What is Mutualistic Design?

Mutualistic Design helps your company or products become a pioneer in the Sustainable Design field. Sustainability is a complex, relative process until you achieve Mutualism, a process that not only enhances the sustainability of your products but also enhances your customers experience, your employees lifestyle, your communities resilience and the Planet’s productive capacity.

To design truly sustainable products one must question the product lifecycle and ultimately the economic structure’s we have become accustomed to. We at Mutualistic Design help your company navigate these complexities, building resilience and sustainability for generations to come.

Who We Are?

Braden works independently yet has a network of freelance designers that he collaborates with and brings in on projects as needed. He along with his collaborators are highly trained designers with decades of experience in the sustainable design field. Our experience ranges from traditional product design, systems design, and user centered design to home scale and regional sustainability, Permaculture Education, all the way up to International Development work. This diverse background in Systems Thinking, Sustainable Product Design and Sustainable Community Planning allows us to develop appropriate solution for you and your company, beyond just product design.

Braden Trauth MDes: Head Designer

He has been pioneering sustainability for almost two decades now, piecing together what a sustainable future will look like through asking tough questions. He holds a BS in Industrial Design and a Masters in Design from University of Cincinnati. He has trained with the leaders of the Permaculture Movement , including its founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, around the globe. He has trained hundreds of students in Permaculture Design and Sustainable Design over the years, helping those students further mutualism through permaculture design processes in their lives, businesses, jobs, communities, farms and homes. He has designed systems for one of the largest Organic Companies in the field and is the former Chairman of the Urban Agriculture Advisory Board for the City Council of Cincinnati. He has also developed and presented a transition strategy for Haitian Farming toward Mutualistic/Permaculture based farming to the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, where he still assists his students and collaborating professors in the transition process. He has also pioneered the development of the worlds first Regenerative Farm Certification, Permaganic Authenticated. You can learn more about his permaculture/farm/community design work at OMValleyPermaculture.com or at CincinnatiPermacultureInstitute.org, Cincinnati’s Permaculture Education Non-Profit, which he was co-founder of and is currently the Executive Director.

Collaborative Contract Design Team:

Braden has a great team of contract designers, all trained in Mutualistic Design to help fulfill our clients needs. They bring diverse and unique design experience in the field of sustainability to create beautiful and functional work, no matter the challenge. No project is too daunting to find beautiful solutions that will work for generations to come to solve our daily problems