We caught up with designer, educator, and world-changer Debera Johnson before she headed to San Francisco to speak at Compostmodern. It’s hard to know where to start when describing Johnson’s multi-faceted, entirely inspiring career. She is the founder and director of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation, which helps establish new socially responsible companies and connects businesses and non-profits with Pratt’s community to work on socially responsible/sustainable projects. Johnson is also Pratt’s Academic Director of Sustainability, and the director of the Pratt Center for Sustainable Design Studies (an umbrella entity that facilitates sustainable work within the school). Last fall, she directed the Pratt Academic Leadership Summit on Sustainability (PALSS), which brought together representatives from 33 art and design schools to the implementation of educational programming around sustainability.

Through her transformative work and her unbounded talent for bringing people and ideas together, Johnson has been instrumental in reinterpreting the role played by designers today.  Here, she shares her thoughts on nurturing socially responsible entrepreneurship, teaching sustainability, and bringing a sense of joy to green design practices.

Living Principles: What are some of the latest developments at Design Incubator?

Debera Johnson: We’re moving from the first stages of the Incubator to “Incubator 2.0.” That involves two main developments: First, we’ve just accepted five new companies into the Incubator, three design based companies and two engineering firms. One of those is making modular biogas systems for urban environments—turning compost into fuel. Another has a patent on a system to capture energy from slow-moving water—affordable low-tech solutions that drop in the water and start generating usable energy. Second, we’ve come up with a more structured “curriculum” to develop our entrepreneurs. In the past, we’ve let the companies within the Incubator develop fairly organically. We’ve learned a lot about what our start-ups need and this will help speed up the process. We’re excited to do something more structured, because our next step will be to bring in virtual start-ups who don’t necessarily need space but could benefit from being a part of the Incubator.

You know, I’m so impressed by the capacity of people to do amazing things, and that’s what Incubator is for: giving people a place to give it a try. Designers are great at having ideas, but we don’t necessarily know how business works. The Incubator is essentially a Master’s in sustainable entrepreneurship. And it’s creating models for sustainable businesses: People can look at it and see how there is profit in going green.

A “Design Jam” that was run for a project undertaken in collaboration with the Earth Institute. The ultimate goal was to improve health care in Ugandan villages by developing better  training materials for home health aids.

What are some other developments and upcoming projects you’re working on that you’re excited about?

Through the Pratt Center, we are going to do something that goes beyond Bloomberg’s plaNYC. We’re taking on the city’s future from a designer rather than a urban planner perspective. We’re hoping to bring 200 people from the community together for a massive design jam about what they think about 2030. The goal is to create a vision for a better world with the people who are going to live in that world. Pratt’s CSDS (Center for Sustainable Design Studies) has also begun to work with a high school in Westchester County, New York to figure out how to innovate sustainability within their curriculum. We’ve been working with CELF (Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation) which led to this invitation to work with one of their high schools. The goal of CSDS is to be a regional resource for educators.

Collaboration has been key to so much of what you’ve accomplished. What makes collaboration, especially between designers and non-designers, work effectively?

It’s really about inviting people in and being a good host. One of my credos for working with any group is that the food should be good—at least when people leave they’ve had something good to eat—and the people should be good, meaning that everyone leaves feeling they’ve met someone really interesting. Conviviality is hugely important. We don’t have enough of that in our lives. I think Americans have their heads down and are focused on what they’re trying to get done. But when you look up and take some time to see what people are doing around you, it can shake you up and redefine your direction.

For me, everything I do is around collaboration. If I’m not doing something collaborative and replicable, I’m not as interested. Designers tend to be natural collaborators, because we’re not the experts on anything—we have to get in there and find out what our clients and their customers are doing. For me, the designer brain, which thinks in a really emergent way, leads the way for others to turn that part of their brain on. Design Jams bring together designers and people who have something to tackle. If you create the right atmosphere for people to take on a creative conversation, it’s fantastic. From there you can build a community that is ready to collaborate on the project.

How can design schools, and academically linked programs like the Incubator, have the greatest impact in collaborations with non-academic entities?

I think it’s important that academic institutions recognize that they don’t have the same bottom line to deal with as private companies do when trying to come up with innovative models. Private companies are in an existing system, based on overhead and paying the bills, but we’re not. I think of it as working on moon gravity versus earth gravity. It’s easier for us to take risks, and academia has a responsibility to take those risks and help model change.

What do you think can be done to generate creative thinking about sustainability at all levels of education?

I think we’re in this really awkward period in education. There is kind of a generation gap now. The speed of change and tremendous access to information is shaking up the old model, because it’s shifting the way we work in the world. The professorial model is starting to make way for a curatorial model. Things are changing too fast to create experts – it’s more important to be good critical thinkers and learners. I think we need to create a migration path from teaching one’s expertise to guiding a dialogue that poses a really interesting question and exploring it together. Instead of looking for right answers, we should be looking for right strategies that can hold up as the world changes around us.

How can teachers, and people in general, best approach those major technological and philosophical shifts happening now?

People are cynical, and sustainability is like a tidal wave of complexity coming at you. This cynicism is really an expression of our fear of massive change: People like to know where things are, and the world seems threatening. You can see this happening everywhere. I grew up in the ’60s—it was a very tumultuous period, and I think we’re going through a similar disruption. As uncomfortable as that is, it will move us forward, and our attitudes and culture will change.

Our world is changing so quickly, and our culture doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s like we’re all fifteen—it’s a really awkward time. You can put your head in the sand, and shiver with fear, or take it on.

What advice to you have for designers who want to make changes and be environmentally sound in their day-to-day work?

Decide to care about the consequences of your work and dive in—find out what’s going on within your discipline so it’s relevant to you. It really doesn’t take long once you start.

People come to me all the time asking for the “right” answer. Sustainability is a moving target, and each situation has different criteria to base decisions upon. You have to be willing to get out there and learn things, but get comfortable with the fact that we don’t have all the answers yet—and it’s inevitable that you’re going to get it wrong sometimes. That’s OK, because you’re trying, and you’re part of the dialogue and that’s moving things in the right direction.

The PALSS conference/initiative has potential to transform design education’s approach to sustainability. What are some notable outcomes of the conference?

I challenged the presidents of the independent art and design schools to collaborate on sustainability rather than compete with one another. The goal is to share and leverage resources to build capacity and integrate sustainability into our curricula. So now 33 schools are working together to up the dialogue. It creates a critical mass for making change. We’re looking at teaching classes together, doing faculty development together and being resources for each other. We’d like to have each PALSS representative act as a portal or facilitator for their school into the PALSS network. For example, if the chair of a fine arts program is trying to solve a problem around materials use, he’d be able to call a meeting through PALSS and talk it through with his peers. It’s a sort of on demand access that isn’t readily available at the moment. It will really expand the networks we have access too—and create faster, well informed change.

Can you give us a little preview of your talk at Compostmodern?

The focus will be on the Incubator. We’re linking the designer to the entrepreneur and the social citizen—I call it connecting the “want to” with the “how to” and the “need to.” I’ll introduce some of our start-ups and talk about how we’ve managed to create a space for people passionate enough to take on socially responsible entrepreneurship. I’m hoping that other people will be inspired to replicate our model. Then we can start collaborating!

Connecting design with social and environmental issues is a serious and complex task, but it seems like you bring a great deal of joy to it. How can we make sure that this kind of work includes an element of fun?

It is so easy, especially around sustainability and politics, to be a wet blanket. People are exhausted by how impossible it seems. We’re constantly being told “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” And we’re being picked away at, psychically. We need to start getting people excited about what the future holds. It’s going to be great and let’s make it happen.

Deep within us is a need for community, and we’ve stopped listening to it. Community, working together, making it happen together, conviviality, brings pleasure into our lives and it stimulates happiness. Prioritize that and you’ll find joy.

Solar Ivy, a patent-pending solar energy delivery device created by SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology), an Incubator start-up that Johnson describes as “our oldest incubee still in residence.”

Clothes from The Twentyten, a fashion studio that is one of the Incubator’s newest additions to the fold.