Q&A: How do we advance sustainability in the design industry

What led you to focus on sustainability in your career?

Jill: I was feeling a little frustrated after I got my bachelor of architecture degree. I wanted to make sure my profession focused on people, providing value and making an impact. I wanted what I was doing to feel like it would outlive me.

I spent a year living in India working as a nonprofit architect, and that really rocked my world; It reframed what matters. It was so critical to realize that most of the world has to think about, “What am I going to do when the power goes out? Or what do I do when there’s not enough water?” I made a career pivot and have spent the last 20 years fully focusing on sustainability in the built environment.

Now with Stantec, I’m excited to grow my impact and help refine design processes. Sustainability isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a people and process problem, and change must happen from within to improve the outcome. As an integrated firm, we can evolve the way we approach our work from the inside out.

We often say that sustainability can’t just be the final stage in your design process. But if it’s a starting point, it guides the design.

Jill: I say all the time, intention requires rigor. We can have the best intentions to do better, but if we don’t define them clearly from the beginning and follow through with rigor, then we’ll never improve our projects. I also firmly believe that sustainability success on projects is tied to firm culture. We value what we measure and prioritize what we talk about in our organizations.

How do your ideas about sustainability in the design industry relate to your leadership with the AIA LFRT?

Jill: Our field is going through an evolution in sustainability. We’ve been talking about the ideal process and tools for too long. We know how to make projects better. The focus of our LFRT group is on how to share lessons learned from within our firms and how to grow a culture that sets those teams and projects up for success.

What is the AIA conference topic?

Jill: It’s an interactive workshop at the AIA National Convention called “Organizing for Impact: Embedding Sustainability in Structures, Culture, & Careers.”

Rather than discussing the technical things we’re doing on projects, it’s asking: How are your organizations structured to have sustainability show up? What are the common career paths you’re finding? How have your accountability structures evolved to show this as a core value?

Our thesis, plainly, is that sustainability used to be this extra, nice-to-have thing on projects. And now it’s becoming a core value to design firms and their approaches to work.

However, we haven’t fully operationalized that value in our business structures, our career pathways, our training, and our accountability metrics.

They’re lagging. It’s in our mission statement, yet many firms don’t yet have people at the leadership table who focus on this evolution.

Is there one way architecture and engineering organizations should approach sustainability in the design industry?

Jill: I don’t think we can align our practices on a single way of working across the industry.

There’s a recognition that there’s such diversity in how the work is delivered; there’s not a one-size-fits-all. However, I think there are some core elements we should clearly define to make us all better. We should be learning from each other.

What’s getting in the way of sustainability in the design industry?

Jill: People say sustainability is everyone’s responsibility, and that diminishes the importance of specialists and innovators. That mentality has held us back because it means we’re not creating space within organizations and career paths for that expertise to thrive.

We need to build a foundational culture around sustainability, but we still need the people to provide the rigor and move us forward. We need our specialists to measure our progress and do the research to push us to what is next.

Sustainability and decarbonization have their own terminology. But to succeed, you need buy-in from those who live in the language of business and budgets. Is it more effective to talk about operational savings?

Jill: It can be discouraging that we still have to make the case for the return on investment for sustainable design. The business case needs to include more than energy strategies.

I like to talk about “impact measurement.” Let’s also measure retention value for increased daylight or health value for improved air quality as well.

And the conversation lights up?

Jill: Yes, clients love talking about impacts, but it requires a shift in how we speak.

It’s about who the clients are; what they are valuing. We must adapt so that we’re not techno speaking. Rigor matters, and we need to be consistent about how we’re measuring things. But you need to connect that knowledge to what others value.

What makes you a good fit for this job?

Jill: My strength has been in that translation and sitting in between the disciplines. My superpower has been synthesizing complex information or analysis so clients can make decisions.

I love building strong sustainability practitioners who can guide a project process and also dig in to talk about a wall detail or boiler efficiency.

You have to connect internally and externally at various levels.

Jill: Adam Grant talks about how, in the past, we rewarded people who knew the most. But today, we have information everywhere, so the goal isn’t to know the most. The goal is to know where the dots are and how to connect them.

Sustainability can be like accounting, where you’re tallying up emissions. And that is important. We need that scientific rigor and accountability. We also need sustainability as a storyteller, as a catalyst, and as a source of inspiration.

What’s next for sustainability in the design industry?

JK: Our industry has set many goals. Architecture 2030 has proven we’ve done well in reducing the energy of new assets and greening the electrical grid.

Next up, we need to double down on existing building assets and building materials. Those have been underappreciated in the overall equation. We also need to look at resilience. Do we have enough clean and reliable power when we need it? Those resilient strategies start to factor in more with energy transition. We must plan for the unexpected. Most importantly, we need to shift beyond “doing less” to design that gives back, restores, and works with nature to leave things better than we found them.

Jill Kurtz will host “Organizing for Impact: Embedding Sustainability in Structure, Culture & Careers” for the Large Firm Roundtable (LFRT) at AIA26 on June 10th in San Diego, California.