Some people travel the world collecting postcards. Others collect questions. Anya Freeman has collected coastlines, and with them, a conviction that the edges of our cities do not have to be lifeless places where nature ends and concrete begins.
Her life has unfolded across borders and ideologies. Born in the former Soviet Union, shaped by Ukraine and Israel, and now rooted in Miami Beach, Freeman’s story is inseparable from movement, migration and possibility. Each place sharpened her understanding of what makes the world truly wonderful, not landscapes alone, but the human freedom to imagine boldly and then act.
“I was born in the USSR, where the idea of building a massive, impactful company was beyond the realm of possibility for my life,” she reflects. “The paths available to me there were narrow, to say the least.”
Everything shifted when her family moved to the United States. Here, she encountered a culture that not only allowed ambition but actively fuelled it. “Only in America can you raise twelve million dollars on what is essentially an idea, and have brilliant people look you in the eye and say, ‘Go build it.’”
For Freeman, that permission to dream without limits became foundational. Her journey, from a girl in Ukraine to a founder 3D-printing Living Seawalls in Miami, is, as she describes it, “a love letter to this country, to its belief in big swings, second chances, and the radical notion that the next world-changing solution can come from anyone who’s willing to work for it.”
A Coastline That Refuses to Choose
The coastline that most deeply shaped Kind Designs is not a distant idyll. It is Miami Beach itself, where rising seas, king tides and flooding are already lived realities.
“Walking past my own neighbourhood seawalls and realising they were ugly, incredibly expensive, and actively destroying marine habitats made something click,” Freeman says. “In a city as dynamic and beautiful as Miami, we were still pouring ugly grey concrete that protects property while wiping out life.”
Living so close to the water made environmental damage impossible to ignore. “The Bay is literally my backyard,” she explains. “So when I saw how traditional seawalls were wiping out marine life, it felt personal, not like an environmental issue in a report, but like damage to my own home.”
From that realisation came a refusal to accept a false choice. Safety or beauty. People or nature. Freeman became obsessed with proving that infrastructure could do both.
“If anywhere can prove that infrastructure can be both protective and alive,” she says, “it should be here.”
Reimagining the Hardware of Cities
Kind Designs emerged from that conviction, focused on reinventing one of the most overlooked and destructive elements of coastal infrastructure. Traditional seawalls are blunt tools, flat, toxic, expensive and ecologically devastating. Freeman saw an opportunity to redesign them entirely.
“What makes me genuinely optimistic about the future of coastal cities,” she says, “is that we’re not just tweaking old systems anymore. We’re redesigning the hardware of cities.”
Living Seawalls are 3D-printed structures designed using biomimicry. Their surfaces echo local marine habitats through ledges, cavities and pockets that invite life to return. “The geometry is designed so native species recognise it as usable space, not a dead, flat surface,” Freeman explains. “By prioritising rugosity and shelter, the wall starts to function like a vertical reef.”
The results surprised even the team. Scientific monitoring documented algae, oysters, invertebrates and fish colonising the walls within weeks. “By around five to seven months, those walls were supporting six to nine fish species per site,” Freeman recalls. “In under a year, FIU recorded soft coral growing inside the mangrove roots of our Miami Beach installation.”
Standing in front of the company’s first installation was a turning point. “On day one, it was a hard, complex piece of engineering,” she says. “A few months later, it was barely ours anymore. It had turned into habitat.”
Speed as a Moral Imperative
Despite the long timelines often associated with climate adaptation, Freeman rejects patience as a virtue in this context. “Building Kind Designs has actually confirmed that patience is the wrong strategy for sea-level rise,” she says.
She speaks candidly about the paralysis of endless panels and task forces. “Those rooms taught me that ‘long-term thinking’ had become an excuse for inaction. Timelines were always 2050 or 2100, never today.”
Instead, Kind Designs operates at startup speed. Rapid research and development, fast-tracked permits, constant iteration, and immediate deployment are baked into the culture. “The only way to get long-term results,” Freeman insists, “is immediate, radical execution.”
Central to this approach is her rejection of the so-called green premium. “I don’t believe in imposing environmental solutions on people in a space like seawalls, where the baseline is already brutally expensive,” she says. “If your climate solution only works when people pay more for less convenience, it’s not ready for the real world.”
Living Seawalls are designed to outperform traditional seawalls economically and ecologically at the same time. “There are no compromises,” she adds. “The product has to hit cost, speed, and environmental performance all at once.”
Builders, Belief, and the Return of Life
The spirit of Kind Designs is shaped as much by people as by technology. Freeman often points to the company’s first hire, a childhood neighbour known for dismantling and rebuilding anything mechanical, as emblematic of the culture she has built.
“He thrives in total chaos, a malfunction, or an ‘impossible’ problem to solve,” she says. “He’s always covered in concrete, grinning, because he’s exactly where he belongs.”
Beyond infrastructure, Freeman believes coastal resilience depends on something more fragile: hope. “You can’t build resilience on top of despair,” she says. “People will not fight for a place they’ve already emotionally written off.”
Visible, local wins matter. Seawalls that grow life instead of killing it. Children watching fish return to backyard canals. Cities rewriting codes to reward living infrastructure. “Culturally,” she explains, “it’s about shifting from ‘we’re victims of sea-level rise’ to ‘we’re a climate-tech laboratory for the world.’”
Learning to See Differently
For travellers encountering climate change firsthand, Freeman hopes the lesson is not fear, but possibility. “When you stand in front of a Living Seawall hosting dozens of species and protecting land from storm surge, climate action stops feeling abstract,” she says. “It starts feeling like engineering, design, and entrepreneurship doing what they do best: solving problems at scale.”
She hopes people begin to notice ideas at work everywhere. “What’s so beautiful about the ocean is how quickly it responds when we give it even a small chance to heal,” she reflects. “Seemingly overnight, surfaces that were dead start to crawl with life.”
The same, she believes, is true of cities.
If the ocean could speak, Freeman imagines it might say, with a hint of delight, “Welcome to the revolution, kids.”
And perhaps that is the quiet gift of her work.
An invitation to see infrastructure not as an endpoint, but as a beginning.
To recognise that even the hardest edges of our world can be redesigned to breathe, to host life, and to remind us that better futures are not only possible, they are already under construction.
Kind Designs
3007 NW S River Dr,
Miami, FL 33142, USA
