What is green design? 

It means making stuff that doesn't hurt us, directly or indirectly. It's this latter part that we have to work on. Sustainable design is about what you can see as well as what's invisible. Ecological impacts aren't always visible; social impacts aren't always quantifiable. We have a responsibility to both.   

Did you always want to be a designer?  

I went to RISD (The Rhode Island School of Design) to be an artist, and then one day I found myself signing up for industrial design.  At the time I blamed designers for material waste and excess. I see things a bit differently now.   

How did you become involved in sustainability?           

Sustainable design for products didn't exist when I was in school. But I have a habit of trying to fix things that make me crazy.  In the late nineties it seemed as though the only people who would teach you about sustainable design were the ones who'd been doing it for decades.  So I went to the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (a non-profit in Austin, Texas) to work with longtime ecological architecture pioneers Gail Vittori and Pliny Fisk, where we built experimental prototypes for the US Department of Energy.  I learned what sustainable design actually means – beyond the tokenism that we were starting to see more of now.   

Was there anything in particular that made you go green?  

I'll be honest: I was an environmentalist kid from Kingston, Ontario, and I had some very unfashionable obsessions with clearcuts, acid rain, plastic containers and hydro dams.  It's not unusual to grow up surrounded by consumption or waste; it's just that I noticed it, and it got to me.  

What would you say your motto is?  

That there is no such thing as sustainable design outside of context. The impact on the planet changes according to your site, your supply chain, your weather conditions. Outside of context, sustainable design is a fiction.  

You are trained as an industrial designer, but it seems like you have worn many more hats.  

I became a sort of interdisciplinary designer by working across disciplines. I never did have the constitution for being a single-minded product designer churning out plastic widgets.  Products on their own were never as interesting to me. I've not only worn a lot of hats in succession, but usually several at once – it’s kind of the nature of things when you're working in a small studio: the small team does everything. When we designed the Nature Bridge, a tree-covered, wind-powered pedestrian bridge in Windsor, our tiny team did drawings, stakeholder engagement, 3D models and visualization, renewable energy analysis.   

You also co-wrote Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century. How did you get involved in this organization?  

Based on a pile of research I did in my spare time in Texas, I found myself connecting to the folks who would become WorldChanging.com. I started writing for the site just after it launched in 2003, and continued collaborating with them.   

Tell me about Autodesk’s sustainable design program.  

The tools designers use, and the information we have ready access to, play a powerful role in what gets made. When blobjects happened, we suddenly saw more sophisticated organic forms in objects, rooflines and furniture (think Apple's iMac and the Volkswagen Beetle). The design language changed along with the 3D tools that were used to make them. It’s the same thing with regard to sustainability in design applications.  How can the software itself transform the way that we make decisions?  Right now, you can create building models, and run energy analyses on to design for optimal performance: daylight, airflow and energy use.  

The sustainable design program was set up to touch on ecological impacts across a whole range of industries.  What does sustainability mean to a product designer, mechanical engineer or a team managing a small-scale utility? What does it mean to city planners?  We want to help people make decisions that don't inadvertently destroy ecosystems, which means wrangling with a certain amount of complexity.  So we're very determined to simplify these decisions as much as possible.   

WorldChanging.com and Autodesk’s sustainable design program reach millions of people. You seem to be giving people the tools to build a green future instead of just building it for them.  

That's an interesting way of seeing it. I think if I'd been as strategic as you make it sound, I'd have ended up doing different work. Instead, I've worked on projects that I found interesting, with people who I thought were fascinating and were working on making the world better. Sustainability is getting amplified, but the essence of the challenge is still here: we need to actually use less, not just talk about using less.  Regarding the idea of giving people the tools, I am, In a sense, impatient. I'm really interested in leverage points, and in figuring out how to really make sustainable design simple and obvious and inarguable.  

Do you have any criticisms for the design and architecture industry?  

I'm in two minds about this. In one sense, we have to transform the way that everything gets made, and we have to do this in a hurry. Buildings use absolutely staggering amounts of energy and materials, and they have an enormous impact on climate. Every decision we make is an opportunity to trade up, to do things better, and I'm amazed at how fast the industry has shifted over the last few years, particularly in North America. In one sense, we're moving; but in reality, we have to move faster. As a designer, I'd rather see the built environment created with humans in mind for a change. Humans really like fresh air, daylight and trees. They really hate traffic. Just ask one.  

Tell me a bit about the Green Corridor Project. How did you become involved?  

After I left Texas for Toronto, I was working with Noel Harding in his studio. His large-scale public art projects that incorporated living systems and ecological remediation were more interesting to me than any design firm, absolutely.   

The Green Corridor in Windsor was a project that came up when the Canadian Auto Workers' environmental committee invited Noel down to talk about doing a project. Noel saw the site in a macro sense, looking at the entire two-kilometre corridor leading up to the border as the location for the project. 

The trucks that lead up to the Ambassador Bridge that cross into Detroit have become a sort of permanent architecture, snaking through a residential neighbourhood in Windsor.  The seam that runs through the city’s centre is all drive-thrus and strip malls – it's all about the care and feeding of the diesel truck ecosystem, moving 10,000 of them a day.  But people live there, downwind from Detroit industry and fogged in by truck exhaust.  It's an environmental disaster.   

Noel and Windsor artist Rod Strickland were teaching an interdisciplinary class at the University of Windsor that was meant to show what was possible for the corridor, and I started working with them.  What could we build here?  Since we weren't commissioned to do this, we didn't have anything limiting us.  It's a deceptively simple strategy, but opening up the vision gave the community a container or context for a whole range of projects: renewable energy, green roofs, public art. The Green Corridor is a series of interconnected projects that add up to Noel's gestural vision, a sweep of green laid into a neglected landscape. 

Do you see this as a trend for the future – greening “concrete jungles”?

I hope so - but I can't predict what we will see. We're likely to see increasingly visionary green transformation in some urban areas as we denude others at the same time.  We’re painstakingly installing living roofs in our cities, but if you travel west, even along that one ribbon of TransCanada, it's clear how much we're extracting from the landscape. But the more green space you layer into the cityscape, the more valuable it gets. Designers and planners have to be educated and empowered to make these kinds of changes. 

It will be interesting to see how much reclamation or remediation happens by design – with projects like the Green Corridor – and how much happens by the lack of it.  Nature doesn't wait around.