Values

It’s been long understood that talent is widely distributed, but opportunity is not. At the inception of Baker Design Group (BDG), several individuals, corporations, and institutions, were willing to take a risk on our young firm over more established firms. BDG has in turn looked to hire and provide opportunity to talented individuals from all ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations. During the firm’s decades of operation, our work has been made better by the diversity of thought and insight from these team members. This has been the founding principle of our hiring practice and leads to the firm’s success. BDG is a Just certified organization (Click here to learn more).

In recent years, BDG has been seeing an increased demand from our clients, to improve upon their interior environments promoting health and wellness for their employees. Companies and institutions recognize the amount of time staff, faculty, and students, spend at the workplace and learning environments and the significance of having high performance interior environments for their health and wellbeing. This important design trend has greatly expanded over time and has now become best practice for workplace and educational design.

BDG has been helping companies and institutions introduce health and wellness strategies into the workplace and classroom environments through implementation of healthy/sustainable furniture and materials, new wellness-centered spatial types, circadian lighting, and high-performance mechanical systems. This has been delivered for large scale project designs with a goal of achieving LEED, LBC or WELL Certifications, or on a smaller scale, by following sustainable guidelines and best practices while not pursuing certifications. To ensure our clients sustainability goals are met and that this becomes a focus of the project design and construction process, we recommend an integrated design approach with the owner, design team, and construction team to establishing health, wellness, and sustainability goals and requirements as early as possible in the design process.

BDG cares deeply about this topic and understands the importance and necessity of including health, wellness, and sustainability into our design practices. Over the past few years BDG has been working with Harvard University’s Office for Sustainability and other sustainability industry leading consultant teams to design projects that not only incorporate existing health and wellness standards for building and interior environments, such as LEED, Living/Building Challenge, Healthy Hospital Initiative, WELL, etc., but our collaborations have allowed us to expand our healthy materials & sustainable design knowledge to push boundaries and thresholds further.

Working together with Harvard’s Office for Sustainability and other sustainability consultants on Harvard Projects, we have broadened our knowledge of this evolving topic and we have helped to expand the list of acceptable materials, finishes and furniture, by specifying materials from Harvard’s extensive research and analysis teams. This process includes a scientific approach with materials and product review that examines each material’s composition and chemical make-up to vet it for safety, wellness, and sustainability. This leads to direct contact with manufacturers to suggest ways to make a material safer or alter the composition, which would allow it to be approved and become published on Harvard’s list for acceptable materials, and other Red List Free material websites. This has diversified and expanded the options for healthy/sustainable materials to the design industry.

Overall, this cyclical, transparent, and highly collaborative design process benefits all parties involved, especially the inhabitants of these newly healthy and sustainably designed buildings and interior environments. BDG’s collaboration with the Harvard Office for Sustainability and other industry leading sustainability consultants has broadened our knowledge as a firm on this evolving and complex topic of healthy, wellness, and sustainable design, which we have been proud to implement into our projects.