Kaarin Knudson On New Patterns, Agency, And A Better Future Design The Future podcast

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Jenn Taranto has more than 25 years of experience in commercial real estate and construction and serves as Vice President of Sustainability at STO Building Group, a major construction organization. Passionate about reducing environmental impact, she drives STOBG’s internal sustainability strategy, helps clients define CSR goals, guides project teams to achieve milestones, and supports efforts to lower costs and emissions. We talked with Jenn about her long-term role with Built Environment Plus, the New England-based regional green building nonprofit, and how such groups are supporting market and industry transformation. Jenn suggests that people working on sustainability in the construction sector should be “deeply curious, have loads of tenacity, and be interested in breaking systems to build better ones.” She was instrumental in getting the Contractors’ Commitment off the ground and shared its reason for being. “We saw a real need for a system to encourage companies to track progress and engage in this transformation, she says. As for how we’re progressing -- the movement, the industry, and society overall -- we asked Jenn if we’re where she thought we’d be by now. “Not exactly,” she said. “Where’s my hoverboard?”…

Design the Future

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Stacy Glass on ending toxic chemical exposure 42:33

7 weeks ago42:33

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Stacy Glass is co-founder and executive director of ChemFORWARD, a nonprofit that creates access to chemical hazard data and seeks safer alternatives in partnership with industry. Stacy drives partnerships, collaborations and stakeholder engagement to support this mission and her aim to end toxic chemical exposure and advance human and environmental equity. ChemForward’s theory of change is rooted in collaboration with industry and other parties -- the entire supply chain. What ChemFoward is really working toward, Stacy says, is “a world where all chemicals are vetted before use.” This would be a fundamental change. “We’d like to see no more hazardous chemicals entering circulation and existing hazardous chemicals being drawn down and replaced with safer alternatives.” She points out that chemical pollution is a significant threat. In planetary boundaries conversations, “novel entities” are in the high risk zone. Stacy notes that people -- consumers of personal products and building products and more -- need to be smart about how to ask for products that are as good as they can be. “We encourage buyers in all parts of the supply chain to be thoughtful about what they are asking for -- and not just ask for things that are ‘free of’ one thing. This can lead to what we call ‘regrettable alternatives.' Instead, as the entire supply chain knows more and understands developing metrics to measure progress in safer chemistry, we can all work toward better, safer, and healthier.”…

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Kaarin Knudson on new patterns, agency, and a better future 50:44

11 weeks ago50:44

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Kaarin Knudson is an architect, a writer, and an educator with more than 25 years’ experience in design, sustainability, and community building. Trained as a journalist before becoming an architect, her work has always focused on people and place. In 2017, after a decade in architectural practice, she organized the public-interest project Better Housing Together to address Lane County’s housing crisis. This work supported the creation of Eugene’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Lane County’s first Affordable Housing Action Plan, and Oregon’s landmark middle housing reforms. In 2024, she was elected as Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, with 73% of the primary vote and 96% in the general election. Kaarin teaches planning and urban design at the University of Oregon, and she speaks at regional and national conferences about sustainable cities, housing, and the work of guiding community change. She is co-author, with Nico Larco, of The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (2024). We discussed what this moment is calling us all to do. “I think we are building new muscles and new relationships and new patterns of behavior with one another,” she said. “This is challenging us to think about how to work in different ways and how to stay focused on the future that we want to build. The framing of the problem is going to determine the solutions. We have to be the people who are framing the problem in a way that allows the solutions to be more connected, more productive, more about advancing into this future together.”…

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Kayleigh Houde on computational opportunity and climate progress 34:50

13 weeks ago34:50

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Kayleigh Houde is an Associate Principal and Global Computational Projects Lead at Buro Happold, where she is responsible for the harmonized development of new technologies within the open-source coding platform BHoM. Her leadership extends to chairing the MEP 2040 Commitment, participating in the ECHO Project and ASHRAE Center of Excellence for Building Decarbonization. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Parametric Life Cycle Assessment. We spoke with Kayleigh soon after the MEP 2040 and Carbon Leadership Forum had released The Beginner’s Guide to MEP Embodied Carbon, a critical resource that was eagerly awaited in the community. Naturally, we spoke with her about that effort and about the broader question of why embodied carbon is important for MEP practitioners. “We have coalesced a lot of data to to bridge gaps for the MEP disciplines and provide clarity about the MEP impact,” she says. Kayleigh’s technical leadership is paralleled by her deep commitment to collaboration across disciplines, evidenced in many ways, including her work on the ECHO effort to harmonize data across disciplines and certification programs. “Computers aren’t the thing,” Kayleigh says of the potential of computation in climate work and the built environment. “They are the thing that gets you to the thing. Really, what computations helps you to solve are some of issues that we have in human collaboration. Sometimes we think we’re connecting but we are not really speaking the same language. Getting people to talk and collaborate is a big part of the solution in the computational work.”…

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Kritika Kharbanda on evidence-based design and storytelling 44:56

15 weeks ago44:56

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As the Head of Sustainability for Henning Larsen, Kritika Kharbanda spearheads the global sustainability team’s initiatives, goals, and growth. She serves on the ULI New York’s Climate and Sustainability Council and is the co-chair for AIA New York’s Building Science Committee. We talked about her journey from India to Japan, Denmark, and the U.S. We discussed storytelling and negotiations; evidence-based design; and her role with Pathways AI,a climate-tech startup using AI to automate Environmental Product Declarations; and her Substack . We also asked her about whether she feels like she’s a part of an industry or a movement (a question that feels more important now than it has since we began asking it in our first episodes in early 2020). “If I were just part of an industry,” she says, “I’d probably be doing my nine to six, designing buildings, and calling it a day. But in my head and heart, I feel called to join with others in learning and collaboration and advocacy. We are building relationships and working together toward tangible outcomes. This is a movement. I am part of it, and I think everyone should be a part of it, because just being part of the industry is not enough anymore.”…

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Krista Egger on healthy, resilient housing for all 41:39

16 weeks ago41:39

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As VP of Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, Krista Egger stewards the nonprofit’s national environmental programs, including Green Communities, Health Action Plan, Resilience Academies, and Decarbonization Hubs. Krista went to Oberlin and and studied physics and architectural history. After college, a stint with AmeriCorps introduced her to a kind of applied building science. “I had the opportunity to identify root causes and then make things better,” she says. Sometimes making things better means dismantling long-held beliefs. “For too long,” she says, “there has been a perceived predicament of whether people can build affordable housing or green housing, whether there can be a standard way to operate buildings or green ways of operating buildings. Those are false choices.” The programs that Egger leads are leveraging capital and policy and resources to solve for barriers that prevent all housing from being affordable, healthy, and resilient. “We are centering the needs of people who live in housing to make decisions about housing.” related links: Health Action Plan framework Green Communities Criteria…

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Upali Nanda on design for human health and perception 54:46

23 weeks ago54:46

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Dr. Upali Nanda is Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. As the firm’s Global Sector Director, Innovation, she oversees HKS’s Research, Advisory, Sustainable Design and Cities & Communities services. Based in Ann Arbor, Upali has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice with a focus on the impact of design on human health and perception. Upali believes that the big problems will be solved by getting many disciplines together in conversation. One example, the FDA Home as a Health Hub Idea Lab, brought together housing designers, developers, technology developers, investors, healthcare providers, and others. All such work is rooted in Upali’s deep commitment to the integration of research into practice. That commitment has prompted to her to ask deep questions about people and place. “How can we design for humans without knowing how humans are designed?” she asks. “That question got me interested in how humans perceive and behave, and then over time, that evolved into this interest in human health itself.”…

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Shannon Goodman on building reuse and building community 46:24

25 weeks ago46:24

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Shannon Goodman is the Executive Director of the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta, which has redirected nearly 13 million pounds of usable materials away from landfills and generated over $6 million in community savings, including 450 in-kind material grants to nonprofits. Shannon also serves as Board President for the nonprofit Build Reuse, representing reuse-focused organizations across the U.S. We talked to her about running a nonprofit and about the changes afoot in the AEC field. “We are in the midst of a massive mind shift,” she says. “It's only going to work if people actually see that there is value. We have to stop thinking about these materials as waste. They are resources.” Shannon’s vision for the reuse work is that “the entire process of what we do gets really sexy for people,” she says. “I look forward to a time when people are compelled by the stories they are hearing of what has been saved and reused. They will think, ‘I want a piece of that for my work.’ That is only going to happen if we make it really easy to tell those stories.”…

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Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth on collaboration and healthy materials 47:12

26 weeks ago47:12

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Jonsara Ruth is co-founder and Design Director of Healthy Materials Lab (HML) at Parsons School of Design, where she is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the MFA Interior Design program. Alison Mears is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director and Co-Founder of HML and Director/Co-Founder of HML EU. Alison and Jonsara published “Material Health:Design Frontiers” exploring the intersectional and complex nature of material health. They also co-authored a chapter of The Regenerative Materials Movement (Living Future/Ecotone, 2024). This year is the Healthy Materials Lab’s tenth in operation. Alison and Jonsara’s close collaboration has been central to the Lab’s development and to its success in engaging people and changing minds and practices. “Jonsara and I have a lot in common,” Alison says, “including a drive to use our design skills in the service of a higher goal to produce place for people that meet all their needs. We want to raise the bar. And we want to invite people in to do this work.” Jonsara says their partnership works well because they have complementary skill sets and they’ve always been willing to hear one another out. “We value intuition and we respect each other’s experience. We are both committed to always learning and evolving,” she says.…

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Meghan Lewis on embodied carbon, research, and policy 43:59

28 weeks ago43:59

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Meghan Lewis is the Program Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), where she leads strategy, research and resource development to execute CLF’s mission to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings, materials, and infrastructure to create a just and thriving future. Meghan joined CLF in 2020 to lead their efforts to inform public policies targeting embodied carbon, from Buy Clean to building codes and beyond. Previous to joining CLF, Meghan was an architect and launched a global supply chain sustainability program at WeWork. We talked to her about embodied carbon (of course), changing practice, the realities of research, and translating knowledge to meaningful policy. “It's really important for people to remember that a lot of the progress that has been made was led by states and cities, and will continue to be led by states and cities,” she said. “Progress is not going to stop, but now there's an even bigger opportunity for local action. I recommend that people think about the groups they're a part of as part of how you think about policy in the next four years.” We talked about books, too. Meghan shared how reading science fiction fantasy helps her bring optimism to her work.…

Design the Future

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Billie Faircloth on transformation and platform shifts 38:01

29 weeks ago38:01

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Billie Faircloth, FAIA, is a design leader and educator who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. Billie was a partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake, where she guided the collaborative development of award-winning studies, technology, and architecture. As co-founder and research director of Built Buildings Lab, Faircloth represents the value of existing buildings in the public consciousness, global sustainability practice, and policymaking. She recently joined Cornell University as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. We talked to Billie about the value and benefits of shifting platforms and about the richness of working across realms -- practice, policy, and academia. We asked her about the communities of which she is a part. “When I look at the green building industry, I see a whole range of communities engaging in movements,” she said. “They are advocating for decarbonization and energy transition or reducing emissions with embodied carbon, or advocating for supply chain equity or carbon neutral design or regenerative design. I see a movement of movements.”…

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Joel Todd on understanding the whole and working synergistically 41:17

31 weeks ago41:17

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Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED’s earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award). She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That’s really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.” Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”…

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Efrie Escott on research and bringing in more people to scale progress 35:48

35 weeks ago35:48

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Efrie Escott is the Decarbonization Technical Program Leader for Digital Energy at Schneider Electric. As a licensed architect and life cycle assessment practitioner, Efrie’s previous experience in reducing carbon in the built environment was as an environmental researcher within the KieranTimberlake Research Group, where she was a core member of the development team for Tally, an award-winning BIM-integrated life cycle assessment tool. We had a lively conversation with Efrie about research in the built environment field, Tally, her leap to Schneider Electric, and what kind of impact she is having in that context (including a recently launched internal tool). We also got a little nerdy about ASHRAE standards and others and how they are addressing (and tabulating) whole life carbon. She celebrated the immense gains on technology and knowledge, but she also acknowledged her disappointment that we have not yet hit peak emissions. And she voiced a concern that seemed poignant this season, about how we need to bring more people along in the movement and the industry. “We are doing a great job accelerating the front end, but we need to work on the middle more," she said. "We need to spend more time talking to other people -- not just each other. This pains me, because I love spending time with people in this community. But if we are serious about really scaling the progress, we need to do a much better job bringing in others. The science tells us that we need to sprint the distance of a marathon. This means we need to carry each other, and we need to be intentional about who we are bringing into the work.”…

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Myrrh Caplan on sustainability in construction and leading with passion 40:45

47 weeks ago40:45

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For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company’s national sustainability team. Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska’s national approach to sustainable building. She established the company’s first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska’s first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.” She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction ( https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook ). And we couldn’t resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM).…

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Mae-ling Lokko on biogenic materials and practices 51:15

48 weeks ago51:15

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Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute. She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”…

Design the Future

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Lu Salinas on consulting and doing what's right for the most people 39:37

49 weeks ago39:37

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Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company’s rule,” she says. “We always do what’s right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.” Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.”…

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Cristina Gamboa on quantifying the benefits of a decarbonized economy 46:01

52 weeks ago46:01

46:01

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. “Collectively, we’ve had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.” Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don’t have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.”…

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Stephanie Phillips on valuing materials and a silo-busting mindset 41:33

1 year ago41:33

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Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee. Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie’s story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”…

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Sandeep Ahuja on technology tools for sustainability 33:34

1 year ago33:34

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Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams. In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024. Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”…

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Nora Rizzo on materials and ethics 43:45

1 year ago43:45

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Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation’s Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”…

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Alyssa-Amor Gibbons on cultural heritage and resilience 48:14

1 year ago48:14

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Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human’s and human settlements’ vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,’ but I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”…

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Janice Barnes on climate adaptation as part of design 49:01

1 year ago49:01

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Dr. Janice Barnes is founder of Climate Adaptation Partners , a NYC-based partnership that focuses on climate adaptation. With technical training in architecture and organizational behavior, she helps clients to understand risks and evaluate adaptation pathways and link these to design and financing options. She works at the intersection of climate change, design, and public health and uses the question "how might we?" to frame her work. We talked with Janice about her advocacy and education work, her current client and project work, and more. She insists that “climate adaptation is part of design. We have a professional obligation to consider climate projections, explore what those mean, and then decide what you are going to do about that.” Janice uses a musical metaphor to talk about team collaboration. She says that she plays rhythm guitar -- and takes responsibility for bringing a lot of unconventional bandmates to the session. “In this way, I have found that I can contribute design thinking and bring climate science experts and epidemiologists to the table. What we come up with together is so much better -- a richer, more rooted system of solutions that do multiple things for stakeholders, ecosystem, and community.”…

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Paula Melton on green building knowledge and education 48:15

1 year ago48:15

48:15

Paula Melton is the Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, which supports the international sustainable building movement with learning resources, community building, and other services. She works with editorial teams to develop and deliver webcasts, long-form analysis, and other guidance on BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser.com . “We have problems that are caused by people being in silos,” Paula says, “and not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.” She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. “We are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.” Besides bringing deep knowledge and humor to the table, Paula is optimistic, despite being rooted firmly in a lot of data about the reality of the climate imperative and the challenges that face the built environment community. “We are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,” she says. “We're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.”…

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Laurie Schoeman on climate risk, resilience, and finance 45:17

1 year ago45:17

45:17

Laurie Schoeman is the Director of Climate for Enterprise Community Investment and has served as senior advisor at the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Her aim is to develop and implement innovative policies and solutions that enhance the climate adaptation and physical resilience of communities across the nation, especially those that are vulnerable and underserved. “When we talk about climate adaptation, I want people to point to built systems all over the country that are rooted in nature-based solutions,” she says. “It's time we move out of the textbooks and into our streets and communities and build these systems.” Reducing risk, she points out, is a whole slate of activities. “Insurance should not be our first line of defense,” she says. “It should be a complement to a property or a facility or an infrastructure project that has risk reduction baked in.” She adds that communications is critical, and we’re still lagging in that area. “We need to break all these topics down. We need to talk about how to communicate in way that everyone can understand.”…

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Noorie Rajvanshi on sustainability as part of everyday work 39:14

2 years ago39:14

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Noorie Rajvanshi is Director of Sustainability and Climate Strategy at Siemens USA, part of a multinational technology company. Noorie talked to us about her family’s sustainability roots, her mechanical engineering background, and how her fascination with quantifying environmental impact led to her role at Siemens. She is proud of her work on performance tools to support cities with ambitious GHG reduction goals and of her current work on carbon pricing. Noorie calls herself a climate optimist and a climate realist. And she says that she feels part of a movement -- one that is changing for the better. “The movement is not as exclusive as it once was. Some folks might scoff about the notion that ‘everyone is a sustainability professional’ but I think that is the goal we are working towards. Sustainability is not an additional thing, it is part of our everyday work." Noorie told us that the people who inspire her most right now are the people, such as electricians, who are changing their jobs to do more of what’s ahead because of the sustainability movement. “They are becoming experts on heat pumps and EV chargers and more -- and that’s inspiring to me.”…

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Veena Singla on environmental health and justice 41:54

2 years ago41:54

41:54

Dr. Veena Singla is Senior Scientist with the People & Communities Program at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). She seeks to address health disparities linked to harmful environmental exposures using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating environmental health, exposure science, public health, and policy expertise. Her research investigates how toxic chemicals and pollution related to systems of materials use, production, and disposal threaten the health of communities. “If you work on buildings, you're actually working on health and justice, even if you didn't think about it that way,” she says. “Green building has influenced health and justice in both positive and negative ways. I've seen the movement expand from a more narrow focus on energy and greenhouse gasses to a more holistic approach. We are now thinking about how buildings fit into our lives, and trying to better integrate health equity and justice.”…

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Seema Bhangar on human health, data, and buildings 41:00

2 years ago41:00

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Seema Bhangar is a Healthy Buildings & Communities Principal at the US Green Building Council; she focuses on research and innovation. She is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. If you are interested in the field of human health and buildings, Seema advises you to “collect data and be curious and discerning and honest. We have evaluate impact and ask what we do not know.” Seema is working with a new team to rebuild a dedicated research function at USGBC. She is fueled, she says, by the magic that happens “when we bring researchers to our communities of practice.” Seema is deeply proud of the network of people she has cultivated during her career so far, "people who value having a vision, who ask questions at the right scales, and who voice their opinions," she says. "In buildings and health, it’s not about the individual superstar. The nodes are people. Each one has a set of expertise and knowledge, and we really advance when we connect and share.” She is excited for the frontiers that are now being explored in the movement. “Health is different than energy, so we’re using different methods than we did for the other pillars,” she says. “The community today has many tools and appreciates the need for urgency and scale.”…

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Annie Bevan on materials and thinking about impact holistically 44:39

2 years ago44:39

44:39

Materials maven Annie Bevan is a facilitator, consultant, and collaborator focused on creating large-scale change and leveraging sustainability as a strategic business enabler. She’s effecting this through two roles: she is CEO of SMS Collaborative and CEO of mindful MATERIALS. The mindful MATERIALS organization began as steward of a library tool. (That tool started at HKS, which gifted the idea to the built environment community.) Today it is a nonprofit convener, aggregator, and aligner centered on the Common Materials Framework — a system for thinking about products and holistic impact. “We want building product manufacturer to hear a consistent language," Annie says, "so they can respond. Sustainable products should be the norm, not the option.” Her consulting firm provides staffing solutions, mostly to manufacturers who are trying to do this work and talk about it effectively. Annie says that she worries that we’re getting carbon tunnel vision. “We need to bear in mind how broad this challenge is,” she says. “We have to attend to social health, equity, circularity, and biodiversity. We have to -- and we can -- solve these problems at the same time.”…

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Alejandra Menchaca on design analytics and opening windows 44:40

2 years ago44:40

44:40

Through her consultancy, AIRLIT studio, Alejandra Menchaca provides expertise in mechanical engineering and building science to owners and design teams. One of her current projects will be the first performing arts facility in the US with full natural ventilation. Ale holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and has taught at MIT and Harvard GSD, where she has mentored, she says, “several brilliant students who have become inspiring disruptors in the building simulation industry. That’s immensely rewarding.” We talked to Ale about growing up in Mexico and her shift from aerospace engineering to environmental stewardship and building science and her time at Payette and Thornton Tomasetti before starting her own firm. Ale co-founded Project StaSIO, a community of building performance simulators (consultants, architects, in-house building scientists) that strives to teach others how to ask the right building analytics questions and convey the results in ways that are beautiful and impactful (not tables!). When we asked whether she feels like she’s part of a movement, Ale didn’t hesitate: “If speaking up and disagreeing with the status quo is being part of the movement, I'm definitely a member..”…

Design the Future

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Victoria Burrows on decarbonization and proving the possible 46:41

2 years ago46:41