Design the Future – Details, episodes & analysis

For our latest episode, we spoke with Kristy Walson and Sarah Gudeman of BranchPattern. It was a fun moment to catch them, right after Greenbuild, and we talked about their careers and also how partnerships and friends are important in this work. 

Kristy is a mechanical engineer and she is a Principal and Building Science Practice Lead at BranchPattern. Based in Orlando, Florida, Kristy is dedicated to advancing sustainable design and decarbonization and collaborates to deliver building science services that propel the industry. 

Sarah is a Principal and Engineering Practice Lead at BranchPattern; she is based in Omaha, Nebraska. She integrates engineering and building science to create practical, scalable solutions that improve building performance, reduce carbon, and enhance health and comfort.

This was a wide-ranging conversation that included their youth experiences and their thoughts about the power of collaboration, their work at BranchPattern, and the imperatives that the movement and industry are facing in 2025. 

“We have an obligation to do better once we know better,” Sarah says. “As designers and engineers, we have a lot of power to shift the norms -- what is high performance, what is human centered, what is low carbon -- and really help elevate that baseline, instead of treating those things as an upgrade. 

Kristy says she is empowered by the community. “I wouldn't be here doing this work if I didn't have that North Star of feeling like I'm part of a movement,” she says. “Sustainability is, in some ways, a technical craft, but being part of the movement has enabled me to advocate for equity, policy, systemic change, and for breaking and remaking the systems that don't work for all of us.”

Julie Ju-Youn Kim, FAIA, is the William H. Harrison Professor and Chair of the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she founded and directs the Flourishing Communities Collaborative, an interdisciplinary research and design lab. She is also founder and partner of C2 Architecture Studio.

In her early-career years in Detroit, Julie tried to meet as many people as possible and found that opportunities -- for practice and teaching -- presented themselves. 

Julie’s current graduate studio, which is also a Flourishing Communities Collaborative effort, is related to her vision for the school -- melding practice, research, education, and technology into a common conversation rooted in relationships.  

Navigating the moment from where she sits, Julie says that she “thinks about the capacity of architects and designers as agents of change for the better and stays focused on the students and their futures as empathetic, compassionate leaders for the future. They ground me!” 

In addition to her teaching and practice work, Julie is working on a new book (anticipated from Routledge in 2027): Intervening in the Urban Palimpsest: Design, Equity, and Community Agency. “This exploration is about understanding cities as dynamic palimpsests: they are shaped by meaning, memory, history, and by transformation,” she says. “This is our context.”

As VP of Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, Krista Egger stewards the nonprofit’s national environmental programs, including Green Communities, Health Action Plan, Resilience Academies, and Decarbonization Hubs. 

Krista went to Oberlin and and studied physics and architectural history. After college, a stint with AmeriCorps introduced her to a kind of applied building science. “I had the opportunity to identify root causes and then make things better,” she says.  

Sometimes making things better means dismantling long-held beliefs. “For too long,” she says, “there has been a perceived predicament of whether people can build affordable housing or green housing, whether there can be a standard way to operate buildings or green ways of operating buildings. Those are false choices.”

The programs that Egger leads are leveraging capital and policy and resources to solve for barriers that prevent all housing from being affordable, healthy, and resilient. “We are centering the needs of people who live in housing to make decisions about housing.”

related links:
Health Action Plan framework
Green Communities Criteria

Architect Liz York is senior advisor for buildings and facilities strategy and innovation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She talks about how buildings impact people -- their lives, health, and mental health. Liz has been a leader in making those connections. She helped create a best practice paper for AIA about lactation rooms that is still circulated widely today. She talks about how triple bottom line thinking has transformed how buildings and real estate are discussed today. Increasingly, she says, we include issues of equity, mobility, and many other “beyond the building” considerations that are relevant to the public health attributes of the built environment. 

Erin Meezan sought a career that would help protect the natural world. That led to an environmental law degree, and today she is VP and Chief of Sustainability at Interface, the global commercial flooring company. She and Interface are focused on defining the next jump toward decarbonization of the built environment. Erin says that depends on driving accountability for delivering on progress, both in the company and in the industry. Interface has a strong commitment to education and to sharing tools, which Erin sees as inherent to “being part of the movement.” 

Gail Brager is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and associate director of the Center for the Built Environment, a model for collaborative research dedicated to transformational change in the building industry. She describes her research into thermal adaptive comfort and points to ASHRAE as the first organization where she found her leadership footing -- and how her work changed the standard. Gail reminds us that feminine leadership skills can be a role model for men and women. We get a sneak peek at the book she is working on about how design for experiential delight can support human wellbeing, with an emphasis on enhancing the positive, rather than reducing the negative. 

Stacy Smedley started her career in architecture and has worked with global construction company Skanska for the past seven years. She co-conceived the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool last year, and is on loan from Skanska to launch the nonprofit Building Transparency to share and scale EC3. She’s also a songwriter/singer, a parent, and writes children’s books. She talks about aligning personal passions and skill sets with the potential for impact and how we can all be energized by the positive things happening in climate response. 

Master communicator Marge Anderson works at the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Slipstream, Inc., where she shapes education to drive behavior change around energy. She chaired the US Green Building Council in 2015, and was in Paris for the climate talks. She says that her working-class upbringing did not suggest a path to sustainability but it has informed her leadership in the field. She is an optimist (and cites British environmental leader Tony Juniper on this: “it’s too late for pessimism”), but she feels great urgency and is startlingly succinct: “On climate, we’ve got nine and a half years left. On equity, we’re 400 years too late.” 

Architect Carlie Bullock-Jones runs Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta and her firm touches many buildings whose owners seek green building certifications including LEED, WELL, and others. This includes very large-scale projects such as professional sports facilities, and she talks about why sustainability-driven design and planning moves in those venues can become a public teaching tool and a community benefit. (Carlie gives a shout out to the late Gail Lindsey, a force-of-nature pioneer who touched many people in the green building movement.)

Kimberly Lewis is SVP for market transformation and development at the US Green Building Council, where she has centered people and healing in her work. This movement builder is responsible for GBC’s Equity Summit, its Women in Green leadership platform, Sheroes, and more.  Kimberly talks about what it means to live your values in your work, the buzzwords in the sustainable buildings industry, and how we cannot equity-wash what’s next.