Sustainable Design: Using Science to Solve Global Challenges ft. Todd Bracher (Chief Design Advisor, Industrial Designer)

Over the past decade working in the cleantech space, I have had the opportunity to work with a number of designers, whether at the industrial or software levels. And the more I work with them, the more I see how they – like us professionals working in the sustainability – are often operating at the heart of a business. I have also come to realize that, in order for businesses to achieve truly sustainable products, we need to bring design in from the very beginning. Which is why I am so excited to speak to a recognized expert truly operating at the intersection of aesthetics and sustainability: Todd Bracher.

Todd is the founder of BRACHER, an Industrial Design and Advisory firm. With over 25 years of experience, Todd integrates design, science, and business to drive sustained growth. He has launched over 200 products, secured two dozen patents, and a three-time International Designer of the Year recipient. Known for guiding strategic differentiation and navigating disruption, Todd is a sought-after advisor for top brands and startups. In 2022 he launched Betterlab to champion science-based design. Residing in New York, Todd is a dedicated father committed to making a positive impact.

In this episode, Todd shares his insights on how design extends beyond aesthetics, influencing everything from business strategy to environmental impact. We dive into the role of data in decision-making, the balance between sustainability and functionality, and the power of circular design principles. He also sheds light on how businesses can integrate wellness into their design approach and why resilience is crucial for long-term success.

Todd brought such a fresh approach to this topic, and our conversation honestly challenged me to think outside of the box, considering the critical role design plays in building a more sustainable and resilient world.

With that, please help me welcome Todd to the show!

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[Host: Lauren Scott] Welcome back to the Resilience Report. This is going to be a really different episode for us in the sense that I think many of our guests that have come on are joining us to talk about a product or a business that is in the market that has been pressure tested and is working, but we don't always get the opportunity to go in deep on the genesis of the design of the business or the design of the product, and we're more talking about the implementation. So today, we are joined by an expert where we're actually going to go all the way back to that basic point at the beginning of all of this, which is that of design and whether it's from a product or from a business lens, I'm really excited to have Todd joining us today. So welcome, Todd. 

[Guest: Todd Bracher] Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

I think most of our listeners, myself included, have a general idea of what we mean when we say design, but there might be different interpretations to that. Would you mind sharing what your take is on when we say the word design and how it can be applied? 

Yeah, I think that's a great question and, strangely, a difficult one to answer, but my view, it's how I sort of equated to the efficacy of a solution. So, as we consider the problem we're trying to solve, be it a system, be a business challenge, or a physical product, or whatever it may be, it's really the quality of the solution and how effective it is. So effective for reaching a market, effective for meeting the, you know, the price targets, meaning differentiation, whatever the metrics are, we'll call it for the for success, how well do we align to those? And to me, perfect alignment, or as close to perfect as possible, it's the design of it. But that's where I sort of say it's good design. 

And you are recognizing in the product design space for different solutions that you've come up with over the years, but you've done this arc over into really taking this idea, to your point, of trying to find design solutions that go well beyond that to make things as efficient as possible. And you brought this over to the business space. Maybe can you start with sharing what made you want to do that jump, and apply all of your expertise over that world and what has that transition looked like? 

That's a great question. So, it's interesting, designers, which I am, are trained. I'm an industrial designer, technically speaking, so it's a kind of hybrid between engineering and marketing in a way, it's sort of if that makes sense. And in the past, I've been operating since 25 years, and typically we're asked to create a design, and it tends to be a brief, and there's a business that's already established, and they have a need to let's say access a newer, let's say younger consumer as an example. And the challenge I saw was we received this brief, and design tended to be the very tail end of the process, which almost a cosmetic tail end, so to sort of make it look nice, and but you saw structurally there were flaws, you know, objectively speaking, that that weren't considered, and things that were left on the table that that would actually access the market for you. And making it pretty actually had nothing to do with the solution, so I started to slowly sort of swim upstream over the years and say, you know, we would truthfully deliver products that didn't work well in the market because we didn't control or have any input earlier in the food you know up the food chain, or earlier in the stream. So over time, we started to insert more the leadership level, and we discovered that the cosmetic of it, or let's say the quote unquote design of things, was kind of the easy part. The real design effort we'll call it, was in the front of the process, and really Ying are we making the right decisions in the first place. And I think the designer, which makes this person I think somewhat unique, the right designer is they are, they're really the translator between the goals of the business and the end consumer, or the market. So, we're that sort of representative and the bridge between the two. So, I think that's why designers, or the right designers as I say, are really I think valuable in that front end of the process. 

And to take that one step further, so much of our show we focus on sustainability and sustainable solutions for businesses. I think from, if I think purely on the product level, but certainly it's echoed within businesses, sometimes we feel like either it has to be sustainable or functional or aesthetic, and I think probably the most basic example I can give is like a paper straw, it's not super functional, maybe not the most beautiful, but it might be the most sustainable. How do you toe the line between those different areas? And maybe to your point, that's coming in earlier in the process, you're not just asked to execute on one piece, but how do you think that holistically? 

Yeah, that's another great question. So my approach to design is called contextual design, at least that's what I call it, and as I've mentioned, I sort of been swimming upstream, or higher up the hierarchy of the organizations, and what I felt was designed since MBAs, well say, aren't typically trained in design, it was I had to somehow develop a design language that fit into the logic of the business. So contextual design, the way I look at it, is the business establishes their again metric for success, or their desired outcomes, and it's up to me as a designer to holistically look at the organization, so cross functionally, and to see how can we make and sort of organize our decision process to govern a result that drives that outcome. 

So, what do I mean by that? So, the example I use sounds sort of silly, but we went out to the park, and I sort of pointed to a tree. I say, what do you think of this tree? I don't think people would say, I think that tree has got too many leaves on it, or it's a little too tall, or, you know, the green isn't really the right shade of green. I don't really think people critique nature that way. I think we just say, I don't know, it's a tree, I guess it's nice, you know, and the reason why a tree is a result of an ecosystem. It's dependent on the sunlight, rainfall, the invasive species, what's the climate situation. I mean, the list just goes on, it's somewhat infinite, this list, and this ecosystem shapes the tree, and you and I and all of us are part of this ecosystem as well, so we are a result of this. So, I consider design solutions as this tree, and in other words, if I bring the new Tesla, we'll call it, I bring it into the room, and say, what do you think of the Tesla? I think you could say, I don't like blue, valid, I don't like the shape of the fender of the car, or I do like this, there now we're dealing with opinions, where there’s a tree, there's no opinions. And so, the work that we try to do in contextual design is to eliminate opinions. 

So if this makes sense, so H2O, another example, uses water, it's, you can't H3O, it's not drinking water, 2 H 1 0 is not drinking water, it's H2O, and very complex compounds could have, you know, hundreds of molecules, and when you look, you can't add one more nitrogen, and you can't take away one more nitrogen, it will fail, the system will completely fail, so it's not about the aesthetic of it, it's not about sort of minimalism of it, it's about all the factors, be it price point, be it market landscape, be it sustainability, whatever limitations, opportunities, you sort of add all these things together, and they inform the result if that makes sense. So that's really how I think contextual design really makes a meaningful difference from a business perspective. 

We do have lots of listeners who are business leaders and or entrepreneurs, and I'm sure it can sometimes feel overwhelming with the amount of data that they're they have access to. I mean, the beautiful thing is we can all turn on our phones and research any topic to help influence the design of our businesses or our products. How do you recommend, when you're speaking with your clients, that they think about sifting through this data because it can definitely feel like so overwhelming to the point where I do see some people having paralysis by over-analysis. 

Yeah, I think that's true. There's various ways we can do it, the common one is the voice of customer, right? It kind of helps take the decision sort of off of you a bit and actually dealing with objective truths as opposed to opinions. So for me, meeting the need is one of the sort of check marks that I really pay close attention to, meeting the need of the market, and it sounds sort of obvious, but I think a lot of my clients, I can tell you, very large, very successful companies, a lot of them still really don't understand their market, not in a really nuanced way, really understand why would they be a customer of your service or product, and really getting to the bottom of that, putting all ego aside, and that's another aspect of design that I love, at least in this contextual process, it's not about ego, it's not my opinion and why is it this shape, why is it this color, why does it do this XYZ, it's literally to deliver that, as I mentioned earlier, the bridge between what do you want as the business and what do these folks need, and making sure we bring that. So for me, it's really about identifying true needs, and if you really stay focused to that, then it becomes much easier to take the other decision.

You've mentioned opinions a couple of times, and I work with some software designers, and I have so much empathy for them because they are often within a business sitting in the middle of all of these opinions, whether it is sales, leadership, marketing, R&D. How have you historically navigated all of those different opinions, and is it kind of pressure testing against the voice of customer, which arguably I guess could be the opinion of a customer? So how do you work through that because, yeah, it doesn’t seem easy. 

So this contextual approach is really to bring all the stakeholders into a room, so folks shouldn't be in a position of well, I don't know why we're doing this or this doesn't make sense to me, but we're just going to get it done, like everyone would understand because if we're really working in a contextual manner then everyone understands how their role contributes to the outcome, so for me, it's, that's how I deal with these things. I tend to say across the organization, I don't really have a pocket, I just kind of move around, and my goal is really to help folks be empowered but also clear line of sight to what's the objective, and I think once the objectives are aligned from all then I don't usually see, any challenges, in fact, I see folks really working in tandem which is, for me, is the goal.

 And similar to, I think, somebody who sits at that hub of design, sustainability often sits in that same role of you're touching every department and you're trying to bring everybody together. Is it the same approach then that you would recommend if some, there is a leader who's trying to take that sustainable design in mind, like how does that translate over to maybe less pure design but more thinking of it or perhaps more extending the idea of design to also include that idea of sustainability? 

Yeah, and sustainability needs to be integrated in step one, and I've also experienced many times, you know, before covid even, sustainability was still not that in demand, even from the market, and I think folks are realizing that it's a need to have, it's the right thing to do, and I think you can still get away with it in the market, but eventually, it'll catch up to you, so I think it is the right thing to be doing. So with regards to sustainability, since I'm a product person fundamentally, so when the client says, and I'm making this up, let's make it red, let's make it red, blue, and green, right away I think of because it'll look great in photography, let's say, I right away know that's carrying a lot of inventory that would probably won't want to do, there's minim orders that are attached to that, I know the issues with using red dyes, I understand then the plastic is going to have to be virgin plastic, or right away I start thinking of all these things which affect sustainability and affect bottom line and affect all the other aspects, so it's, if you want multicolor, if you, let's say, if that's an important part of important feature, then we would solve it in a way that already considers those limitations and, maybe you design parts of it that are easy to interchange, and so on, so the whole point is, whatever the ask is, integrated in the beginning, and then if we look holistically, in this contextual approach, we solve it. But to try to clean it up later, it's really difficult, it's expensive, and that's where I believe the market can see where a company doesn't really have their act together.

Actually to extend that thought, I learned this stat the other day through another guest who focuses just on circularity, and she was talking about something that 80% of a product's environmental impact is determined at the design phase, and since that time I've been just picking brains of different designers I know and asking, is this even part of your curriculum, like how do you think about it, and it's kind of been a little bit of a hodgepodge, I'd say, depending on who I'm talking to, but how did you become aware of it and if we have, let's say designers who are listening and saying, I care about this, how do I educate myself to learn more? 

It's a great question and, so as I mentioned, I'm 25 years in this design space, I have not had any formal training around sustainability. I think some younger designers are now, right, but the fact is, the sustainability, as we call it, it's a moving target, it's an evolving target. I think folks that were educated months ago, they're dealing probably with some irrelevance now, and so the way that I solve these problems, and it goes across the board, could be physics problems, it could be electrical problems, optical problems, it could be a list of things. Sustainability, let's say being one of them, I bring in an expert, I bring in folks that know inside and out this subject, and, so that's another aspect of this contextual approach, is I don't pretend to know anything, in fact, it's like being the orchestrator, and you need the, the percussion instrument, let them do that, I'm not going to play all the instruments, I can, so it's really about bringing in the experts, and over these years, I've had the privilege of finding just incredible talent and keeping these relationships, and we bring them into projects as needed to bring that expertise. 

I think it's very honest, too, that we can't be everything. I remember thinking because I come from a marketing background, I remember what we were learning 15, 20 years ago, but I remember social media was just starting to boom, and there was nothing in our textbooks about it, and just, by the time you print and educate, it just, there is, is a lag, it's the reality. 

It's amazing, and I have this, a client that they lead the industry in sustainability in the contract furniture space, the company's called Human Scale, and I go visit with them, I design products for them, I do a lot of strategies for them, and they have an entire sustainability team, they have material scientists, they have experts all around material, and you walk into the room, and you see just piles of crazy stuff. I have some actually sitting right here on this test, and a lot of this stuff is unbelievably interesting, 90% of it is not for scale, it's not manufacturable, and so that's the other side of it. It takes real expertise to say, well then how can we truly make this thing sustainable, and some of it is use mild steel, or some of it is you're using wood, it turns out it's not some kind of new eco grow the thing like it's actually could be very simple, so depending on the application, it's understanding the processes as opposed to, let's say, applying a quote unquote sustainable material. So I think there's a lot of ways to solve it, and you need folks like this who are expert to actually guide you. 

And are you seeing more and more conversations around circularity of products, kind of that end of life of a product? I love that you bring up the idea of maybe less end of life, but you brought up the idea of inventory, that's also an extreme source of waste, but is circularity making its way into more of these conversations and how are you seeing this being reflected? 

Yeah, two sides of it, we proposed, even to some of these major companies, the furniture world, at least contract furniture. So office bases typically are change roughly every eight years or so, and as leases expire, and but furniture is designed to last good 20 years. And so what are we doing with this furniture, so we would propose furniture as a service, and everyone thought this was kind of a crazy idea. Like why would I rent furniture? But when you, you know, I think about the building I live in in New York City, I live in a 10-story building, and I have a hammer, and I think about how many, I know how often do I use it, right? And I think I use it once every three years, but when I need it, I have one, and then I think everyone in this building probably has a hammer, so there's probably 500 hammers in this building that everyone uses once every 3 years, and I said, well why, why don't we just have like two hammers in the building, and then we share it as needed, and then you start to think about, well why doesn't this apply everywhere, there's so much redundancy, and in my mind, therefore, waste.

And so when I look at circularity, these products, I mean, are designed to last really a lifetime, and maybe it's one or two parts that are designed to be swapped out, and then the lifetime can continue for another 20 years. So it's finally being embraced, and, we're seeing it more and more, and again this company, Human Scale, we, we've just launched actually a circularity program, and it's interesting, it's being received super well. So I'm starting to see it more and more, thankfully, you know, companies like Apple and so on have already been doing this quietly with their refurbished program, they're there, but they I think folks still have to get their head around what does that mean even, for example, sustainability want, I just click back for one second. I think folks have an expectation for what design needs to be, or a product, or let's just say a product needs to look and feel like a kind of fit and finish, and a lot of that is not aligned with sustainable practices. So let's say a shiny white plastic thing, it's very hard to make that a sustainable material out of out of a sustainable material, so I think it's, l maybe it's a little slower than that, 10 years a new kind of aesthetic that happens to be beautiful to us then that is actually sustainable, I think we have this image of kind of brown as sort of the only thing that can happen with a sustainable solution, and I think nobody wants, let's say brown computer, so but I think we're going to find an aesthetic that's actually acceptable for everyone that is sustainable, and I think so when terms of circularity I think we're going to embrace what that means and not feel like oh it's kind of old furniture, it's old products, I think we'll understand it's part of this kind of communal reality of life. 

 I think you're absolutely right that it's such an education too, I was speaking to somebody who is in the recycling side of plastic, and he was saying kind of nudging it back to me saying well you oversee marketing when you're putting pressure on designers to have a product look a certain way and let's say be matte plastic on one side and then shiny on another, you're actually creating issues in terms of recyclability. Also when you're insisting on a certain color code to your point right are you then also having an impact on that, so I think it's all of us becoming more aware of how we're all woven in together. 

Yeah, I think that's right, we'll find, I think a new language in a way, and I think we already are seeing it quietly, I mean Apple again as an example is using, machined aluminum, and that was kind of crazy at the time, then you realize it's 100% recycled, and it can be 100% recycled, so this is fantastic, whereas the plastic computer folks can say it's recyclable, and I'm sure your friends made this comment, most plastic doesn't get recycled, and there's not a facility that actually handles it, so okay, it's recyclable by chemistry perspective, but it's not actually being done. So whereas aluminum, it's always going up in value, so it will can always be recycled, it'll be scavenged from the trash to be recycled.

And I want to make sure we dive into maybe a different part that I'm guilty of this sometimes when I think of sustainability I purely think of the environmental consideration, but the reality is there's such an interplay between planetary health and human health and just overall well-being. How do you think about that well-being aspect when it comes to your products or when you're working with clients to weave that in, or the business model, like what is that interplay of thinking not just the business not just the environmental but also the human/social side? 

So one example that I don't really speak much about because, folks don't really seem to, I don't know, I guess go there, but I would love to share this. I think it was in 2008 maybe 2006 - I lose track. I lived 10 years overseas, and I helped a business called Mater, which is a Danish product company, and they were getting off the ground, and, I was in contact with them to design collection and then help them with sourcing and all this type of thing. And they had a wonderful point of view, and we helped create this solution, so this is a kind of good example when you bring design up front, the differentiation of this company was rooted in this conversation around how can design actually make this business. and they wanted to do sustainable furniture and product design, lighting, and so on. And this was in 2006 or so, which at that time was kind of very progressive, and we went further since now, I think, say well just use sustainable materials, and then we can check the box and then we go, since that really wasn't the mentality, we were thinking about well, the real problem is the social side, the people side of it. So what we did was we sought out factories in Asia and parts of India that were kind of terrible, they were pouring heavy metals into the rivers, they had no ventilation, their working conditions were terrible, we would intentionally find those facilities to work with, and we would pay them a little bit, but we would instead put money into water filtration, into ventilation, into creating meeting actually a Danish code, meeting a standard of quality of a facility, so that was the way we solved, and the product was done in a sustainable way, but it was more, the entire invention of the product was done in the right way. And by doing that, we were solving the problem at the root cause, and we were then making these small facilities now available for the rest of the world who want to work with clean and healthy facilities, so there's ways that, and that made this entire business the success of what it was, it gave it differentiation from the market, and showed really that they were there to do the right thing. A lot of small companies that make a sustainable product, they ship you know a handful of things a year, it's not really making a difference, but if you're able to get into the bottom of it, and deal with the root cause, which a lot of it's the facilities, then you're really making change, so that's an example of how we deal with things like that. 

And I think you're touching on such an important piece that we don't always think of because we, we have entrepreneurs and business leaders from all different sizes on the show, and sometimes it does seem like if there's a company that is able to develop something really sustainable, they, it's just like it's hard to see the jump to do that scaling. So when you're thinking of that design, is there anything that you can keep in mind or that you can guide some of those listeners, even maybe previous guests of they're listening in as to how do you think about scaling sustainability so that it's not just limited at maybe that very one-to-one type of interaction? 

That's a really difficult question from my perspective, and there's probably better ways to go about it, from my perspective, it's really one step at a time. I think everyone's sort of figuring it out as we go, I think it's okay to acknowledge mistakes, I think you have to really invest in this intention. Again, it's not a, a kind of marketing stunt to do things sustainably, you really have to integrate it, and so my advice is to, and again depending on the scale of the business, but integrate sustainability as early as, like day one of the process. And look at really your intention as a business, truthfully, and I think maybe my biggest advice is if you're being really truthful about the intention, you'll find your way, and because I do find a lot of companies think it's like a nice marketing add-on to make, make something somewhat, you know, I don't want to say greenwashing, but they might have some intention, but it's still, it's not as easy and as deployable as you sort just plug and play it. So I think it's really about having those honest conversations and really making truly investment into what does it mean to be sustainable. 

Well, it sounds like you're having a ton of really interesting conversations with different clients at the moment. Are there any projects that you're super excited about that you're working on that you can share with us? 

Yeah, I mean, I would love to, there's lots, there's one in particular, if I can share a short story, because this to me is really interesting from sustainability, but to give you an idea on how this sort of contextual based design really comes into play: I was advising a lighting company right at the very beginning of Covid, and this company creates essentially a biological light, or germicidal light. They have one of the foundational patents for light that actually can sterilize an environment while you're in it, so which is kind of quite unusual. The scientist, that I know did the light on the International Space Station. And he's very familiar with how to mitigate pathogens in the air, which is kind of interesting. So anyhow, long story short, right at the beginning of covid, he got quite a significant amount of funding to roll out this lighting solution into architecture, and to start to help create healthy environments, because we don't know what's going on with this pathogen

And here I am advising on design, and how we can scale this business, and go, and meanwhile, I'm seeing like, we have a problem of a vaccine, in terms of a business, the vaccine will probably kill this business, which is good, we want Covid to go away, and people to survive. But in the meantime, it makes sense to get this light there, because it does prevent the spread of any pathogen, not just Covid. So in the meanwhile, I'm taking at the time, two very small boys, who are a little bit older now, and we'd go to a shop or wherever, we're all wearing masks, and there are these pumps for a gel sanitizer, you know, and we're all kind of lathering up, and I didn't like the idea at the time, my youngest was five, and I didn't like the idea of a 5-year-old kind of mopping this chemical on his hands every day, you know. So I'm sitting there, and I, you know, it's not that genius of reality saying, like, why don't we use this light on our hands instead of worrying about trying to fill out architecture because we're the scale of it is too difficult, it's just difficult barrier of entry. So whereas this light works perfectly, it works faster, it gets in the nooks and crannies of your hands, unlike the sanitizer, sanitizer takes about 90 seconds for it to work, whereas this light takes just a couple of seconds, and it works much better. But then I clicked into it, and I find that, for example, one of my friends - she works with Bank of America, she does their retail, and I had asked at one point, give me an estimate how much you guys spend on hand sanitizer, she said about $30,000 a location, and I thought, oh my God, meaning about 10 cents a pump, that there roughly, and I thought, my God, this is not sustainable. And then they have to manage it, they have to manage all the transport of these bottles that are on trucks all around the world, and you start doing this mental math, the manufacturing of water and all the plastic bottles, all the waste, like I just started doing all this math, and I found some recent articles that put the hand sanitizer market is responsible for 2% of the global carbon footprint.

Oh my, crazy!

This is terrible, so long story short, we've developed a hand sanitizer as a light device which eliminates all of that, so from a sustainability perspective, it's phenomenal, from an application perspective, it's a $1,000 device as opposed to $30,000 a year. This is a one-time cost, it actually works faster, works better, doesn't have any issues with skin - in other words, the list just goes on and on, all the benefits, and then the environmental recovery on it is so, so great. So this is the kind of thing that I'm glad to be a designer in the room, because the company had not at all considered this, and even in the beginning, I had friction of explaining why this is an interesting idea, and so it kind of tells you that, you know, I think there's a lot of beautiful, incredible solutions in the world that are waiting to be solved, I just think they need to a few folks that are allowed to kind of explore with them freely, like I had the opportunity, and I think good things can come from that. 

That's fascinating. It definitely sounds like you're applying that sustainability lens and all of this work that you're doing. Was this always something that was at the heart of what you wanted to do? I know you mentioned you didn't have formal education in it, but was there always kind of a common threat of sustainability, or was it more a moment in time, was it maybe during the pandemic when you were having these conversations that you started to think about it more holistically? 

So I mean, truthfully, no, I don't think 25 years ago, I got out of bed saying, how, you know, how can I think sustainably, responsibly was there, but truthfully, the problem was, I have no had no power, and I was taking a project on, and it was made out of urethane foam, and the client said they need it by Friday, and you did what you did, and, and I guess, I'm not sort of taking, dodging the responsibility, but I know if I said, hey guys, this isn't going to work. By the way, there were no alternative materials at the time, so right, it was a different era, in a way, but as I've aged into this space, and have a little more muscle, I think I'm able to influence now some of the decisions that are being made, and also say no to things if I think you're going in the wrong direction. I've been in meetings where I say this direction sustainable, this direction is not, and they still say, okay, we don't want to do it, and that's your choice, it's your business, and, but I won't participate, but that's fine, so I think it's on the designer's role right now on to nudge, push, pull, scream, whatever they can, to get in that direction. But I also understand that, you know, we don't own the business, so there's a, it's just a question of, in my opinion, if these businesses want to see the big picture or not. 

 Well, I guess we'll see as things roll out, but I do see it, some of those voices getting more and more space to your point, and the reality is, some of it has to come with experience, so I am hopeful that as you mentioned, maybe sustainable design is something that maybe this next generation is bringing in more and more, so hopefully, as they gain the space within businesses, they can help translate this through. 

I think so, I mean, there's no question, I think very few, again, I think the designers still aren't equipped yet, I think the material in the world is still not fully mature, I think, , there's, you know, supply chain is still not really there, like there's still limitations on that side, you're seeing in building in architecture, like it's catching up, in fact, it's leading, in my opinion, is it still a pretty terrible offender with concrete and so on, absolutely, but I think all things are in the right direction, and they're accelerating. And I think there'll be some watershed moments in the next 20, 25, 30 years that will actually, there'll be no going back to this sort of irresponsible world.

I'd imagine, then two parts of sustainable design is also coming back to ourselves as leaders in the space. Have you woven in or found any tools that help you being able to keep on coming back and recommitting to the work? Because it sounds like oftentimes your job is to challenge status quo, and that can't always feel really easy, or maybe that's what actually energizes you, so do you have tools in your tool box that you recommend to our listeners to explore so that they can continue to come back to the space?

 I'm not sure tools in a practical sense, I think about what type of model do I want to set for my children, you know, what kind of legacy do I want to leave in this world, how can I leave this world better than I how I found it, that's sort of the fundamental driver. I had a woman work in my office for quite some time, and we, she said, you know, I turn off the water when I brush my teeth at home, my husband and I were eating vegan, we recycle everything, she had this very responsible list in home. Then she say, then I come to work, and I design things that go into the world, and she's like, how do I reconcile that? I thought, you know, absolutely, you know, I get it, and I said, we can, that's a problem, then you're right, but here's the good news is: we decided to change some of the things we were doing, so I appreciate she said that, and we were at the time working with this company, Human Scale, and we had an opportunity to design a task chair, an office chair. And she says, why would we do this, this is like office furniture, this is terrible for the world, environmentally speaking, you know? I said, no, this is what's interesting, tens of thousands of these chairs are thrown away every year, tens of thousands, and they typically have 75, 100 components, they're made from five different factories, like they're just a mess, these things. And so, but we took the project on, knowing it was going to be made whether we exist or not, somebody else would make, thing, so this is going to happen. 

We took the project, and we ended up making the world's most sustainable chair, and from a supply chain perspective, from what they call handprints and footprints, which is the social aspect of it, and then from a material perspective, everything breaks down, we have very few components because we've engineered a solution that requires very few components, like we've done everything we can to make this thing, transports in, in almost a pizza box, like a very small box. So we've done everything we can to make it, it's actually a net positive product, I don't know how familiar you're listeners may be, the product actually cleans the environment up more than it impacts it negatively, so the world gets cleaner, the more this product is actually sold. So we've managed to get it to that level, thanks to the support from Human Scale, and that to me is a great example of like taking the responsibility as a designer, and the responsibility as a manufacturer, and like solving this problem. So, yeah, when I think about, you know, that's how I can contribute to the world, I make things, so if this can clean up the world, my little corner of the world, great. So I think that's motivation, is like what can I do, if I was a poet, and I, how can I help as a poet, like I would find whatever it is, if I'm a musician, whatever it is that I, that my expertise, and then how can I bring this mentality to that expertise? 

Well, it's extensive expertise, and if our listeners would love to explore a little bit more, where would you direct them towards? Is it a website? Are there social handles that you recommend them go explore? 

Yeah, sure, I have recently released a book, thankfully in June this past year, and it's called Design and Context, and it's available on Amazon, it's kind of a short essay, and then there's some interviews with folks, so you can get different point of views from various folks in the industry. And it helps supply some of this thinking around contextual design into a business, so I think that might be a helpful resource for folks that want to learn more, and then of course my website, ToddBracher.com. 

Thank you so much, Todd, this has been fascinating. I do have one last question, it's the question we like to end every episode on, which is, what do you think it will take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward? 

Be resilient? That's a good question, I think, and at least the way I think about things, is knowing and believing like your true values. And I think if you hold true to your values, I think then you live or die by it, but you at least hold true to them, and I think that to me is what keeps me resilient, and the folks that I know that are resilient are the ones that really truly believe and hold true to their values. 

Thank you so much, Todd. I can't think of a better way to end the episode, so thank you, 

Thank you. Really great to meet you.