Design the Future
Episodes
126 episodes
What we can learn from women leading in sustainability
In our kick-off episode, meet hosts Lindsay Baker and Kira Gould, who discuss their interest in exploring and sharing the amazing work being done in sustainability by women across the country and beyond.Lindsay and Kira have worked...
Sara Neff talks about sustainability leaps in real estate and reasons for optimism
Our first guest, Sara Neff, Senior Vice President for Sustainability for Kilroy Realty, has brought that organization to a leadership position in sustainability within the real estate market. She talks about her career journey, advances being m...
We talk with Rosa Sheng about intersectionality and the common good
Rosa Sheng is an architect and Principal with SmithGroup and the firm’s Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. We discuss how intersectionality plays out in architecture, pushing us to eliminate conventional silos and explore how sustai...
Sarah Golden on storytelling, feminine leadership, and audacity
Sarah Golden is the Senior Energy Analyst and Conference Chair, VERGE Energy with GreenBiz Group. We talk about the importance of storytelling and how stories can advance the movement. Sarah also shares her perspective on energy markets in the ...
HP’s Mary Curtiss on how sustainability engages people through place
Mary Curtiss is the head of sustainability for HP operations, which includes 120 sites around the world. For her, this is a mandate about buildings and people. She explains why storytelling and empathy are as important as the technical side of ...
Gail Vittori on design, human health, and holding on to your voice
Gail Vittori, the co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas, has been a change agent in the green building movement for many years. She says that she brought a “beginner’s mind” to the industry. She saw a...
Liz Ogbu on spatial justice
Liz Ogbu is a designer, urbanist, and social innovator. Her multidisciplinary consultancy, Studio O, works with communities in need to leverage the power of design to catalyze sustained social impact. Which is not, strictly speaking, what most ...
Amanda Kaminsky envisions building material flows as a healthy system
Perhaps it was her summer manufacturing job that seeded her interest in resource cycles. After studying architecture, Amanda Kaminsky worked in real estate at the Durst Organization in New York, then founded Building Products Ecosystems (BPE) w...
Andréa Traber on innovating, change management, and multi-generational teams
Andréa Traber is an architect and managing principal at Integral, an engineering/consulting firm aimed at accelerating positive change. Amid fast-paced change brought on by the pandemic, Integral is looking at new ways of shaping teams and s...
Elaine Hsieh on the imperative to accelerate climate innovation
Elaine Hsieh is co-founder and head of Corporate Partnerships/Marketing for Third Derivative, a new organization focused on success and speed to market for climate innovation efforts. Throughout her career, Elaine has followed her curiosity...
Mara Baum on design for health and well-being
Architect Mara Baum leads global health and wellness design practice, which includes a number of large projects for large health organizations. Human health had been an interest of Mara’s for years, though during her education, it was not at al...
Eden Brukman on the impacts of architectural decisions
In the course of architect Eden Brukman’s career, she has touched and shaped a number of critical aspects of the sustainable building industry. Today, she is the Senior Green Building Coordinator for the City of San Francisco. We talked to her ...
Kimberly Lewis on movement building and centering people and healing
Kimberly Lewis is SVP for market transformation and development at the US Green Building Council, where she has centered people and healing in her work. This movement builder is responsible for GBC’s Equity Summit, its Women in Green leadership...
Carlie Bullock-Jones on building certifications and design for sports
Architect Carlie Bullock-Jones runs Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta and her firm touches many buildings whose owners seek green building certifications including LEED, WELL, and others. This includes very large-scale projects such as professional sp...
Marge Anderson on inspiring change for a clean energy future
Master communicator Marge Anderson works at the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Slipstream, Inc., where she shapes education to drive behavior change around energy. She chaired the US Green Building Council in 2015, and was in Paris for th...
Stacy Smedley on embodied carbon and focusing on impact
Stacy Smedley started her career in architecture and has worked with global construction company Skanska for the past seven years. She co-conceived the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool last year, and is on loan from Skanska...
Gail Brager on meaningful mentorship and the power of collaboration
Gail Brager is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and associate director of the Center for the Built Environment, a model for collaborative research dedicated to transformational change in the building industry. She describes her resear...
Erin Meezan on driving change and raising the bar on sustainability leadership
Erin Meezan sought a career that would help protect the natural world. That led to an environmental law degree, and today she is VP and Chief of Sustainability at Interface, the global commercial flooring company. She and Interface are focused ...
Liz York on architecture as a matter of health and public health
Architect Liz York is senior advisor for buildings and facilities strategy and innovation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She talks about how buildings impact people -- their lives, health, and mental health. Liz h...
Judi Heerwagen on connections and the richness of biophilia
Psychologist Judith “Judi” Heerwagen focuses on the behavioral and health impacts of building design and operations; she works with the U.S. General Services Administration and is on the architecture faculty at the University of Washington. She...
The hosts reflect: life paths, climate urgency, and the systemic nature of what's ahead
At the 20-episode mark of this podcast, we took this one to talk about some of the topics that have come up and about how we will shape this conversation going forward. The urgency of the climate crisis in the context of the pandemic and the in...
Leith Sharp on turning to biology and cultivating leadership
Leith Sharp studies and teaches leadership for sustainability in organizations and teams; she directs Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health. We had a fascinating discussion with her about hu...
Jenny Carney on democratizing access to green building benefits
Chicago-based Jenny Carney works with WSP’s Sustainability, Energy and Climate team supporting corporate sustainability teams and project work. Her ecology/field science background keeps her grounded in empirical data (and wishing the building ...
Alyssa Lyon and Mandy Lee on sustaining equity as part of sustainability
Alyssa Lyon is the Sustainable Communities Director at Pittsburgh's Green Building Alliance and Mandy Lee is the manager of the NAACP’s Centering Equity in the Sustainable Building Sector initiative. We talked to Lee and Lyon about promises the...
Lucia Athens on designers as public servants and joy in policy
Building a climate responsive and just future is happening, many would argue, most meaningfully at the local level, due in part to the vision and persistent hard work of people like Lucia Athens. Lucia, trained in landscape architecture, talks ...