Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability."

Metropolis West Supplement
October 2001



Where do we stand on the issue of environmental sustainability in 2001? The Metropolis West Conference probed the question in San Francisco on February 7 and 8.

Green Dialogues
» Introduction
» We're All Connected
» Sustainability
» The Big Picture
» Education
» Politics
» Grassroots Activism
» Economics
» Architecture
» Products
» Branding
» Mobility
» Collaboration
» Challenges
» Definitions & Resources
Before flying to San Francisco to moderate the Metropolis West Conference, I was watching the evening news. There on my TV screen was a scene from a Silicon Valley office: a dark computer screen lit only by a candle burning next to it. For me, this image became an emblem of California's recent energy crisis, and it validated the timeliness of our conference's topic: sustainability.

As we settled into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' elegant lecture hall, we were warned periodically-by speakers who'd been following the news-that a rolling blackout was a distinct possibility by 3 p.m. on the first day of the conference.

Fortunately for us, the power failures that left much of the Golden State in the dark did not hit the Yerba during our two-day event. But as the possibility loomed, our discussions took on a special significance.
We wondered, in planning our conference and throughout the two days, if we could find "a thread of sustainability" in current thinking about our material world, which after all is the focus of design professionals. We used that metaphor-the delicate but strong thread stitched through fabric-to evoke thoughts of integrating environmental awareness into everything we do, into the fabric of our lives as well as the fabric of our designed world.

We asked ourselves how, in the face of the environmental degradation we experience every day, can we possibly call something "good design" if it ignores the natural world it occupies?" More than that, can our form-givers really contribute to our well-being if they're ill-informed about the materials they use?

And so we went to San Francisco with a mission: to help remove sustainable design from its marginal position in practice, as well as in academia. We hoped, as only purists can, that sustainability would no longer be thought of as a decorative flourish-as a clever but useless piece of embroidery on the fabric of our society-but as an integral part of everyone's thinking.

What follows is a snapshot (many different snapshots, in fact, to convey the idea that many different voices are needed to build a sustainable world) of the conference's content. Read it bit by bit or all at once, and pick up your own thread of sustainability.

Susan S. Szenasy
Editor in Chief, Creative Director & Facilitator of the Metropolis Conferences

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