My Doom & Bloom recap: S1E5

I host the Doom & Bloom podcast from Climate Designers. Below is my recap of the latest episode.

In this special episode recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, I sat down with Katie Patrick, environmental engineer and software designer. We go deep into why we’re stuck in a doom-heavy narrative and what it’ll take to design for the future we actually want.

This is a conversation about systems, behavior, and possibility. It's about moving beyond facts and fear. It's about shifting from problem-obsession to solution momentum.

Katie nailed it when she called out the "value-action gap", this assumption that if we just educate people enough, they'll change. We're applying 20th-century thinking to 21st-century problems.

We throw facts at people, expecting logic to drive behavior. Meanwhile, the most successful behavior changes of our time, from social media addiction to fitness apps, they've figured out the dopamine system. They've cracked the code of human psychology.

Katie brings up the loneliness epidemic. What if the idea of loneliness isn't about human disconnection, but our disconnection with nature? We've built walls between ourselves and the natural world, then wonder why we feel isolated.

I mean, we've also built walls between us and:

• our food
• where our clothes come from
• from our communities
• from ourselves

The pug cafe might sound silly, but it represents something revolutionary, using design to create spaces where our polarized minds remember our shared humanity.

Our climate breakdown isn't a technical problem. It's a design problem.

True climate resilience is about designing our way back to wholeness, understanding we're not separate from nature, we are nature trying to remember how to live in harmony with itself.

So, designers, let's design the future we want to live in.