I recently stepped up as a new co-founder for Climate Designers to help rebuild the product offerings, and support the organization in the next phases of its business development. I manage the day to day operations along with Marc O’Brien with our 70+ volunteers, with a focus on community and product strategy. It’s been an exciting journey that began with the Resource Library pictured here, which first connected me to the organization.

In Spring of 2022, I was a Climatebase founding fellow. During my time there, I created this Sustainable Design Guide, as a living document sharing what I have learned about sustainable and regenerative design practices across domains in recent years. Following the fellowship, I began working with Climate Designers, and this guide has evolved into their Climate Designers Resource Library with the help of Batul Rashik. The scope of these resources are broad and systemic, with the intention of connecting designers across disciplines to the principles and industry resources needed to take that first step on leveraging change in their work.

I was driven to create this because of my own learning journey. When I left my job in fashion advertising, I made a decision to pursue work with a positive impact in the world. I joined Instructables excited to encourage the making and repairing things as a way to combat consumerism. As my design work there was nearly all digital, I thought of the environmental impact of my work as minimal. It was only in the past few years that I learned more about the carbon impact of the digital world, a conversation that was and still is sorely lacking from mainstream design channels.

As I was learning about how to apply sustainability to my digital work, I was simultaneously learning about the materials I use as a craftsperson. I quickly realized how difficult it is to simply to make an informed decision on what supply to buy over another through a lens of safety and sustainability. Information is complex, and largely gated behind expensive industry tools and data sets. Many of these decisions are impossible to make with any degree of certainty without an entire team of supply chain, LCA, and manufacturing experts, however I did my best to collect the most accessible tools and information as a starting point for that first push in the right direction.

My goal is for this Resource Library to become a collaborative ecosystem of information and inspiration, and for Climate Designers as a whole to evolve and grow in order to best serve its mission of empowering designers to learn, connect, and act on climate.