One of seven original designers at WeWork who helped create the coworking product that transformed the industry, Dean went on to lead design teams across New York, London, Shanghai and Tokyo, delivering more than 3 million square feet of workspace. That front-row seat to commercial real estate's endemic waste problem sent him in a new direction: in 2024, he completed the Circular Economy Masterclass at the University of Exeter Business School and launched his 'Circular by Design' furniture collection — a direct challenge to the throwaway culture he'd watched up close for two decades.
But it's not the furniture that brings Dean to Spill the Green Tea. It's something he said on a panel at the Surface Design Show earlier this year that stopped Katie in their tracks: environmentalism needs a new narrative. In this episode, they dig into exactly what that means and what it looks like in practice.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why ignorance might be our most environmentally unfriendly habit and why acknowledging what we don't know is not a weakness but the starting point for genuine progress
- The difference between spreading opinions about sustainability and doing the actual work within your unique sphere of influence, and why focusing on where you can have the most disproportionate impact matters more than sweating every detail
- Why the current environmental narrative is failing — when the language of fighting, saving, and activism only resonates with a narrow slice of society, the conversation stays small; true progress means communicating in ways that work for everyone, not just those with the luxury of caring
- How Dean helped redirect $98 million worth of furniture away from landfill by building a business case, not an activist campaign, and speaking the language of the boardroom
- How Dean's furniture collection makes circularity invisible to the consumer but baked into every material and production decision
None of us can save the planet single-handedly but if we each play our part within our sphere of influence, that adds up to something far greater than all of us spreading ourselves too thin.
Resources mentioned:
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy by Jonathan Chapman
Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga
Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
AI News & Strategy Daily with Nate B. Jones
Work in Progress by Dean Connell
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation Butterfly Diagram
More from Dean
Website: https://iamdc.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdeanconnell
More from Katie
More from Malin
PS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast
