ESG and Healthy Building Design with Khuzema Hussain of Collective Works

Doing for the NHS, it's thinking about how do the spaces feel like, what is the color temperature of the artificial lighting, because some of the color temperature resembles more like the sun than others. That has an impact on how people experience and feel in these spaces, and, and that sensitivity is something that that we think about and comes back to this idea of a healthy building.

Hello and welcome to Rethink What Matters, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy and ecology with everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. And today I'm joined by Kusuma Hussain of Collective Works, and we're going to be discussing ESG design. Welcome, Kazema.

Thanks for having me, Paul.

It's great, great to have you on this podcast, you know, because the Rethink What Matters podcast has been all about thinking about how we, you know, join up the economy, the ecology, and everyone. So I'm thinking the next step is how do we actually put rubber on the road? How do we actually get traction? How do we make a real difference? And I think the way we do that is through the built environment, you know, the structures, the spaces, the urban areas, the buildings that we're creating. If we can align the economy, the ecology, and everyone around that, then I think we can create real traction. And from a business perspective, that's about aligning the profits with the the planet and people. So the triple bottom line: profits, planet, and people. So that's very much what Wardroo is focused on at the moment. So I started doing a little search, I started looking for sustainable architects and interior designers, and that took me to Susan van Meter, an interior designer. And Susan suggested that I speak with you, Kazema. So brilliant to be speaking with you on this podcast.

Well, like I said, I'm glad you've invited me. And I think in our earlier interactions, Paul, between ourselves, I was struck by this idea of this, as you called it, this triple bottom line. And I think it is the right esprit. And you do see this, but it's kind of the rubber on the road idea is a little bit If you kind of go back to business ideas and Simon Sinek kind of territory, the why we do something is really should be at the heart and at the center point. And then kind of the what is the last bit and the rubber on the road is a little bit the what. And I think this triple bottom line that you're kind of describing to me and that you're exploring is the why.

Yeah, I know. So it was great on our first conversation, really, I think within 30 seconds you stood up went to your bookshelf, grabbed a book, sat down. Paul, I think you want to read this: How to Make and Lead a Business the World Needs by Alan Moore. Yeah, you know, and quite quickly the two of us were talking about regenerative, you know, regenerative business, or, you know, rather than sustainability, being regenerative. And there's a lot of people involved in that built environment, isn't it? There are, yeah, you've got the architects and you've got the interior designers, there are the contractors, the installers, people who are putting in windows and heating systems and ventilation systems, and the plumbing too. All of these disciplines need to be triple bottom line. So, and as well as the people that are selling and letting and leasing these buildings too. Yeah, let's, let's learn more about Collective Works. If you can tell us the story of Collective Works.

Sure, we are a design studio based in London. We probably punch a little bit above our weight because we're just a studio of 8, but we do a range of buildings that are focused on sustainable and healthy ideas. Our tagline is that we do responsible and beautiful design. And that largely means, you know, the thinking of the carbon and the impact on society at large, but also then the occupants of these buildings, of these spaces, whether they're workers and transient and kind of an office setting, organizational setting, or they're residents because it's a home. The people inside of these dwellings and structures also need consideration because they have psychological metrics and physical metrics that are not always in, you know, they're different categories than basically what the planet needs and biodiversity needs. And for us, that's all the space we operate in. So we do design a lot of homes for people, renovations largely, because retrofitting existing buildings is a great way of, you know, minimizing carbon. And as you're probably aware, but maybe not all the listeners, the built environment contributes about 40% of of global greenhouse gases a year. And so that's a large component. And you are highlighting of all the different participants within that starts to kind of elucidate why it is such a big percentage, because every— all these different enterprises all have supply chains and they're not at all overlapping. So the supply chain needed for producing ducting is different from the supply chain needed from producing wiring, which is different from the supply chain needed to produce, I don't know, steel beams or paint. All of these things, but all of these things come together in the edifices that make up the built environment.

Yeah, so, you know, I was just thinking as you were talking there about some of the podcasts we've already recorded probably relate very well to, you know, what we're going to discuss here. We've got Gary Grant and Dusty Gedge talking about green roofs, JD Brown on biophilic cities and Alastair Daines on biomimicry and John Goldwyn on greening cities. When you're talking about ESG design, how does that relate to what you're actually producing?

Well, I think the, I suppose that the starting point from our point, from our perspective is, and you mentioned Alan Moore, I think the kind of statement that has stuck with us is that If your business is beautiful, then what your business does can be beautiful. And not unsurprisingly, a little bit of that is a reflection of yourself in the mirror, being able to say, well, this is how we operate. This is what the collective works is looking like, warts and all. And And if we want to, if we could start by improving that, then we could certainly, you know, be the change that we want to see in the industry. And so ESG design starts to think about diversity, diversity of users, neurodiversity, as well as physical diversity and abilities. It's gender. It starts to think about how you can bring stakeholders to the table who aren't present, who don't have a voice, children, nature, these kinds of participants. And is it, you know, how are the working conditions like? You know, ESG design and in architectural design, let's start with, has a wide range. It exists on paper only and is there to kind of communicate ideas and changes in the built environment at a big scale. But then it moves from that. If it's captivating enough, it mobilizes people and galvanizes people, I should say, behind the idea. And then you start to need to construct it. And all of that is in the remit of architectural design. And so ESG design has very different kind of manifestations along the way. I think with carbon, there's different stages of emissions, which starts to think like that, which is like, what is your strategic area? Then what is your, you know, your final, the manifestations, the kind of actual stuff, which would be more akin to construction itself in terms of How much does lighting play a part in your design and in the health and well-being of people in your work? Design has taken on different attitudes. There's been different drivers of what design should mean historically. There were elements of it that had to do with manufacture. There's times and places in society where it had to do with statement. And I think where we are maybe in the 21st century, but certainly where Collective Works is putting its kind of thinking, has to do with a human-centered approach. And humans have certain things that affect them. Natural lighting is one of them. It affects our circadian rhythms. It affects then our productivity. It affects our brainwave patterns, as does oxygen or kind of air quality. Largely. And so if you think about the, not just the ergonomics of humans, because the ergonomics of humans, that was a bit of a modernist idea of building things to the size and shape of a perfect person. But let's say, well, we're not an ideal world. We are imperfect people. We're a group of very imperfect types of people. And that is actually more accurate. That is more human-centered design if you embrace that. And there are many elements of the spaces that we occupy that touch on our essential humanity. And an argument that can be made, which maybe you'll explore with your speaker who's going to talk about biophilic design, is how humans have evolutionary— on evolutionary terms, been hardwired to respond to the natural environment. So where there was water, there was probably food. Where there was woods, there was probably shelter and food. And so the topography of the world started to imprint itself on people. Seeing trees and grasses looked more habitable than seeing rock. And so we were kind of That's just how we came about, I suppose. And biophilic design starts to remind ourselves of that. It says, hey, well, in the essential humanity that describes us, we respond better and our moods change to things that remind us of nature. There's different arguments then about what that is, but that's kind of a bit of the weeds, but by and large, you're, you know, the approach is what things and what, how can buildings embrace natural phenomena? Lighting is certainly one, water is another, which could be reflected simply by colour. And we do a lot of colour thinking in our studio because we realise it affects people dramatically. A lot of the work we're doing for the NHS, it's thinking about how do the spaces feel like, what is the color temperature of the artificial lighting, because some of the color temperature resembles more like the sun than others. That has an impact on how people experience and feel in these spaces. And that sensitivity is something that we think about and comes back to this idea of a healthy building.

Yeah, right, okay. And how has, how has design changed then in the 21st century versus the 20th century, in your view, because of what we're seeing here with climate change?

From my experience on the ground, that what it would look like is that there's a lot of people trying different things to see what's going to stick. There's people who are very interested in the the impacts of computational design and computational technology manufacturing, as well as software-driven approaches. It's an experiment in motion to say, well, what would or could our cities and architecture be like if you leverage all of this computational power? There's another movement alongside of that that has to do with buildings that are thinking about carbon exclusively and embodied carbon and perhaps regenerative design in that sense, or carbon capture maybe is a better way to put it, and sequester. There's also probably a lot of lingering ideas about modernism itself and just how to create simplicity of spaces, of objects, and create form. In a way that is still in the modern, modern with a capital M approach of eliminating extraneous things and kind of simplifications. Some of that aligns well with the kind of methods of construction these days and the costs of construction. So that kind of persists, I think, as a design focus inside of architecture.

I'm just thinking back to, say, the '60s and '70s and all those concrete jungles that they used to build.

I mean, I might do something a little bit unpopular here, Paul, and actually come to the defense of the '60s architects and designers. They had a motivation that was actually very people-focused. But in the time and place we live in, you could just say they got it wrong. To get something wrong isn't the same as not having the right desire or initiative. And that's how I would frame what happened. I think you had at that point a design that was trying to say— was based on a certain ideal. I mean, that was where it went wrong. It was based on an ideal. It wasn't based on an ideal sense of how people would interact with each other, of democratic spaces, of everybody being the same, basically. You know, everybody have the same Probably if I—

Yeah, I think that's maybe what I was trying to— I was sort of alluding to, sorry to interrupt, is then it was much more about function, wasn't it? It was about this is going to be functional, you know, people need a place to live, here's somewhere for people to live. But now perhaps we realize, and I'm, you know, I'm asking you really, you know, maybe we realize it's not that simple in that form. Is important to people's health and wellbeing as well, not just the function.

Thinking of it as pejorative, like in functional is pejorative, I think there was an attempt to make those buildings that have now failed and those kind of estates and kind of, you know, urban plans, kind of all of that that might not have been successful was still probably had this right attempt. If we come back to today, because I think, you know, the point of our conversation is where are we now? I think now we have much more science and much more, many more metrics behind us that are all kind of aligning. So you have in neuroscience, you have people who are doing CAT scans of brains as the brains are processing colors and spaces and imagery. And you kind of know, people aren't guessing anymore what a human might feel like. And people are also much more aware that there is a great amount of diversity that is in our societies. It's cultural diversity, it's physical diversity, it's neurological diversity. And so there's a complexity that is just part and parcel of the world we live in. And I think that Today's designers who are wanting to design for, you know, also with the same attitude, designing for positive impact to societies, they have more actual tools at their disposal to say this would really be a plausible, defensibly better design. Not all designers may be doing that, but I think they have that ability to engage with what what the people who are in and around these structures might actually— how they might experience them.

I just want to mention Passive House. I don't know if you're involved with Passive House at all, but talk about form and function. I was reading, and you can explain what Passive House is for our listeners in a moment if that'd be okay, but I was reading that one of the problems with Passive House is that, you know, they've— the the function of it, which is this hermetically sealed environment, I think, isn't it? So it's incredibly healthy to live in. The constraints of that are actually in the design of the building. There's only so many ways you can actually build all those things and have it form as a very highly efficient building. I think they're meant to use very, very small amounts of energy, aren't they?

So a Passive House is basically If we step back a bit from the brand name, Passive House is a brand, it's a certification. But underpinning that certification is the concept that if you make a building incredibly airtight, then any heat that you are producing stays inside of that shell. Obviously, it has to be highly insulated as well. But Passive House identified that by buildings focusing on insulation only, they weren't focusing on all the air movement that happens from outside to inside. The kind of common analogy is a woolen jumper versus a windbreaker. A woolen jumper is your insulation. It keeps you mostly toasty and nice and warm, except when it's windy. When it's windy, you need a, basically a piece of plastic around that so that the wind doesn't take that heat away, which was trapped against your body. And that's Passive Houses in a nutshell. And I think that it's a high-tech— it requires a high-tech solution because once you make something very airtight, you're also stopping fresh air, which humans tend to need, from coming into the building. So now you need a mechanical system to do what you need to bring fresh air in and keep keep things a comfortable environment. There are, on an energy perspective, wins that's demonstrable. These buildings don't use a lot of kilowatts to make them function. And that's why they're this kind of— that's a reason that Passive House has an argument to continue to to be the esprit for buildings to be built and designed to. But there are then a little bit of limitations in terms of form. I mean, there's the more complicated— well, ideally it's easier to do what you need to do with the Passive House if it's a block. If your building is very orthogonal and very rectilinear, then all the logic is easier to manifest. The more complicated your building is in terms of its shape and form and levels, then you can still achieve it. It's just more complicated. And that trade-off is not necessarily always then the right one.

And in terms of the materials that you're selecting then, what approach do you take towards that you're choosing?

So structure is probably the first place to kind of start thinking about. And if you can make buildings out of timber, that's great, as opposed to steel. If you can minimize concrete usage, that's also positive. Or if you can design the concrete, and this is where we would need to work with structural engineers, one of these disciplines that goes into making a building. But some of our favorite structural engineers are familiar with alternatives to traditional Portland cement that goes into making concrete. And that And so we can find ways to reduce the embodied carbon that goes into the structure itself. That's one element of a material selection. And then on top of that, it depends on if it's a new bit of the structure or old, but there's a lot of great materials that are finished materials, great paint that's been developed recently called Graphenstone, We really love it because it's made with kind of— it's got carbon built into it as a molecule. And so it's very durable. It kind of doesn't need a lot of layers or coats. So it's really comparable with other mass-produced paints, but it has no VOCs. It's basically a natural paint otherwise. And it's a kind of thing that doesn't then produce chemicals once you've put it in the air. So for another 3 weeks or month, there's nothing produced that then the occupants are living with. So between paints, colours, these are things that we think about a lot because going back to this biophilic design idea, we're trying to imagine what are, what is the registers for people inside, what is the appropriate register.

Thank you so much for your time, Kassemah, on this podcast about ESG design, SDG 3. Good health and well-being. And for sharing with us your experience of, you know, bringing this into reality. It's been really insightful. And once again, thanks very much for your time.

It's been a pleasure.