| Description | As the Regional Sustainable Design Leader for the Texas offices of Perkins and Will, a member of the firm’s Sustainable Design Council, and Co-Director with Max Richter of the Materials Performance Research Lab, Mary Dickinson integrates research thinking, advanced sustainable technologies, healthy material protocols, and evidence-based processes across the firm’s practice. Her lifelong interests in nature, the environment, health, and science are characterized by questions she has raised throughout her career. As an interior design major studying materials she began by asking, “What is it made of?” Working with Perkins and Will leaders, other issues arose, “How do we find the toxicants in materials?” Also, as she describes, the genome is how your body is affected by your genes, and the exposome is how you are affected by your environment. Now she and her colleagues are investigating the impact the built environment has on this dynamic. Mary has worked to develop information methodologies that enable designers to make healthy product recommendations to a client. First launched in 2009, the Perkins and Will Precautionary List identifies substances that have known or suspected health impacts for humans and the built environment. It is an example of transparency on multiple levels. The List continues to be updated as a result of communication between design professionals, researchers, and manufacturers. The platform’s content will always be publicly available to all. |
