Specialization and Sustainability: Good for the Bottom Line and the Earth
David Schwarz leads a team focused on creative and sustainable design exploration. Images c/o HUSH
As an industry-leading experience design studio whose clients include Instagram, Nike, and Max, the Brooklyn-based firm HUSH often begins in the backseat in relation to the sustainability goals of their global clients. Digital technologies — in their energy use, materiality, carbon costs, and lifecycles — are often unaligned with the sustainability mission. This is even more true when considering global corporations’ own brand experiences and technologically-driven workplaces. (The built environment is the second largest producer of carbon emissions in both its construction and operations!)
Observing this, the HUSH team recognized the need for a strategic framework to guide their digital and technological experience design — one that allows them to continue to leverage digital technology as key elements in their work, but in a way that maximizes a net positive value both creatively and sustainably. Based on their learnings from creating “Unisphere,” an experience design platform for the biotech company United Therapeutics, their team created a three-point framework to evaluate and apply to every new project.
Here, HUSH founding partner David Schwarz shares how they developed their framework around materiality, energy usage, and lifecycle; what they learned about designing within an “energy budget” from the boundary-pushing Unisphere project; and why their team welcomes and celebrates people who want to push their craft in new, unexpected directions.
The Unisphere at United Therapeutics’s HQ shows the building’s energy usage.
You’re bringing sustainability to the forefront of all HUSH projects. What made you move in that direction?
As an experience design firm, we build things in the real world. Adding anything new to our world means having to consider our impact. Moreover, we had to grapple with this idea that one of our key differentiators as a design firm, our technology prowess, is extremely unsustainable. Clients would come to us and say, “We’re building new headquarters, and we want to create a beautiful digital-physical experience that differentiates us and inspires our people.” We would say, “Great. But technological materials are less sustainable than just about any other option. So how are we going to address their needs while supporting their — and our — sustainability goals?”
In parallel to this line of thinking, as a firm we were already moving well beyond big digital, immersive-box-things. We see screens everywhere, all around us, and they’re getting bigger every day. It’s the Times Square-iffication: digital signage in transit halls, workplace, and retail. There is simply no end. So, what’s the delta between a single point of light (like a light bulb) and the scale of a Times Square billboard, or a giant digital box? Within those poles, there is ample space in-between, and the space in-between means lower energy costs and fewer unsustainable technology materials shipped all around the world. This is the area of creativity we’ve been exploring for years and are refining now more than ever. We saw how we can compel people with ideas and information that is softer, lower resolution, and more artful. These realizations led us to ruthlessly analyze our design inputs and ingredients to make sure we’re on the sustainable path — and a rich and unique creative path.
What is HUSH’s framework to meet your sustainable design standards?
The framework we use to judge our decision-making internally and with our clients has three parts. First, it’s about prioritizing working with materials that have less negative impact on the world. Second, energy usage. Is what we’re putting into the world an energy hog? Is the experience optimized to reduce unneeded energy costs? Third, do we have a plan for what happens after our work is implemented in the world – its lifecycle? Are we considering its afterlife? Can it be re-contextualized or recycled? Can we dismantle and reconfigure our work, giving it an afterlife? Do we have a design for its second life?
We began with just armchair knowledge, open source data and information from a suite of advisors. With this support and additional partners, we now can look at every one of our design ideas and determine if we’re truly pursuing the most net positive (creativity + sustainability) impact with a particular design concept. That conversation only starts by framing our work through these lenses at the start, not as an afterthought or an appendix slide. It’s liberating to see how it affects the quality and direction of the work and to watch clients realize that they have the agency to align the work with their bigger picture goals.
The Unisphere can inspire employees to take actions to reduce the building’s energy usage.
How did you get to this framework?
The project that inspired this framework began four years ago. It was for the biotech company United Therapeutics. We were engaged to design dynamic storytelling experiences about sustainability on their net-zero campus in Silver Spring, Maryland, which utilizes some of the most advanced net-zero building engineering systems created to date.
The resulting designs were inspired by the cyclical behaviors in nature (the rising and falling of the sun) and in the human body (the breathing lungs) based on a real-time energy surplus/deficit visualization, sharing the real-time energy patterns and consumption of the building. This installation invites audiences to make informed decisions about their behavior based on the real-time output of the visualization. For example: the building may be in an energy deficit because of a lack of sun/solar energy, so instead of turning up the heat an employee might choose to bring an extra sweater or thoughtfully shut the lights in their office. These are micro-actions for sure, and individually, they have little impact on the energy balance of the building. But, multiplied by hundreds of days a year, over many years of their tenure at the company, they all add up in impact. Critically, all of the experiences we designed were also held to a strict energy budget, so decisions around materiality, technology and form intimately and necessarily shaped the formal design output.
What did you learn from this project?
We learned a few things. First, there is a true brand and story value to surfacing sustainability. Companies are making huge investments in sustainable design because they have to align with their larger ESG goals: It’s a big decision-making factor for employees when they choose their employers. By externalizing this commitment and vision, you’re galvanizing that relationship between employer and employee and partners and investors. You’re making something that was once-hidden quite visible, and you’re committing to it because it’s not going anywhere. You look at it every day, day in and day out. It’s not social media. It’s not a throwaway. There’s a huge value there just from a brand expression standpoint.
Second, the big, beautiful 40-foot light sculpture didn’t get that way by accident. The choices we made materially and technologically were part of an evaluation we did with our client to meet their energy budget. We were a line item in a large energy model of the building.
The end result is 40 stainless steel fins and simple LED lighting — and no major mechanical, electrical, and plumbing impacts. This was the most powerful teaching moment for our team, where we met our design vision within the practicalities of our (then fledgling) three-point framework.
The Brooklyn-based HUSH team is encouraged to apply their skills in new and inventive ways.
What was United Therapeutics’ response to your work?
Good work begets more work, so we’re building a series of experience design platforms for the new building being constructed next door to the Unisphere. This addition will be a mass timber, net-zero and carbon-zero building. Carbon-zero means you have to also account for all of the carbon costs of materials to build the building. Every piece of wood, every piece of concrete, the shipping and emission costs to get the raw materials from their starting points to the construction site. These costs will accumulate over the two to three years it takes to build the building, then the building will work off that cost over the first year with its solar production.
United Therapeutics is the largest landowner in Silver Spring, so the community’s downtown will be an amazing space for people to understand how sustainability is applied in massive constructions like these. It will be a model for urban architecture and development.
What are you implementing to achieve the net zero, carbon zero building?
For us, the biggest thing is using timber. It is one of the most green building materials we have available. So a lot of our work is actually looking at sculptural forms that we can then bring to life using timber and incorporate digital elements and lighting.
What’s the biggest challenge or opportunity when working with timber?
Timber visually demonstrates your commitment to sustainability and it can be sculpted into almost anything. As we continue to ideate, we’re playing with forms that look natural and bisect the entire building. This investigation has invited us to imagine that we are looking inside the material itself and understanding how energy is being recycled and how carbon is performing inside of it. There is very little constraint with timber and the opportunity lies in the endless possibilities of what we could create.
The idea of an “energy budget” is a new way of looking at design. What’s it like to design around an energy budget?
It’s all opportunity. Design needs constraints, and an energy budget is viewed as a wonderful guiding hand. You set yourself up in a territory with parameters and work from there. It met up with the design choices we’re making, moving away from high resolution slick digital content to explore this fertile, middle ground.
Tell us about your team. How do you work together?
We believe in rigor, not exhaustion, so, even if you think you hit the bullseye on your first or second try, we still need to prove it out to ourselves internally with 98 more versions. If we come back to that second version, we have confidence internally that that was the right thing all along. I believe more is more internally and less is more externally. We need to cover a lot of ground as a team and then we ruthlessly curate what we know is the best and we only show that to our clients.
The hallmark of HUSH, for good and bad, is our team’s ideas are constantly being pushed and pulled by their peers. The organization of our teams invites much cross-disciplinary work. Our best moments are when there is no final say from a discipline standpoint. It's also the most exhausting.
What characteristics do you look for in your team members?
The folks we hire most of the time are the folks who have timed out of some of the other industries. We’ll get someone who worked in motion graphics for 10 years doing amazing animations and work for TV. They have all this knowledge about timing, pacing, graphic design, and motion as expression, but they no longer want to deliver everything in a 16x9 frame. Here, they can apply their knowledge to something else, like animating lighting effects that are 40-feet wide. Now it’s no longer a rectangle, but multidimensional, and speed, timing, perspective are all new territories to explore at scale.
That happens with almost every person we hire. They built brand guidelines and did identity work and now they’re asking themselves, “What’s a brand in a three-dimensional space? And how do I extrapolate what I thought about brand positioning into materials, graphics, and sculpture?” We have the folks who are exhausted by their home industry, if you will.
Are there any tradeoffs to that approach?
We have realized that folks at different times in their career are trying to build expertise and sometimes this cross-disciplinary challenge makes people feel like they are losing their ability to be experts. They are experts in one field, and now they're all of a sudden grappling to feel like they know exactly what to do again. It took time for us to realize we need a lot more support and coaching here. We love the uncharted territory of what’s possible. But that same freedom actually can feel pretty daunting for some folks.
How did you provide that coaching and support?
We talked about how we develop the operating system for culture. For the first half of HUSH, we thought culture was the vibe, the feel of a place and people. I do think that’s an artifact of culture, but we used to think that was the ingredients of culture. We now have Karl Stewart, who runs our people and talent program and leverages deep knowledge of behavioral psychology and emotional wellbeing to ensure that everyone feels safe and excited to pursue uncharted creative territories.
From day one when we onboard folks, whether full-time or freelancers, we make sure they understand what we expect. We’re there to help them figure out how to do that. For example, we'll onboard a motion designer and go through a bunch of our projects and their projects and show them how what they’ve done is going to apply directly to what we do here. They get to see where their input is going to make a big difference and how they can contribute specifically within our larger design process. They draw a direct line to it.
Any other notable changes you’ve made as you’ve built the firm?
As I get older, it’s less about adding things to the ecosystem and more about what we don’t do and taking things away. We’ve scraped away all the things that we really aren’t experts at and what's left is undeniably our area of expertise. The more we whittle away and focus on the things that only we can do, the better our work becomes and the scale and impact of it increases.
Where does HUSH go from here?
What has driven HUSH in the past 10 years is how we think about the scale of our work. Scale is a function that indicates growth and design potential. When we started, the first project we did was at human scale, an installation at an auto show that you could walk around and understand as an object. Over the years, it has become less about the object and more about a space and people in fixed space.
Then we started to link together these spaces and control how people experience something beat-by-beat, space-by-space, foot-by-foot over time. The scale of space increases as does the scale of a user journey.
Taking on big questions like, “What is a transportation experience that’s interconnected, artful, informational and inspiring? How do we control what people feel and do when they get on a train, that ends up in a public arts experience that then turns into a public/private retail environment that then turns into commercial and branded space?” Brand, storytelling, and artistry affect people all along the way to create a consistent journey that changes their behavior and elevates the way people connect to their environment. A swing that big will keep us going for a little while. This, and with the move to more deeply integrate our sustainability proposition…Well, the world is our oyster.
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