Communicating Green

How do you create a passionate dialogue around sustainable design without oversimplifying its inherently complex nature? This is the central premise of Communicating Green, a proposed Web-based teaching tool for millennials. Its aim is to create a greater awareness of green design and its connection to the built environment. An information-design, research, and advocacy initiative created by Dan Albert and Myer Harrell, the project was originally sponsored by their employer, Weber Thompson, a Seattle-based landscape-architecture firm. “Imagine the way your scroll wheel takes you from state to street level in a Google map,” says Albert, a 27-year-old landscape designer at the firm. “For Communicating Green, new pieces—explanatory diagrams, text, and links—could be plugged in and expanded upon. We’re thinking of this as a home base for the sustainability movement, a place where the user could show a skeptic and say, ‘Here, look, this is how waste from the water cycle becomes
a resource for the energy cycle, and this is why it’s important.’”