In Spring of 2022, I was a Climatebase founding fellow.  During my time there, I dug deeper into research I had already been doing on sustainable design practices across domains.  This Sustainable Design Guide was one of the products of my time in the fellowship, and is a living document sharing what I have learned about sustainable and regenerative design practices in recent years.

The scope of this guide is broad and systemic, with the intention of guiding anyone in a position of decision making power towards mindset shifts and concrete resources to learn more about how to leverage change within their industries.  The guide spans digital design, industrial design, fashion, architecture, and communications.

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 was now nearly all digital, I thought of the environmental impact of my work as minimal.  It was only in the past few years that I considered the carbon impact of product design decisions and the digital world, a conversation that was and still is sorely lacking from common design channels.

I was simultaneously learning about the materials I use as a craftsperson, and the industrial chemicals and harmful impact of our manufacturing industries.  I quickly realized how difficult it was to navigate the information out there, simply to make an informed decision on what supply to buy over another.  And if I was struggling with this in such small decisions, what about designers at the helm of manufacturing, trying to navigate opaque supply chains?

This spurred years of research on how we as designers must evolve our practice towards sustainability, and work towards regeneration.  Right now this is only a seed, but I hope it could someday become a living, breathing, collaborative ecosystem of information and inspiration.