HiP Awards > People > HiP Designer for Sustainability

Photography by Adrienne Fox.

Ariane Laxo is a national award-winning Interior Designer and Director of Sustainability at HGA. She is advancing the firm’s work on decarbonization, resilience, and fostering healthy communities. With a background in Interior Design, Ariane blends human-centered design with sustainability so that client outcomes rely on reliable evidence to improve both the occupant experience and building performance. In her work within her firm, with clients, and within the industry, she distills complex issues into approachable, tangible pieces with strengths in synthesis, analysis, and research. Her passion, advocacy and dedication have advanced sustainability and resilience practices in the industry. For the last decade, she has been exploring how climate projections can be used to inform architecture and engineering workflows, including collaborating with climate scientists on how to translate outputs from climate projection models into data formats used by energy modeling tools. Ariane has been leading the development of HGA’s Field Guide to Holistic Design, bringing together interdisciplinary participants to co-create a workflow to make best practice standard – in the interest of having a greater impact on the communities the firm works with. A gifted facilitator and change leader, she is evolving HGA’s design culture to embrace equity, inclusion, and sustainability as the foundation of their practice. She holds a Certificate in Positive Psychology, which shapes her approach to collaboration and mentorship; learnings she has shared both internally and externally. She has held many volunteer leadership positions, including IIDA Northland Chapter President, USGBC Emerging Professionals National Committee Chair, and as Executive Director of TEDx Minneapolis. She collaborates with external partners on sustainability and resilience research and is a frequent speaker on the national stage to share knowledge and advance the practice of sustainability for the great good of our people, our industry, our planet.