The last frontier

Priya Gandhi, M.AIRAH, took the trip of a lifetime to Antarctica in 2023. Laura Timberlake speaks to her about the lessons she learned.

Although Priya grew up in the Rocky Mountains in the USA and spent much of her childhood in national parks, the things she saw in remote Antarctica on the Homeward Bound program still amazed her. An associate director at Atelier Ten, she’s now applying what she learned to her daily life and work.  

Laura Timberlake: Can you tell us a little more about the trip – what it encompassed, and how you became involved?  

Priya Gandhi: In 2019 I was accepted into a global leadership program for women and gender diverse people in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine). The program is called Homeward Bound and brings together individuals from various fields around the world to study leadership. There was a strong theme around climate action and science communication – how can we use our platforms to effectively communicate to the public and make an impact? Even though not everybody worked specifically in sustainability, it was a big theme that underlined everything. 

As originally envisioned, the program was meant to include a nine-month online course and then culminate in a three-week intensive on a trip to Antarctica. My original trip was planned for 2020, but then the pandemic happened and it was postponed until last year. 

So in November 2023 I boarded the MV Ushuaia, a former research vessel turned tourist cruise ship, along with 83 other women from around the world. My cohort included everyone from medical doctors to policymakers, scientists and consultants like myself. We sailed from Ushuaia, Argentina and spent three weeks together – just us and the 40-odd person crew. This was not a luxury cruise, more like school-camp vibes with bunk beds. Each day our schedule changed, but it was generally a mix of leadership sessions and Antarctica excursions, depending on the weather.  

What are some of the big takeaways you took from the program?  

I came back from this trip with a renewed sense of hope and purpose. There was a lot of discussion on the ship around climate grief, or climate anxiety (referring to the sense of loss you can feel about climate change or environmental destruction). I’ve been working in sustainability my entire career and I take a lot of this stuff very personally.   

For a long time I felt pretty isolated in my climate grief and anxiety – it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, even though rationally I knew that wasn’t the case.   Being around so many brilliant and passionate women also going through these deep emotions was reaffirming and, perhaps oddly, uplifting.    

I was also astounded by the biodiversity and abundance of life in and around Antarctica. It’s an incredibly harsh environment yet the seas, skies, and land were teeming with life: whales, dolphins, seals, penguins, skuas, petrels, cormorants and more. Of course, Antarctica is not untouched by climate change – in fact it is heating up at an accelerated rate, causing penguin colonies to move ever further south, increased ice sheet disappearance, and less and less sea ice each year (to name a few of the many impacts!). 

But even so – when there was life, it was prolific! I will never forget the first time I saw penguins in the wild. There were excited shouts and we all ran outside to look. We were still quite far – but with my binoculars, the dark specks I thought were rocks were actually hundreds of gentoo penguins. Life was everywhere – from the dive bombing petrels and skua hundreds of kilometres from land in Drake’s Passage, to the penguin colonies of thousands of birds on the ice- and snow-covered land. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about a line from Jurassic Park, “life finds a way” – and it really does! If biodiversity is so great in such a frigid and unforgiving environment, then surely improving the biodiversity in our cities and urban spaces shouldn’t be too difficult! 

Another big takeaway was something within Homeward Bound we call “leading in emergence”. That is, learning how to lead when things are difficult, uncertain, shifting, and unpredictable. I’m someone who’s very much a planner – I like to do lists, I like schedules, I like order (in my work at least!). This has served me really well as a way to think strategically and think of different possibilities. It’s a lot easier to lead when things are easy and going your way, but with climate change the only certain thing is uncertainty – so being able to lead when things are hard, dynamic, and unclear, that’s the real skill. 

Full circle

With the ongoing climate and biodiversity emergency, this is a question that Priya believes needs to be answered with every project. She believes that good design can solve the climate crisis, one project at the time, and this is the foundation to her work as Associate Director at Atelier Ten in Melbourne.

Priya has a BS in mechanical engineering, an MS in architecture (building science), and experience in research and industry, working on both US coasts and in Australia. She is Vice President of IBPSA Australasia and is on the organising committee for the upcoming global conference Building Simulation 2025 in Brisbane. She is on the GBCA’s Expert Reference Panel for Energy and Carbon and serves on the SDAPP Framework Technical Reference Panel.

Has this affected your work at Atelier Ten since you returned? 

Something that’s come up a lot in my work in the last 18 months is the idea of regenerative design – and how that incorporates a broader scope, including things like designing for biodiversity. How does an individual building or a group of buildings contribute to a biodiverse ecosystem? How do you measure biodiversity? How do you know that you have made a positive impact (or even a negative one that needs correcting)?  

But seeing how life can flourish in the harsh environments in Antarctica made me consider how we can create our own small ecosystems. They can still contribute positively, and by using this regenerative approach I’m trying to bring more of that ethos into my work. 

For the first part of my career I was very focused on the technical detail and performance of buildings – I was an energy modeller. I spent a lot of time thinking about technology and controls, and technical solutions to reducing energy use and carbon emissions. In some areas of high performance building we’re at a point where we have actually solved quite a lot of technical problems, and now it’s more of a strategic or tactical innovation that we need. 

Not every building owner is going to be your top-tier developer or client with exemplar and demanding ESG targets driving the sustainability vision. I love working on these big, innovative projects, but I recognise that they are just a small percentage of buildings. What about the rest of the market? We need to also consider the significant percentage of the industry that is barely performing to the building code. 

There is an untapped market of building owners who may not know where to start and I suspect that it’s not a lack of interest, but a lack of access to resources. We can’t get to where we need to be without bringing them along with us.  And that’s what I mean about strategic and tactical innovation – how do you make something like zero-carbon design business as usual? The technology is there, that’s not the issue – it’s a matter of logistics, of resources, of cost. 

I feel so privileged to have the education and experience that I have. And like Uncle Ben says, “with great power [knowledge] comes great responsibility”. I am excited about this responsibility – I want to use my experience and skills to bring sustainable, regenerative design to more people. And I think the way I can do that is by being a better communicator. 

What have you learned about communicating complex messages to people? 

The program came at just the right time in my career – as I was rising into leadership roles. 

One of the most impactful sessions that I had was with Dr Jen Martin from the University of Melbourne, who spoke to us about science communication. She teaches scientists how to communicate to people in a way that they will understand, not just in a way that you, the scientist, will understand.  

Studies have shown that technical papers and articles have been using more and more jargon over time, and that’s not a mark of good communication – that’s a mark of knowing a lot of big words. 

The best way to communicate is to understand your audience – what do they care about? How does that relate to what you want to get across? The entire globe got a real life lesson in the importance of science communication during the pandemic, including a lot of examples of how not to do it. 

At Atelier Ten we have always taken time early on in projects to develop a clear sustainability vision aligned with the client’s priorities and goals. I feel like I’ve been able to take this to the next level with the training I’ve had with Homeward Bound. Because it’s not just about the content, but it’s also about the communication method and style. I have a lot more insight into how the communication method impacts understanding and how to connect better with the client/architect/general public by considering different ways of learning. 

I’m really excited about this shift in my focus. Don’t get me wrong, the technical stuff is still important and interesting, but I’m realising that the communication side is where I can really make a difference. This is part of what I meant earlier, when I said this program has helped me to figure out my purpose – my “why”. 

Homeward Bound

Homeward Bound is a leadership initiative that aims to create a global community of women and non-binary people with a background in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine). 

The program aims to increase the influence and impact of leaders in making decisions that shape the future of our planet.  

Launched in 2016, the program has three strategic focal points: 

• I am willing and able to lead
  
• We are stronger together
  
• We are taking actions with impact. 

The participants undertake 12 months of online study before embarking on a trip to a destination that offers the cohorts an opportunity to observe first-hand the influence of human activities on the environment and provide critical insights into the global-scale change required. 

And when you’re working with so many people across so many fields, how do you take all of those strands and tie them all together? 

I strive to take a holistic approach – where you’re not looking at things in isolation, but rather as interconnected and intertwined. This approach is part of integrated design or generative design – there are no silos of knowledge. My role is to bring all of these experts together to find connections, potential integrations, and develop new solutions. 

As I mentioned earlier, I have been spending a lot of time in the last couple years thinking about nature and biodiversity, and how our cities can be a catalyst for positive change.  

When it comes to biodiversity and the built environment, Cristina Hernandez-Santin at RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research introduced me to an approach that really resonated – we need to “design for the non-human users”. With that one phrase she took something daunting (biology?? I haven’t studied biology since high school!) and made it comprehensible and approachable. The example she gave was designing for frogs – they need things like access to water and underbrush within their habitats. 

When you look at it like that, it kind of demystifies it a bit. Of course it’s complex designing a whole ecosystem, but there have been some wonderful examples of biodiversity success – like the City of Melbourne bringing butterflies back into the city by planting small areas of native plants. There’s so much going on in that space, even just locally, which I think is really exciting.  

What was a highlight of the trip? 

The friends I made along the way! (Sorry, I seem to keep quoting movies). But seriously, the women I met before and during the trip have been inspiring and uplifting, genuine and remarkable, kind and caring, creative and badass. I have this incredible network of friends to rely on, to share joys with, to grieve with, to lift up in turn – and it’s constantly growing as the program continues on. A few months ago I was on holiday and met up with a few shipmates in Colorado – they brought along a participant from another voyage and now I have one more awesome friend. 

The conversations and experiences we shared were life changing. From the utter delight of someone yelling “Whale! 3 o’clock” before we all dropped what we were doing and rushed to the starboard side to see a humpback breaching. And the day we cruised around a sea of icebergs under the bluest sky and witnessed an iceberg flipping over to reveal a colour I didn’t know was possible. Or the lesson about embracing paradox in leadership – I can feel profound grief about the loss and destruction of climate change, but I can also feel incredible joy at seeing an Adélie penguin slide across the snow on its belly in front of me.  

The world needs leaders who feel and think, who are caring and pragmatic, who can, when the world can be depressing and difficult, still hold on to hope and joy. 

All images courtesy of Priya Gandhi, M.AIRAH.