How do we apply that to the design industry where these sustainable choices are so often treated as a checkbox rather than a core creative foundation?

It is a great question and a really good one to start the conversation.

Before I directly answer it, I actually think I'd like to tell a short story about the first time I ever thought about the climate implications of design.

Being a non-designer, certainly not something I spent a lot of time thinking about.

So I used to work at Microsoft and while I was there, I co-founded the company's first employee sustainability community.

You know, these are commonly called green teams and ended up being one of the largest and most influential in the world.

We got to 10,000 members.

Maybe they have their own perspectives that are maybe misguided, right? So what would be an exercise that you can share with us that would help someone listen to their peers to make sure that they are able to bring them on their journey with them?

Both.

Ironically, I would say that for someone like me, again, contrarian, coming from a counterculture, punk rock, that is very anti-establishment, very anti-corporate, coming in with that set of experiences and perspectives, those politics, those beliefs, I was always, like, skeptical.

I was like, "Okay, I'm in the belly of the beast now.

Let's see what the beast actually looks like from inside as opposed to outside." And so I would actually argue that it's easier to see the hypocrisies and the contradictions when you see how the gears turn than it is on the outside.

When I got to Microsoft, and that was 10 years ago, I had just come from five-ish years of my career in environmental nonprofits.

And so the first thing that I noticed coming to Microsoft was, "Wow, this is not a resource-constrained environment." I mean, the place I was at right before was five people, and it was like, "If we don't get this grant, we can't pay the electricity bill." And then suddenly the headquarters of a trillion-dollar tech company, 50,000 people on campus, a private shuttle fleet.

I mean, so just that, that alone was just like this staggering difference of, of like the venue essentially.

[laughs]

But the guy's gotta put food on the table, so he takes the job, does the job, and kind of quickly, he realizes something.

[upbeat music] I, I had come from such resource-constrained environments and tiny nonprofits, and suddenly it was like, we have a trillion-dollar market cap.

We operate in a hundred and fifty countries.

We have two hundred thousand of the smartest people in the world.

[laughs] We can literally move markets with a single press announcement.

So the opportunity of what you could do at a systems change level from inside a power structure like that was very enticing.

And so that sort of began the journey of figuring out, how do I get my hands on those levers?

Eventually, the group kind of realized something.