order to get broader buy-in and broader consensus building, they’ve made it more flexible so you can dabble in a few different categories.

Taylor Martin
[33:59] That makes sense. You want people to get in the folds. You want more people attending.

Colin Rohlfing
[34:05] There’s a big debate about that. Should we reduce our performance standards while we only have eight years left? Maybe not, but we need to get people on board.

Taylor Martin
[34:15] We’ve talked about a lot of things on today’s show. It’s just makes me think that you’ve seen and experienced and witnessed and are working on just so many different things. I’m really a layman outside the architectural world. I’m really impressed. I find it incredibly fascinating. Is there a story that you can tell our listeners about something that was profound? Something that happened or a project that you’re just really happy about that really crossed a lot of bars and you just want to tell us about a success story?

Colin Rohlfing
[34:48] Yeah, it goes back to a recent project that I think I had mentioned earlier on in this conversation. I’ve been working on this specific regenerative design framework for HDR for the past three or four years. A lot of the feedback you get is, well, those are really hard targets. I don’t know if we can hit that. I’m not quite sure if that’s even possible. I think my biggest a-ha moment was going back through old projects within the past five years and seeing which of those projects actually did hit some of those metrics. Now, not in one single project hit all 30 or 40 metrics that we’re trying to look at, but when I started to line them up, this project was net positive operational carbon. This project was net positive embodied carbon. This project was net positive water. This project hit all of the targets in the well building standard for human health and regenerative health. This project had an amazing social equity story where they engaged community. This project put 18 inches of soil back into the site to build nutrients and to sequester more carbon into the soil and increase biodiversity.

When I started lining up about 20 to 30 past projects, all of them had covered every single metric that we had outlined. Whenever someone tells me this isn’t possible, I can have this a-ha moment and say, “No, look, we’ve done this. We just haven’t done all of it at once.” It’s very possible to do all of this at once, to hit all those targets at once. It just takes a little more focus. That a-ha moment was what seemed insurmountable, it seemed impossible to hit these regenerative targets and everyone had doubts, but then you show them projects and they get less concerned. Then they get less scared about doing it. They’re more on board with you to try to hit these targets together. I think that’s the most important thing about trying to convince clients or other designers that you should do something is show them a project where it worked. There’s plenty of them out there. Show them a strategy, an HVAC system, a lighting system, an envelope where it’s in practice, it made economic sense, and it’s working. They get less scared and they’re more willing to follow you down that pathway.

Taylor Martin
[37:15] Yeah, more and more case studies to prove your point. I love that. That was a good one. I’m going to be following you on LinkedIn like crazy right now because you and I have linked up. I think we talked earlier and I want to tell our listeners to look out for Colin on LinkedIn. You can follow him yourself. His last name is Rohlfing. It’s R-O-H-L-F-I-N-G. Look him up. Follow him. Connect with him and see what he’s up to. Because I am very interested in hearing what you’re going to be doing in the future and maybe reconnecting sometime in the future, maybe doing another show. Colin, thank you for being on today’s show and thank you for giving that wonderful lecture you did at South By Southwest. If any of you out there are listening, if you see his name pop up somewhere and he’s going to be giving a speech, because he does a lot of them, I highly recommend going and attending that one. I was really – that one really – I came home and I was telling my wife, “Oh, my God. I was this guy Colin. You’re not going to believe it.” We talked for three hours about it. Thank you for being at South By. Thank you for being on today’s show, Colin. Is there anything futuristic that you want to say about regenerative design in terms of where it’s headed?

Colin Rohlfing
[38:28] I want to thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the conversation. I’m looking forward to maybe your wife and I could talk about this if she’s [inaudible] too, we can have a follow-up. I think one thing I want to say is I want to encourage everyone out there who wants to apply regenerative principles is to not make this like sustainability. The word sustainability, it got stale. It got old. It was green washed. We can’t green wash this anymore. We don’t have any time left. We have to make it stick and we have to make it real.

Taylor Martin
[39:02] I want to underscore everything he just said right then and there because I agree with you. While sustainability is great word, but it has fallen deaf on deaf ears, but regenerative design is poignant because we have passed that Rubicon. We have to pull things back because we are in a deficit. I totally agree with you. All right. Thank you, Colin, again. If you want to follow him, look him up on LinkedIn or check him out any time he’s speaking around the world. Thank you, everybody. Over and out.

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[39:34] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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