In our June 2011 issue, Peter Hall writes about the fascinating relationship that the giant design consultancy, IDEO, has with a very particular type of client – governmental agencies. The firm’s trademark design thinking method is showing mammoth bureaucratic juggernauts like the Social Security Administration a deep insight into who uses their services, and how they can help streamline even the most convoluted process, allowing government officials to effectively reach out to the citizens who need them (while saving costs). In the process, IDEO also had its own significant learning curve on how to use design to fix problems in governance.

There are some interesting parts to that journey that we couldn’t share with you in the magazine, like the videos produced by the firm as part of two projects: monitoring energy use in buildings operated by the General Services Administration (GSA), and helping Clark Realty understand what kind of housing wounded veterans really need.

The GSA came to IDEO to understand how they might meet President Obama’s directive that all government buildings are to reduce energy consumption by 30% below 2003 levels by 2015. So in a sense, the client was already converted. But the administrators weren’t the only stakeholders in the project. Read more…

Why the funny title?  Well, I went to a conference a few weeks ago in Burlington, Vermont and came away wondering if the Passiv Haus movement is really accessible to the mainstream. The phrase is a play on words from the presentation, “From Bauhaus to Passivhaus”, given by Ken Levenson during the Better Building by Design Conference, hosted by Efficiency Vermont.

A handful of presentations showcased Passivhaus projects and their innovative design process, as well as other super-low energy, net-zero projects. They brought together a variety of professionals and their case studies, working on opposite ends of the spectrum— houses for the wealthy ‘spare no expense group’ and those working with Habitat for Humanity, ‘let’s figure out how to do this for everyone group’.  Somewhere in the middle we will meet. Read more…

There is a new naval battle being fought off the coast of Britain, but not of the kind that Admiral Nelson would recognize. The ocean is turning out to be the next frontier for renewable energy, and Britain leads the world in off-shore wind energy generation – it has already installed 330 wind turbines on its seas. Now several engineering firms are vying with each other to develop giant wind turbines for Britain, with capacities in excess of 10MW – double the size and power of any existing turbines.

Two Norwegian firms are currently in the lead, both offering mammoth windmills that “float” in areas where the sea is too deep to lay foundations. Read more…

The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…

Ed Mazria, known to American architects for his 2030 Challenge to clean up the environment through sustainable practices, recently joined select members of the DLR Group at the Island Wood campus on Bainbridge Island, Washington to help them design a fictional middle school. Six different designs would be proposed to suit six different locales in an exercise that was part of the architecture firm’s annual company-wide educational retreat, focused this year on building skills to pursue the 2030 reduction targets. My interest piqued by the opportunity to watch Mazria in his designer’s role, I ferried to the island from Seattle one early morning to take in the day’s events. Read more…

Ministers from 24 countries, representing 80 percent of global energy usage between them, put their heads together in Washington, D.C., last week at the first ever Clean Energy Ministerial. The big guys signed up to take action on things like carbon capture, clean energy, and electric vehicles, but their plans for the building industry are particularly interesting. For if all goes well with the Global Superior Energy Performance (GSEP) partnership that was announced on Tuesday, we might have to look at sustainable architecture in a new way.

In minister-speak, the GSEP partnership will be “a multi-country effort to create and harmonize nationally-accredited energy performance certification programs that encourage and reward strategic management of energy use and third-party verified energy reductions.” Essentially, Canada, the European Commission, France, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States have signed up to adopt a global standard not just for deciding how sustainable a building is, but also what the acceptable methods for reducing energy consumption will be. And this rating/reward system will not be LEED. Read more…

Yet more news from Yves Béhar: the prolific designer has teamed up with GE to develop the WattStation, a plug-in electric vehicle charger with a cute, colorful form. It’s powerful too: according to GE, the WattStation’s “level 2 capability” will decrease typical charging time from 12–18 hours to as little as 4–8 hours. Check out a video of Behar describing his “small, soft, and friendly dispenser of electricity” after the jump. Read more…

The Botswana Development Corporation (BDC) has selected SHoP Architects to design a new Innovation Hub for the country, in the capital city of Gabarone. In response to a design competition announced last year by the BDC, 17 leading international firms—Foster + Partners, Perkins+Will, and Gensler among them—sent in entries. The SHoP proposal won for its “innovativeness, environmental sustainability, functionality and cost-effectiveness.”

This will, after all, be an Innovation Hub—a 270,000-square-foot office building and research facility for tech-driven and knowledge-based businesses. SHoP’s design fits the brief perfectly, using the most cutting-edge sustainable technologies, including a concept called the “Energy Blanket Roofscape.” Read more…

The Brooklyn-based distributor didn’t have too much new to show since we caught up with them at the Gift Fair last February, but there were still a couple of items that caught our eye. For instance: We’ve long been fans of Anything’s plastic desktop accessories (like the scissors and tape dispenser pictured above); now the design studio is planning to launch a bamboo collection, which will include an elegant magnetic board (above, center; the full collection comes out in September). Also new from Anything: a minimalist letter opener with a pleasing weight and a simple kinked angle, a welcome relief from the phony ornateness usually found in the product. Read more…

We’ve been following the Swedish lighting manufacturer Wästberg since it released its first collection in 2008—and, in 2009, we wrote about the Stockholm design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune’s experiments crafting furniture from a new material called DuraPulp—so, naturally, we were intrigued to learn just now that Wästberg and CKR have teamed up to produce a task lamp using this durable paper-pulp composite. Called w101 (catchy!), the lamp is made of DuraPulp on a cast-iron base with a five-watt LED. “Paper has been used throughout history for making lamp shades,” the manufacturer’s founder and CEO, Magnus Wästberg, said in a press release. “Now we are using paper for the actual structure of the fixture adding advanced LED technology.” Indeed. The company officially launches w101 in Milan next week; here’s a bigger image of the (origami-influenced?) design: Read more…