Happy New Year, and welcome to our first episode of 2026. I’m Josh Cooperman with Convo By Design and have bee hosting Doctoring Up Design, the official podcast of Design Hardware. If you haven’t been into the showroom before, or its been a while, please come back and see all of the new updates and additions to this remarkable space, where we host industry education events, like the one you are going to hear today. This is a throwback to the first Environment Check event held in the showroom back in 2022.

It has been a year since the catastrophic fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. What have we learned? I would say we have learned a lot, but much of it isn’t new. So, periodically, in addition to all the new content we create here at Design Hardware, we are going to add some throwbacks that make sense. Like the program you are going to hear on this episode of Doctoring Up Design.

Design Hardware hosted a vital forum on how the intersection of gray water reclamation, native landscaping, and green building policy is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for human survival.

We, gathered a "Brain Trust" of sustainability experts at the Design Hardware showroom in Los Angeles. The conversation moves past the surface-level "crunchy granola" stereotypes of eco-design and dives into the hard science of urban resilience.

From the "double waste" of California’s current water infrastructure to the vanishing craft of climate-appropriate landscaping, the panel explores how designers and architects must act as "Building Scientists." The consensus is clear: awareness and education are the only tools powerful enough to shift policy from a reactive "whisper" to a proactive “scream." And that “scream” was heard loud and clear a year ago. Let’s explore ways to minimize this in the future. This feels like a good way to do that. Listen to a few hot talks from the following conversation and see if they don’t resonate. Because this was a conversation from 2022.

Participants:

Josh Cooperman | Convo By Design

Design Hardware | DesignHardware.com

Cassie Aoyagi | Form LA Landscaping

Leigh Jerard | Greywater Corps

Tim Barber | Tim Barber Architects

Ben Stapleton | USGBC California