Ep. 224: Charlotte McCurdy is Charting the Path to a Very Desirable Bio-Based Future
Charlotte McCurdy is a designer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of climate change, futures, and materials. She shares how her work—"charismatic objects" such as a carbon-negative raincoat and a high-fashion algae sequin dress—offers more than just striking aesthetics. They are rigorous, tangible experiments in building a bio-based future that doesn’t just reduce harm but actively supports planetary healing and human well-being. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of a bright and desirable world that is not about personal sacrifices or backward motion. We discuss regenerative materials, shifting manufacturing paradigms, and the exponential hopefulness embedded in these actionable possibilities.
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Charlotte McCurdy: We’re in a place where it’s not enough to sustain, we need to be in a place where we are actively repairing and undoing the harm, if we’re going to have a liveable future.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking with Charlotte McCurdy about the practical—and sexy—promise of a bio-based future. Charlotte researches and teaches design at the intersection of climate change, futures, and materials at the Stanford d.school. She was recently named to the World Design Council’s 2025 cohort of Design for Planet Trailblazers—a global group of designers reimagining the industry and shaping innovative responses to the climate crisis. You might’ve seen her translucent raincoat made from carbon-negative algae-based plastic, or her collaboration with fashion designer Phillip Lim—the Algae Sequin dress, now part of the permanent collection at the Met. They’re truly stunning—but more than that, they’re tangible expressions of a bold and deeply pragmatic vision: What would it look like to make things that actively heal the planet, rather than harm it? Charlotte’s work lives at the intersection of design, climate science, systems thinking, and storytelling. She’s asking: What if our materials could sequester carbon rather than emit it? And then she’s answering that question—through rigorously developed, beautifully executed proofs of concept, like the dress and the raincoat, that have the power to shift our collective imagination from sustainability to regeneration, and ground it in real and practical possibilities available to us now. This conversation is a hopeful and fascinating look at the role of design in climate resilience—and the restorative potential of a manufacturing paradigm shift. Here’s Charlotte.
Charlotte: My name is Charlotte McCurdy. I am based out of San Francisco, California and I am a designer, trained in industrial design, but work primarily in materials and objects as tools for trying to change public imaginaries around climate change. Trying to think through what a decarbonized material culture would look and feel like and what the opportunities are for using the tools of design to render that kind of future as a way to try to create space for conversations that are aspirational, not just fear based, as we think about the future in terms of climate change.
Amy: Yes! Aspirational, not just fear based, but also deeply grounded in concrete… proofs of concept. One of the things that just made me so elated to anticipate this conversation with you is in doing all the research around your work I started to feel really hopeful, which it’s just rare these days. We’re living in very uncertain times and all the discourse around climate change is usually really fear based and so to feel hope was just such a refreshing and powerful. There’s so many ways in which you’re using your creative agency to develop these tangible proofs of concept that help us regular folks kind of wrap our heads around the opportunity embedded in our current set of circumstances. You make what could be abstract really come forward into a practical reality in our current capitalism, with our current technological opportunities. And you kind of parse it out in a way that’s like here’s how it could really work. And so a lot of that comes down to a mindset shift or a paradigm shift in how we’re thinking about approaching this. I wonder if we can start there? You recently gave a really compelling TEDx talk around the concept of a de-industrial revolution. Talk to me about what the principles are of de-industrial design?
Charlotte: I guess maybe just to back into that question, I do think that there’s so many dichotomies that we’re inheriting and take as a given. For instance that sustainability and consumerism are necessarily in conflict, or that even within the practice of design, that there’s design for strategy and design for craft and they’re different things. And I do think that starting from climate change, starting from materials, I sort of found these surprising gray spaces, just thinking about even materials and plastics, this strong sense, I went into this project with synthetic plastics are synthetic and they’re manmade. But the more you dig into that, they’re petrochemical products, which is to say that they’re made of fossil fuels, which is to say they’re made of fossilized life and actually there’s much more organic and biology in these things that we’re taking all this credit for, these manmade materials. And what if by playing in that gray space there’s new opportunities that open up? When I talk about a de-industrial revolution, there’s another challenge to preconceptions there, because de-industrialization is so often a catch-word for bad loss of industrial economies. But what I’m trying to think through is the possibility of a next industrial revolution that is de-industrial in the sense that it is not built on fossil fuels, it’s not built on massive machinery for genericized global scale, dead products. But instead, what does an economy that is built on what we can grow and therefore what is connected to the short term carbon cycle… you talk about how I’m trying to be a sort of science translator as a designer, so we can always pause and define things.
Amy: Oh yeah, I want to hear about a ‘short term carbon cycle.’ (Laughs)
Charlotte: Yeah, so part of what we’re in right now, our current mode of operation with industrialization is in drawing on fossil fuels, we’re pulling carbon out of the ground that was put there tens to hundreds of millions of years ago and we’re living on and building our society off of energy we’re teleporting through time. This is where I sort of came to the formulation that helped me, that I share around talking about these, synthetic materials as ancient sunlight, that they’re embodied ancient sunlight. The nergy they have in them, literally, when you burn them, the energy that’s released is energy that was captured by photosynthesis that happened tens to hundreds of millions of years ago. And ancient sunlight drove the photosynthesis that captured ancient carbon dioxide into the big beautiful carbon based molecules of these plant based organisms that some of which got buried in the right ways to become the materials from which we make, not only our plastics, but also our cements. There’s a relationship between life and evolution and geology and our economy in a way that was surprising to me as I pulled the thread through a design research process and those moments of surprise, of like wait, this is not how I’ve been holding onto the story in my mind, how are other people thinking about this? Wait a second, maybe there’s a reframe there. And so that’s part of why I’m interested in the framework of an industrial revolution because we are in a moment of great change on many fronts, right? And the opportunity, if we take seriously the possibility that we are building a different system and framework for civilizational scale organization of energies and people and time, what does that look like if it centers the challenge of climate change and in that way we build an economy that stops pulling fossil fuels out of the ground systematically in the long term. It’s obviously that’s very hard to do for certain things, there are certain things that are harder to decarbonize, but we need to, in my view, be celebrating, investing in and demanding the technologies that are going to make that decarbonized world, not just possible, but delightful and full of beauty and aspirational so that we can want collectively to pull towards it and not see it as a compromise, desaturated, less than present in our current paradigm, but a new paradigm that is exciting.
Amy: Yes, okay. If I can repeat this back to you just to make sure I understand. Essentially what you’re saying is, the sun acted upon the earth eons ago. That stored energy is underground and we’re now pulling that out and burning it and that’s our fossil fuels. And what you’re presenting is a paradigm where we just take the sun acting on the earth today in real time and convert that energy into the fuel that we use?
Charlotte: Yes, and the feedstocks for our materials.
Amy: Yeah, and the feedstocks for our materials. And you’re presenting really tangible ways that we can do that.
Charlotte: Yeah.
Amy: And when you talk about this mindset shift, part of that is a shift from the concept of sustainability itself, which you make a really valid case for towards the concept of regeneration, which maybe can you unpack that dichotomy there? [0.10.00]
Charlotte: When you just think about the word ‘sustain’ and ‘sustainability,’ there’s actually something intrinsically lower case ‘c’ conservative about it, in that it’s about sustaining the thing we are doing right now. Keeping this boat that’s slowly taking on water, like how do we build it out and maybe fix some holes at the same rate that it’s creating holes… just keep this ship moving more or less. Unfortunately when you talk about climate change and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re at a point where we’ve put so much into the atmosphere, that even if we stopped burning ancient sunlight today, and therefore taking ancient CO2, taking it out of the ground and putting it back into the air, even if we stopped today, there’s baked in warming that takes time, there’s a lag. So we’re in a world where the vast majority of our models for staying under a reasonable amount of global average temperature rise rely on carbon removal and we don’t have those technologies scaled or the business model locked in for that. We are in a place where solar and wind are cost competitive with natural gas. Where battery storage is really changing in its price, the price of these things are just dropping. We’ve solved, as far as I’m concerned, in fundamental ways, energy and many fuel applications, but this carbon removal piece, we need more attention, demand, focus and investment on these things. That gets back to regenerative where we’re in a place where it’s not enough to sustain, we need to be in a place where we are actively repairing and undoing the harm and in this case, that means the greenhouse gases that are in the air, if we’re going to have a liveable future. That’s part of this shift in what we name as the goal away from sustainability towards regeneration. And in the case of thinking about how do we make materials that are not just less bad, but actually could be beneficial because they’re sequestering carbon.
Amy: So the net beneficial is in the sequestering carbon, and the current proposition of materials is that they are fossil fuel based and that they are releasing carbon into the air, right? So, it’s a reversal of that…
Charlotte: Yeah, and that’s such an inversion of our expectation that things are intrinsically harmful and all we can do is aspire to be less harmful. Again, let’s make this concrete because that’s part of the premise of this work. So more than half of textiles right now are made of fossil fuels, polyester is the big one. The projections on petroleum demand over the next 25 years [0.15.00], plastics, pet chem is projected to be one of the largest segments of the growth of demand for fossil fuels. So we’re going to be tapering away from fuels for transport and increasingly making things like plastic and fertilizer, stuff like that. So these plastics, for instance, that are made of fossil fuels, they are complicit, and part of greenhouse gas emissions because they are intrinsically co-products of the fossil fuels that we burn for energy. So when you think about mining fossil fuels, there’s off-gassing at that site, there’s pipelining and transmission, there’s off-gassing there. A big fraction of what you’re pulling out of the ground you are intending to burn, which releases CO2 intrinsically, the material is carbon trains and we burn it and releasing the energy of that heat we are releasing carbon dioxide molecules, there’s no way around it, that’s the intrinsic chemistry of burning. And so then one of that co-product is these molecules that then become the feedstocks for our synthetic plastics and while they’re plastics, there is carbon there in the plastics, they’re carbon based materials. But they’ve been complicit in this fossil fuel supply chain and here’s another sort of twist as we think about what do we want from sustainability, if we make those synthetic plastics biodegradable, then we’re making it possible for bacteria and fungi to break down those molecules, to use their energy and that metabolism is releasing CO2 as well. So synthetic plastics and proposals around circularity and increasing recycling, yes and… but our recycling rates are dismal and even if they improved, demand for plastic is projected to triple by 2050 and I don’t see how we recycle our way out of that. There’s still going to be demand for new virgin feedstocks, new virgin plastics in the systems and how do we replace that? And ideally replace it with something that’s not just less bad than our current conventional plastics, but could be a force for good. That’s sort of the premise.
Amy: So that’s the idea behind shifting the mindset from sustainability which is basically let’s keep treading water to regeneration, which is let’s make what we make actually repair the earth and let’s not only stop doing the harm, but make the stuff that heals. That makes a lot of sense.
Charlotte: Just to add one piece to that in terms of the conventional sustainability and the stop doing harm, one thing that is important to remember or think about is this is back to the connotation of de-industrialization as being bad or a loss or economic loss for communities that were connected to old modes of production, when we talk about doing less harm or trying to think about a new mode of production, I’m very focused on the fact that we have eight billion people on earth today and being accountable to the lives and dignity of those people means that saying stop, developing more than you are now, and expect less, demand less, that we need to shrink, that’s not going to fly. There’s no way that that’s going to be politically palatable and so then we get stuck. And so part of what’s exciting about thinking about a de-industrial framework, a framework where we’re powered by the energy that we have right now, instead of ancient energy, is that we can A, do much more with the energy we have now. So before the industrial revolution, like corn was one of the most efficient tools for making useful things out of sunlight, and that’s like 2% efficient. And now the conventional solar panels you can buy [0.20.00] are like 15% efficient, there’s experimental ones that are getting closer to 50%.
Amy: Wow!
Charlotte: We can meet more needs with the energy we have right now than we could before. We are being pummeled with energy from the sun and it’s so much in fact that there’s 10,000x more energy we are getting from the sun than we are using to fuel our society at any given time, globally. That’s the hope piece, that this is not just like a utopian. What if we could just do everything perfectly? It’s actually not pie in the sky, it’s back of the envelope, but it can math out and we can do research and these technologies, we can improve. Commodities like fuels, there’s a finite amount of energy bound into that and so the capacity for innovation and invention and creativity, that’s where the hope sits for me.
Amy: Just to kind of put a bow on it, the hope sits there because the sun is already providing us more than enough energy…All we need to do is figure out how to harness it…And divert our attention from trying to pull it out of the earth and spend our creative energy and our technological innovation on figuring out how to harness all that sunlight.
Charlotte: Excellent bow!
Amy: (Laughs) Yes! And we’ve already started, so we’re not starting from scratch…
Charlotte: Yes, absolutely.
Amy: You’ve talked in your work about how solar panels have had a long enough lifespan now to become much more mainstream and much more efficient in terms of their capacity to work for us. And so I also want to hear more about the plastic route. I know that you have developed a biobased marine macro algae based plastic that is super exciting and it’s completely devoid of fossil fuels. Talk to me about a future that’s bio based?
Charlotte: A biobased future has the potential to be beneficial, not just on these big ecological scales, in terms of climate change, but on the small individual scale of our bodies and our individual health. And I do think we have an ability to imagine a healthier future as well, on the individual level, as well as on the ecological level.
Amy: But we have to also scale it up to the eight billion individuals, so that’s massive.
Charlotte: Yes. And this is another dichotomy within sustainability that I think is causing problems, this sort of camp that advocates for individual behavior change, that the solution is people not eating meat and biking to work and that’s how we’ll do it. And then on the other side is like we need system level change, we need policy leadership, I think it’s not only a both/and, but how do those things actually self-reinforce each other, because it is not enough. You can do everything right as an individual, but because you are in a broader system that is dependent off fossil fuels, you cannot zero out your impact and still participate in a western global north economy. How do we have both of them support each other? The really concrete example of this for me is like the reusable grocery bag. A reusable grocery bag, just think about the polypropylene ones, for instance, the plastic ones. They’re more heavy duty, there’s literally more plastic in them than the thin film disposable bags. So you have to use them many more times for the carbon impact to net out that it’s beneficial. Most people don’t use them enough for that to make sense. So the cynical read on that, the gotcha journalism piece would be like ‘reusable bags are actually bad for the climate.’ But here’s my counter, a reusable bag is a social signal, it’s a tool and you see other people at the grocery store carrying and it creates this norm where you no longer feel alone and then that can help create that more system level collective action piece. So what can these two approaches be feeding each other instead of seen as competing strategies for change and competing for scarce resources, scarce attention. Why do we have to have these divisions, these camps, these dualisms that aren’t reflecting reality and aren’t helping us anymore.
Amy: What I’m hearing is the tension within it is not serving either side. But, if we think of individual impact as being able to put pressure on systems and to be able to change social and cultural norms, and if we think that it’s not just individuals, but it’s actually the systems that need to change, but individuals can have an impact on putting pressure on those systems through changing culture and norms, then we’re actually supporting each other…
Charlotte: And that’s what design is all about!
Amy: Yes! Yes!
Charlotte: That’s what design does, is meet people where they’re at. Understand what they want. Offer things that are exciting. We want to talk about changing behavior, [0.30.00] like the smartphone transformed many, many industries around it by making something that was delightful and aspirational and kind of beautiful to many people. Yeah, design has these tools, ideally, to change so many pieces, to change not just what technologies get cultivated and nurtured, but also to change what people even think they want. And the sinister version of that is like manipulative advertising that makes people insecure in themselves and things, but can we use that for good or what we might think of as good. This gets into weird questions of paternalism and power and maybe giving designers too much credit in a really complex system. But that’s my hope.
Amy: I do think that designers have this power/responsibility to imagine the future and then illustrate, demonstrate and prove the way forward. So that other people can see the path and then assist. And so not only did you develop, test, iterate, put all of your science and creativity to work in developing a bioplastic that’s made completely of marine macro algae, but you designed it into a beautiful representation what’s super powerful about it is that it taps into those things that appeal to human behavior. It’s an object of desire and I don’t want to solve climate crisis by not having stuff, not doing stuff, opting out of certain aspects of society, no, but if you’re saying I can buy this sexy raincoat and it’s also repairing the earth, I’m down for that!
Charlotte: Absolutely!
Amy: This raincoat has been very demonstrative; it’s also been a way for your work to come into discussion. Maybe you can talk to me about, your trajectory of developing this raincoat and this bioplastic?
Charlotte: I started very broadly with a question about how I could make climate change feel more immediate. I often, when I talk to students or groups of people, I’ll do this exercise at the top of any conversation, which is… close your eyes and go to your own internal google image search and type in ‘climate change’ and hit ‘enter.’ What is the top few images, what’s the most common thing you’re seeing?
Amy: Flooding, extreme weather devastation. Ocean trash.
Charlotte: Yeah and even in a huge group there’s a few characters that show up. There’s landscapes of devastation and it’ll be fire or hurricane or flooding, depending often on where you’re from, and I’m California, so there’s a lot more fire that shows up. There’s polar bears on melting ice through a telephoto lens. And sometimes there’s smokestacks or dirty things, like ocean plastic. And one thing that you might start to notice about those is that there are no people in them. There are all these big distant vistas, they’re all through these telephoto lens. And there’s no one fighting, there’s no solutions, there’s no change. And so the question of how to push the needle a tiny bit changing that internal google image, auto complete away from this far away… distance in time, distant in which species is being affected and really make it vivid how it’s right here, right now, our generation, our bodies. That was the starting point of what I wanted to investigate and that sort of led down this funnel of exploration and thinking about materials and this more unexpected piece about the role that these fossil fuel based materials quietly play in climate change and how deeply they permeate our lives. So if you look around yourself right now, the first thing you might think of in terms of plastic would be single use bottles and packaging, that’s often people’s first association with plastics. But when you think about fossil fuel based materials, probably every paint around you, every glue, the dyes, even if you’re wearing a natural fiber, the dye on it is probably an azo synthetic, like just the deep permeation of fossil fuels into everything we take for granted is so profound. And even when you think about non-plastic things like steel, the carbon in that is coming from fossil fuels. The cement, limestone is fossilized marine vertebrate shells. So having this shipped… and then also back to the body, 98% of pharmaceuticals and medicines come from fossil fuels. So like Tylenol, all of these things are synthetic, organic chemistry. And maybe that’s a better use of fossil fuels than asphalt (laughs), and asphalt is actually one of the more highly recycled fossil fuel materials that’s used at scale, but that’s neither here or there.
So yeah, getting focused in on materials and then finding this shift in my own thinking, my own understanding around how these materials I think of as synthetic and manmade, that they’re actually connected to biology, and once that opens up the possibility of using photosynthesis, living things that are working today to sequester carbon, to make things instead of these ancient organisms. That sort of was this shift. And so then focusing in on marine macro algae, algae is are very efficient photosynthesizer. Marine macro algae is exciting because it doesn’t produce a substation problem with food. Humans are already really actively making use of land for food production. So how do we not just substitute one photosynthesis for another, but, actually do more with the energy we get from the sun than we have been in order to meet our needs in a delightful way and not say that we have to ask for less and shrink. And so then yeah, a process of sort of [0.40.00] slamming together lots of different existing research and new technology, ancient technology, how can I start to try to make a proof of concept of an algae based plastic substitute? And then it was really important to me to not end on swatches, like you’re saying, if my purpose is not to invent a material, my purpose, my goal is to offer something that allows that mindset shift around what climate change is and who it’s impacting and when and where. It was important to me to make it all the way to a prototype thing and then a garment emerged as the right thing for several reasons. One, I was developing this project right after Hurricane Maria impacted Puerto Rico, so I was thinking a lot about… it was on the East Coast as well, so I was thinking a lot about hurricanes. So a raincoat as an emblem of we are already in this climate change world. It’s already impacting us right now. And a raincoat is something that you can imagine putting on. It’s something that’s very of the body and you’re really inviting it in.
And then in terms of the aesthetics of it, to try to be in the space of relatability and desire, it was really important for me to have the garment be kind of normal and not this utopian, hypothetical, not a speculation far in the future, but sort of a near future/alternate present to sort of embody, we can do this now and you don’t have to be sort of like jetsons alienating yourself from your current experience to be part of a future. It can be closer to you. I’m also interested in this utopian pragmatism divide and what happens in the gray space between there. I think you said it well, the capacity of a designer to imagine and render and create buy-in from other people so we can pull together in the direction of a project. Where to place that imagination in time was something I thought a lot about.
Amy: Yeah, that’s super clear in your work, it’s not just research and it’s not just materials generation or even prototyping, it is all in service of driving the collective imagination around what’s possible and creating concrete examples for us to actually, in some ways the concrete exampleI’ve already worked it out, it’s real, it’s feasible.
Charlotte: And that’s the flip from speculation, it’s not just what if…It’s then maybe like this.
Amy: Yeah. And from there, that raincoat also garnered you a lot of attention, rightfully so, but it also took you into new collaborations where you got to reimagine this algae in different ways. Can you talk to me about that?
Charlotte: Yeah, I was really lucky and sort of imposter syndrome/starstruck to be paired with Phillip Lim in an incubator called One X One that was trying to connect fashion designers with sustainability innovators to try to explore what new ambitious visions for conscious fashion might look like. And so I had an initial meeting with him and showed him this raincoat. So coming from an industrial design mindset, I had put so much work into having this material be as clear and shiny and mass produced looking as possible, to sort of make that connection, plastic, plastic. But now we have no fossil fuels involved. And he asked me two questions. One was, okay, talk to me about paillettes, sequins and talk to me about colour. I almost exclusively wear all black, I’m a born and raised New Yorker and I was like, yeah, colour was not a priority for me.. And colour is actually an interesting challenge in this space because so many of our modern dyes and pigments are petrochemical in origin. So then there was a whole set of investigations that I did around how natural dyes and around different painting pigments to try to come together with a proposal for Phillip Lim.
And so then the pandemic hit and I threw the basic necessities of my equipment in the back of a truck and then fabricated sequins in a garage and shipped them to the Phillip Lim team and he designed a dress and his atelier hand-embroidered the sequins and working with Phillip Lim, he was just really a good advocate for conceptual coherence and simplicity and clarity and so that really pushed me to how to make this really accessible and vivid to more people. And so then this dress kind of had its first debut into the void of online stuff. It was like a digital premier, but the full circle on it was that this summer it was in the MET Costume Institute show, and that was so gratifying to have a lot more people be able to be with it in person and not just see a digital image of it. And now it’s in the permanent collection of the MET, so maybe it will come back out in another hundred years and be a timestamp on when we hadn’t yet figured it out, but we were dreaming.
Amy: Well, congratulations on that and what a wonderful way to be able to do the work that you’re doing and have the paths line up that you get connected with somebody who is also interested in this, they’re solving it from a different industry or from a different angle. But you both get to put your talents together and there’s nothing more appealing than a really beautiful garment with a little sexy dangle, sparkle, a beautiful lush colour. And so it’s so emotionally resonant in those ways and so exciting in terms of the possibility it represents. And at the MET Costume Institute it’s also not this abstract idea that somebody proposed. It’s like this is a vehicle for garnering buy-in, continual buy-in, as this thing lives its own life now as an object.
Charlotte: Absolutely. It inspires hope in me that an institution with that long timeline, that in including that piece in the show, they’re putting a flag in the ground of like this is where fashion might be going, should be going. And that makes me hopeful, that there’s a possibility of more momentum and alignment that’s possible. But we’re in a moment where long term thinking is a real luxury. There’s so much just getting through the day-to-day and the week-to-week, and the space to be strategic, to step back and that’s what I mean by ‘planfulness,’ look out ahead and be more deliberate about what it is I do to try to get there. I think that that’s harder and harder to do with the technological landscape we’re in and the cultural expectations that that creates for us to be responsive very quickly. To be always on, to be fast and short.
Amy: Okay, so I want to get a little meta here, because that cultural expectation for us to be always on very responsive, hyper productive, fast and short is to me a recipe for burnout. And so in and of itself is not sustainable, nor regenerative. So if we were to apply the lens of regeneration or regenerative thinking onto our own willingness to engage with that, what does that look like?
Charlotte: Absolutely, yeah. One pushback I get sometimes when I talk about this vision for having a garment be regenerative and that what if we could use the market and consumption to create a demand for carbon removal, to create a value on it that then empowers it, so we don’t have to wait for policy to force it, I get the pushback that I’m sort of apologizing for capitalism or consumerism and I want to be very clear that the acceleration of consumerism, especially in fashion is absolutely a problem. And it’s a problem not just for the planet, I think it’s a problem for our own happiness. So what does a regenerative relationship to our materials, to our textiles, to our fashion look like? I do think that by getting into a more present tense relationship with the sun is a key phrase that I use sometimes. But getting more connected to what the materials we make our lives of are made of and how they come to be, we can slow down a little bit. We can get so much more gratification and aura out of the things we choose to include in our lives. And slow down this acceleration of consumption, of being on trend is on the scale of weeks. That is not helping anyone and the possibility of a regenerative relationship to things and materials and stuff could have a soothing and a slowing effect on our own relationship with ourselves and our lives and our communities. That’s a hopeful thing too. of you being able to tap into your own individual rhythms and needs. So how do we create space for that?
Amy: Well, I listened to a talk you gave a group of, I think they were high school students or they were young climate scientists. [1.00.00] And you had some things to say that I thought really applied, to anyone, first of all, embrace your creative agency, which I think if we’re talking about how do we create space for individual biorhythms, part of that is going to come from individuals embracing their creative agency and setting boundaries and communication. But in the embracing the creative agency part, you also acknowledge that this general movement, these changes need to happen in every industry. So it doesn’t mean you have to be science oriented, you can still follow your bliss and care about the climate at the same time and move forward with your creative agency with this idea that you can affect change, valuable change in any industry. Which I thought was so concrete and so valuable for young people to hear. But it also reminds us that we can’t just rely on scientists to fix this, it does have to happen in every single industry and it has to be a concerted effort altogether, which is why the changing of cultural norms and expectations is so important. Because we need this happening in retail, in dentistry, in even like the wellness space, we need it happening everywhere. And anyway, just thank you for that talk.
Charlotte: That’s a mindset shift I think in a big way, to go from seeing yourself… and I think part of what’s damaging about this distant long lensed view of climate change is that it’s so disempowering and the feeling that I’m just one tiny person and this is something that governments and international panels of scientists can’t even… so what am I supposed to do? And I think the flip… I think that comes from, and it helped me coming from design training, the specific example of this is in studio, as a design student, working with metal and taking this material that felt so tough and strong and something that I as a little monkey with my soft little fingertips couldn’t possibly transform. And the shift that happens when you learn how to use tools that extend your capability and allow you to act on things that felt previously immutable, that kind of empowerment and the shift that oh, there’s other systems and things and institutions that feel like they’re made of metal. But if I can find the right tools, maybe invent the right tools, I can start to carve them into a screw. (Laughs) And these institutions are made of people.
Amy: Yes!
Charlotte: These abstractions are just made of people and you, we, are those people. So if we change, we’ve changed those institutions.
Amy: Yeah, exactly! (Laughs)
Charlotte: And that maybe seems naïve or overly simplified, but it’s also profound. They’re just the material of a community or a government or… an NGO of xyz is just people at the end of the day. And so just asking questions about what the goals are, what we’re doing on xyz, that shifts the institution because you are in it and you are part of that collective of ideas that make up what this thing that you’re participating in is or is not.
Amy: I am so fascinated in the work that you’re doing and I’m also so grateful that the power of storytelling is super evident in your work and also in the way that you give your talks and frame really abstract ideas. So thank you for that. I think it’s another portal, it’s another invitation in, right, when you tell a story that invites somebody into the science of it all. I am going to make a leap here, but in digging through your background, you spent some time in theater, right? you’re not afraid of the narrative, in fact you harness the narrative very actively in your communications, in the fact that you knew that this needed to not be a swatch, it needed to be a full-blown object. What can you tell me about your storytelling background, from your theater history, that you think is still super relevant to the work that you’re doing today?
Charlotte: Things I learned from theater, many of those principles have a lot of overlap in design disciplines and are just called different things. So we would do a lot of ideating and a lot of brainstorming, putting different little sketches of moments or ideas, not on the wall,, but instead in space and refine, converge towards possibilities. We did a lot of prototyping and testing and always iterating, always seeing what was landing. Because you can have a concept for something and that doesn’t mean that an audience is going to pick up what you put down.
Amy: Yeah. (Laughs)
Charlotte: And so always testing your assumptions about how a story is going to connect. I do think that all of that is foundational to the way I think about creative process and sort of teleporting something out of my mind into someone else’s mind. And the process of that. I do think that there’s just a fundamental comfort I have with being in front of a group of people and just being perceived and that’s definitely something that I think also connects to design, education and pedagogy and the routine experience of critique and defending your work and speaking to your work and the importance of not just having a good idea, but getting other people excited about it. And it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, if you can’t get other people to buy in to your idea, get them enrolled in the idea and there’s multiple parts to enrolling someone in your idea. Like how do you use surprise to get attention, but still follow through to being persuasive down to having people care about what you’re doing. All of these pieces I think are rooted in storytelling and they’re crafts that you can practice and improve and just put in hours. (Laughs) I don’t know, I’m curious… it seems like maybe you have more insight than I do.
Amy: Well, I mean I will just say I think in some ways your understanding of these charismatic properties that help an idea land or help convey, teleport an idea from your head to someone else’s or change a mind or heart. I think you’ve transferred them into your objects. I’ve read that you talk about these charismatic objects, and I do think that in some ways you need the object to do the performing for you and that understanding maybe got its start in theater.
Charlotte: Yeah. Which I think is also part of why a raincoat made more sense than like a vase or something that would be more legible to industrial design because it is anthropomorphic, it’s a character.
Amy: Yes! But we can assume that character because we can immediately imagine ourselves putting it on and being in it.
Charlotte: Yeah.
Amy: Which is way different than me imagining me carrying a vase from one table to another or putting it on a shelf, right? I’m now wearing this raincoat and I am a certain kind of person in this raincoat. And so that’s a very easy leap for the mind to make.
Charlotte: I hope so!
Amy: No, it is, and I think in doing so you’re also extending this wide open invitation to come along the journey with you, which is what you stated from the beginning. I think you’re living up to the promise of your work so congratulations. (Laughs) Is there anything that you don’t get to talk about that you feel like is really important?
Charlotte: Just one thing I want to put into the universe while I get to talk to you Amy is yeah, just feeling excited. I’m in a place where I’m excited about the potential for new projects and collaborations and if there’s anyone hearing this who wants to be part of that, reach out. My Stanford email is public and there’s still so much work to do and as we’ve talked about, it’s going to take all of us and I really do think that interdisciplinarity is essential to finding interesting solutions to problems that have been so stuck otherwise. So yeah, I guess there’s stuff cooking, but that’s about all I can say at this point.
Amy: I love that wink, and I love whatever is cooking because I’m so excited for when you get to reveal more of it. I’m glad you put that out there because I was going to ask you, what do you think is needed in terms of support. What kind of support would put wind in your sails personally, and what kind of collaborators and/or new projects would help pull your work forward.
Charlotte: Particularly in the position I find myself in right now, at Stanford there’s a lot of support for tech and science and basic knowledge, but I’m always interested in, both for my own work and for connecting my students to the real world of working on these things, really interested in people who really are in the trenches of trying to transform their organizations and their production processes, I’m thinking in particular about fashion and textiles. I don’t know if you know, Palo Alto is not really a center of fashion in the world. (Laughs)
Amy: I do know. (Laughter) I lived on the West Coast for 20 years and made several trips up there.
Charlotte: It’s super important that research is really connected to challenges and knowledge for knowledge sake is great, but I think we’re in a moment of urgency where we need to connect what we investigate very closely with the challenges we face and hold in mind the human and ecological impacts we want to have as we think about what we do. I think technology for technology sake is a mindset that feels very prevalent here, and I think that designers approach that stays connected to need and opportunity, yeah, connection to people who are really… who can articulate both for me and for some of the grad students I work with, what they really think the need is. I don’t want to get too lost in the university weeds, I wanted to stay really connected to the challenges.
Amy: I do respect that. I think there’s this really great space where the university bubble provides a safe space for this kind of really creative and speculative thinking, but then given a real world, not just a real world challenge, but the application of that potential solution, maybe a context in which you design for a specific context, like with an industry partner who has a very specific need. That can be a really dynamic environment in which both the student and the educational institution and the industry partner grow and learn from each other. And it can be a really powerful feedback loop and an exciting way to address challenges, and invest in the future generation of these problem solvers. So it is my wish that the ideal collaborators come to you (laughs) and will find you very easily and…
Charlotte: Yeah, still working in the space of carbon removal, textiles and collective imaginaries around a future we can build, that definitely remains the through line of what I’m working on and what I believe in as a way to do something positive with my one little life.
Amy: Well, I thank you for sharing that with me and for the good work you’re doing in the world and for sharing it with the next generation. It’s powerful and it’s compelling and it’s hopeful and I’m super excited by it.
Charlotte: Thank you Amy, this has been super fun and thank you for asking questions that push me to think new thoughts.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Charlotte, including links and images of his work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clevver with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us Us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.
Algae raincoat, courtesy of Charlotte McCurdy
“Algae Sequin” dress (left). Charlotte McCurdy collaboration with Phillip Lim on view at “Sleeping Beauties_ Reawakening Fashion” at The Costume Institute of The MET. Image Credit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Material Design, courtesy of Charlotte McCurdy
In the Lab with Charlotte McCurdy Sustainability is a “spider diagram” according to what the individual cares about most. Credit: George Chinsee, WWD
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
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