In his introduction to Design Education for a Sustainable Future, published recently by Routledge/earthscan, Rob Fleming says his premise “is remarkably simple. It is based on a series of straightforward questions that seek to uncover the context, values, and behaviors necessary for effective twenty-first century design education. Is society moving towards a new sustainable or integral worldview, a new set of cultural values that are reshaping the very fabric of human existence? If so, how are such profound shifts in consciousness impacting the design and construction industries? And how can design educators better reflect the zeitgeist of the new century by moving from well-intentioned but lightweight ‘greening’ to the deeper and more impactful ideals of sustainability and resilience?

“The process of answering these questions begins with the requisite historical narrative which explores cultural evolution not as a slow and gradual rise to new levels of complexity but rather through a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in human consciousness. The jump from dispersed Hunter Gatherer cultures to centralized agrarian societies and then to industrialized nations correlates well to the convergence of new energy sources and the invention of new communication technologies.” What follows is Fleming’s opening salvo to a much talked about, much-overdue shift that needs to take place in design education:

Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis that “The convergence of energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigures society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself.”¹ The early twenty-first century, as characterized by unprecedented sharing of information via wireless networks and by the emergence of renewable energy technologies, demarcates a threshold from one world view to another, a jump from an industrialized conception of nature as immutable and infinite to a Gaia inspired view of nature as alive, intelligent and, most of all, fragile in the hands of man.

The principles of sustainability, which emphasize ecological regeneration and co-creative processes, comprise a new and powerful ideal that is reshaping technologically driven initiatives, especially those associated with the design and construction of the built environment. Societal conceptions of money and profit, consumerism, design and technology are radically shifting to address the superficial but useful demands of “greening,” and are leading to finding deeper and more impactful processes to meet the much higher bar of sustainability. Read more…

I have mixed feelings about the sea of mail that inundates us around the holidays. Having worked with architecture firms for many years, I’ve had the card versus email greeting debate time and again (and, admittedly, landed on both sides over the years). But once in a while, I receive a card that reminds me what thought and intentionality can do for the “hard copy” format.

KieranTimberlake’s annual message of good wishes is a five panel, fold out card. On the one side there are elegant, muted-hue diagrams from five of the firm’s green roof projects, illustrating how the vegetation has evolved over time. The Middlebury College Atwater Commons project, for instance, is shown in 2003 and 2012; the other depictions vary in duration. All prompt careful study.

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This fall, the American Institute of Architects announced a 10 year commitment to develop design and technology solutions for cities addressing public health, sustainability, and resiliency challenges. It’s the kind of commitment that many AIA members have long sought: putting human and environmental health and wellness at the center of the architecture mission. That the announcement was made at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York, gave it cache; more than 1,000 global leaders gathered to address the theme of “Designing for Impact.”

AIA is seeking to demonstrate the link between building design and the health of people who live or work there, and, says AIA CEO Robert Ivy, “bring the force of design to bear in the public health arena and debate.” The effort, called “Decade of Design” will involve funding and in-kind contributions from the AIA, Ivy says, through three initiatives: university research; community planning collaborations; and something called “Show Us Your APPtitude Hackathon,” designed to promote creative apps and technologies as springboards.

The first three recipients of research grants were announced. Texas A&M University’s project, Evaluating Health Benefits of Liveable Communities is a toolkit for measuring health impacts, which will include an empirical study of a LEED for Neighborhood Development project in Austin. The University of Arkansas’s Fayetteville 2030: Creating Food City Scenario Plan will study pathways to creating a local food infrastructure amid rapid growth. The University of New Mexico has a pilot program, Establishing Interdisciplinary Health-Architecture Curriculum.

For those who have long made the case that attending to issues of sustainability are the over-arching umbrella of any design or planning pursuit, finding ways to strengthen and illuminate these connections seems almost painfully obvious. But anyone familiar with architecture education and practice—where barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration are stiff—the links are too often ignored, overlooked, or poorly quantified. I asked Robert Ivy to talk about the impetus for this program.

Kira Gould: Why do you and the AIA see a need for funding the health/design connection at this time?

Robert Ivy: While many of us believe that the connections between health and design are there, what we need is proof. We want to help build up the data that will help us quantify and demonstrate, with rigorous case studies, the value of design in the context of these issues and the inherent relationship between architecture and public health. I’m inspired by the notion that we can participate in this.

I think it’s true—if not proven—that architecture can affect a community’s health, particularly in the area of ailments such as diabetes and heart disease. Basic design principles already encourage architects to consider health every day: we take into consideration how buildings have access to sunlight, fresh air, clean water. Ultimately, we want to be able to show and prove that buildings are making an impact. This requires evidence. We know, anecdotally, that certain types of places make people more productive. Quantifying this is the aim of this initiative.

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I’ve written about Simran Sethi here before. She’s an inspiring, energetic green diva—a strategist, educator, and journalist. She’s had a worldwide career, yet somehow she landed in Lawrence, my hometown in Kansas, and taught for some time at the University of Kansas School of Journalism (my alma mater). Sethi has been doing some big thinking about the problems we have in communicating environmental issues.

Photo couresty of Marino Scandura.

Big problems. Yet we have people, on the Congressional Science Committees no less, who deny evidence reported by swarms of scientists around the world. So it’s become urgent that we ask now, and persistently: How do we find ways to talk to each other? How can we move beyond bickering over willful misinterpretation of real data, and get to the real work ahead of us?

Sethi recently spoke about “Our Green Brain” at TEDx Cibeles in Madrid about this topic (which became the most watched of the TEDx Cibeles collection). She challenged the audience to find a new path to reconnecting with people unlike themselves; a difficult concept in this day of “user group” sameness. This reconnecting, after all, is the first step toward growing and healing as a community.

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I was recently asked to join the Advisory Board for SXSW Eco, an offshoot of the huge SXSW conference now in its second year and coming to Austin in early October. In my new role I have organized one panel discussion and reviewed many others. Now as a member of the diverse Advisory Board, I decided to tap into their wisdom, starting with Jerry James Stone, an environmental writer with Discovery Channel’s TreeHugger.com who also writes for Atlantic.com, MAKE magazine, and Digg.com and focuses on food and wine. He has served as the first “Cool Chef” for Cline Cellars and is this year’s Twitter Shorty Award winner for the hashtag #green. Here he talks about the many sprouting green conferences, concerns about content, and greenwashing.

Kira Gould: It seems that “green conferences” are sprouting up all over. Why are you involved with SXSW Eco and what kind of impact do you think this conference can have?

Jerry James Stone: Yes, there is definitely a green conference trend emerging, for sure. It is one of those good and bad things. The fact that green is a trend is great because people recognize not only the value of protecting the environment, but that it has mainstream appeal too.  Of course, mainstream appeal comes with consequences—like greenwashing. That is why I wanted to be a part of SXSW Eco. The brand is proven, SXSW is known for innovating and being creative. With such strong brand recognition, it can really move the needle in a sincere and beneficial way. I am thinking about what SXSW Eco can be five years from now. That is what I am concerned about. How can we keep bringing in the right people, the right panels and the right attendees to really make a change. And I think it will happen.

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We talk, endlessly, it seems, about the impact of technology on our lives, our relationships, our work, and workspaces and we worry about what it’s doing to our physiologies. Now the inimitable writer, Diane Ackerman offers, in her blog in The New York Times, a characteristically elegant and pointed commentary on this topic; it’s been on my mind ever since I read it. (The volume of comments from readers suggests that others found resonance there, too.)

Diane Ackerman is a poet and naturalist, and author of many books, including A Natural History of the Senses, one of her best known works, and One Hundred Names for Love, her most recent (and a Pulitzer finalist). In her essay last week, she asked: “Are we living in sensory overload or sensory poverty?” While bemoaning the “myopic daze” in which so many people seem to wander around these days is not new, she takes a hard look (in the spirit of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature) at what it might be costing us. Here’s an excerpt—

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

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Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic. We came away with an understanding that there are some sensibilities typically categorized as “female” by contemporary culture that tend to be effective in advancing sustainability goals. I’m reminded of this as I recall a recent conversation at Portland’s Living Future conference where I asked six people to engage in a dialogue with me about these sensibilities and how we can all find ways to cultivate and apply them.

Architect Bill Reed, of The Regenisis Group, whom I like to refer to as the uber-unpacker, talked about the need for us to start personal. He’s not talking about recycling at home before you try to start a business in the green space. He’s talking about a deep and personal knowing of yourself/life/place as a precursor for engagement with others.

Stacy Glass who works with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, talked about the importance of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. She used her experience of founding CaraGreen, a sustainable materials company in North Carolina, which eventually transitioned away from her original plans for it, as a demonstration of learning from failure.

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If we love it, will it last? This is a question at the heart of architect Lance Hosey’s new book, Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press, 2012). Because the book is just out I want to offer you a quick peek, as Hosey starts talking about it; his first talk since the book launched this week was at SPUR in San Francisco. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must also point out that Lance, who is CEO of the nonprofit GreenBlue, an organization dedicated to making products more sustainable, is also a friend. He and I co-authored Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design five years ago.

There’s an ongoing disconnect between what is perceived as “good design” (like the Vanity Fair “A-list” published in 2010) and “green design,” as Hosey points out; he documented this when he polled for the readers of his Architect blog in response to the Vanity Fair survey of architects. The disconnect, to him, is more than something to lament; it’s actually something to mine. He writes:

“Following the principles of ecology to their logical conclusion could result in revolutions of form as well as content in every industry at every scale, from the hand to the land. Reversing the devastation of nature requires reversing the devastation of culture, for the problem of the planet is first and foremost a human problem. We create the crisis, but we can correct it—by appealing to both morality and sensuality, to both sense and spirit, together. Designers can promote sustainability by embracing what they have already cared about most: the basic shape of things.”

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There’s something daunting about a speaking slot called “15 Minutes of Brilliance.” At the Living Future (un)conference, these speaking engagements took place before the keynotes each day, a nice way to give individual speakers a platform. But the “brilliance” and the (somewhat false) time limit give these sessions a sense that the person might spontaneously combust after she finishes. (Think Cinderella at midnight.) Or that it will be the high point of her career. Where to go after brilliance, publicly exhibited?

One thing is for sure, Jennifer Cutbill, has a lot of brilliance ahead of her. Her 15 minutes introduced many of us to her wisdom, care, and passion, something that her mentors had already glimpsed at. Cutbill is an intern architect at Dialog in Vancouver, B.C. “She stole the show,” as Nadav Malin of BulidingGreen.com noted at an intriguing conference wrap-up session. I talked to him later about Jennifer when he added, “She wowed me with more facets of the one-percent-99-percent meme than I would have imagined possible, and showed us our ‘response-ability’ to make a difference.” (More on that “response-ability” term in a moment.)

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Recently at the Living Future event in Portland, Oregon, I had an opportunity to explore “lives of green” with eight other women working in the sustainable design space, as it is often called. We followed the Pecha Kucha format (my first time with the 20-seconds-for-each-of-20 slides).

Barbra Batshalom, a Boston-based “recovering architect” talked about her path toward transforming organizations, to transform practice, collaborate more deeply, and inspire change in the sustainable design world. “Our research has shown that most organizations, even those known for good green goals, are not making wholesale change. More likely, they are experiencing what we sometimes call ‘random acts of sustainability’.” This prompted the founder of Green Roundtable to launch the Sustainable Performance Institute, a certification program for organizations.

This was one of several recurring themes in this session (which, as our moderator Lance Hosey noted, mirrored the themes that turned up in Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design, the book that he and I wrote together a few years ago): Find ways to think bigger—much beyond single buildings. And if your current career path isn’t allowing that, change course. Almost every single presenter described a non-linear career, what author and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson might call “lives of improvisation,” theme she explored deeply in her book, Composing a Life.

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