ROX IN A BOX

Olson Kundig Designs Office Made From Wind Turbine Parts

Design For Sustainability

There is no doubt our world is transforming, physical signs of environmental change are all around us. Problems like global warming, lack of natural resources, the extinction of species and peak oil had to occur in order for our society to wake up from this so called life and actually start doing something about it. We are destroying our planet and ourselves with it, which means, we can not continue doing things as we used to. It is time for a new way of thinking. A time for sustainable living.

Sustainability is a long term approach to the environmental protection and process improvements. Zero impact is the basis for intergenerational equity, our future generations should have the right to enjoy the Earth as we know it.

We may say design is interconnected with everything. The way we live, the composition of things, where we work, how we interact with people and the impact on our planet. This is reason why designers have to acknowledge the importance of their work. Sustainable design prevents pollution from the start and calls for systems thinking, which recognizes the connection between the economy, the environment and social responsibility. Unfortunately, the concept of sustainable design is relatively brand new for most people. As dependent as we are of Nature, we some how managed to move in a different direction and worked against it.

Our planet is now running out of resources, consumption levels are exuberant and demand just keeps on growing. Acknowledging that human actions are the primary cause of the rapid changes we see in nature today, would probably be the first step towards solving our problems. Still, only a few people seem to be concerned about this situation. It saddens and makes me furious at the same time, how hard it is to persuade people into changing their lifestyle. I am aware how difficult this can be. Unfortunately, time is running out and in order for the problem to be solved we have to work together. We are all part of a system. So why do people haven’t changed their way of thinking? Could it be a matter of evolving ethics, culture, politics or even religion?

In order to understand our behavior, we need to peel back the layers of the past and explore the roots of power on the modern world. Oil or “Black Gold” as people like to call it, is the bloodstream of our economy. We founded our entire economy on a non-renewable resource, a product that took millions of years to form and that we all knew it would come to an end. Animals, plants and other living things had to die, then compressed at the bottom of the ocean and over the years and with a series of chemical reactions, they would turn into oil.

But what is so fascinating about oil? Well, this non-renewable resource has the ability to replace 25,000 hours of human labor with just one simple barrel. This isn’t rocket science. Mankind had found a compacted liquid, transportable and cheap alternative to energy. Of course the idea seemed very attractive at the moment. Petroleum revolutionized civilization. The industrial production began and the wellspring from which the modern United States emerged. It was such a convenient time for this amazing discovery. After WWII our government had to come up with a solution to reactivating the economy. Now we were able to create a vast variety of products, therefore, retail analyst Victor Lebow came up with an idea. The Nature of Postwar Retail Competition. In said article, the author assumed:

( I ) that American business will come through the war with its vitality still “bunyanesque”, with its capacity for enterprise and venturing undiminished; ( 2 ) that American business leaders are still capable of learning, and that they have drawn sharp lessons from the events of the last twenty years; ( 3 ) that the goal of industry will be full production for an expanding market provided by a people on a rising living standard.

Basically, our government was trying to revive our economy with consumer goods. That being the case, a lot of projects started to develop, the 1950’s housing boom, the green revolution and modern technology. At the same time, cities were becoming a terrible place to live in, they turned into noisy and polluted places, filled with byproducts from nearby industries. People didn’t want to live here anymore. So based on the idea of consumption, suburbia was born. Everyone started moving out of the city with a false belief, people were tricked into thinking they were achieving a more pristine country lifestyle. When in fact, they were developing a complete dependancy on a set of wheels. By living out of the city, most people spent all their day confined inside their cars, going back and forth to work.

We were mesmerized by technology and by being one of the largest economies in the world, that we are now victims of our own success. Our corporations have become bigger and more powerful than our government. They run our economy, nothing else matters to them except consumption. Corporations are destroying our world, exploiting the United States and other third world countries natural resources. And to keep up with the demand, they forgot about the Earth’s carrying capacity. We are consuming at a rate that doesn’t leave margin for natural resources to regenerate. In the United States, the average ecological footprint is about 31 acres per person and we only have about 5 acres per person available.

Society has been living in a happy go spending world, where people have been unconsciously drawn into thinking that’s what life is all about. We are running a planet based on consumption, we have been programmed to consume. With designed obsolescence they have convinced us into buying stuff, that will break easily and somehow we still continue on buying. And then we also have perceived obsolescence, where they make us feel like complete losers, by not wearing the latest pair of Jimmy Choo boots or owning the newest iPhone version. And what about the american dream? The whole suburban project was the worst misuse of postwar wealth I can think of, it is a living arrangement with no future. So, if we have history to learn from, how come we still don’t manage to overcome economic problems? Our economic issues are actually getting worse with time. And in addition, our level of happiness has been decreasing since the 1950’s happy peek. We have more stuff, but less time for things that makes us happy.

The demand for consumer goods is huge and people keep forgetting where things come from. Our planet is a sustainable system, but we need to determine the conditions that would allow human beings to live forever. The Earth being a finite planet, demands for things that belong in a close loop system. Recycling is a great contribution to the problem, but it is not enough. We need to start designing from cradle to cradle, which basically means avoiding waste and pollution. Our poor designs not only are destroying the environment, but they are also disrupting our health. Since most of our products contain toxic materials, I can’t imagine the consequences people who make them suffer. These people are mainly from third world countries, with no other choice than to work for long hours and receive a minimum wage in return. The main reason for externalized cost would be to maintain low prices, so that we can keep on consuming like there is no tomorrow. But what will happen when we ran out of oil? Every country is fitting for the last scraps, instead of coming up with lasting solutions to the problem. We have to accept there’s a peak and the time to face the opposite side of the mountain is getting closer. During the last 150 years, we’ve seen the growth of everything, industry, transport, trade, agriculture. But, all of these growth was possible thanks to the supply of cheap oil based energy.

Another thing that concerns me is what we are eating today. Food has changed more in the last fifty years, than in the previous ten thousand. Things like the so called green revolution, the use of petroleum base chemicals and the way farming has changed have altered our food so much, to the point that it is becoming dangerous. In a modern supermarket we are able to find an average of forty seven thousand products. With so many options to choose from, non-fat, low-fat, cholesterol free and so on, we still have the highest levels of obesity and thousands of health issues. In the past, we didn’t actually thought about healthy eating. It is all thanks to huge corporations that have taken over the food industry and the only thing they really care for is profit. So now, it’s not even an ecological problem, but a human health problem too. We have allowed ourselves to be so disconnected and ignorant about something as intimate as the food we eat.

We are facing a difficult situation here, that explains why it is so hard for people to acknowledge the problem. We are the solution. Mass production is not only affecting our environment, but also our health. Ultimately, we have two options. We can get the population to understand that if they want to continue consuming energy the way they are, we’ll always be in a constant war. Or, we can began to prepare for something new, which is the end of oil and the search for alternative technologies for energy. Alternatives that are cleaner, safer and have less impact in our social, political and economical matters. Redesigning our way of living by using ecology as inspiration.

Many new sustainable concept theories exist now days. We have biophilia, a hypothesis that suggests human beings have an affinity for things that have life in them. The term literally means “love of life or living systems”. Then there’s Biomimicry, which is a design discipline that uses nature as a model, measure and mentor. Another similar one is ecological design, it integrates human activity with patterns of nature. They all share the same principles and know what works and lasts here on Earth, natural processes can teach us how to design without harming the environment. All systems are interconnected, another reason to design from cradle to cradle. Keep in mind that waste equals food. And most importantly, follow the four basic steps towards sustainability: decrease in extraction, decrease in waste, terminate hurting ecosystems and equity.

Our job as designers is to integrate human life with nature’s processes. Since the beginning of time nature has solved many of the problems we are struggling with. All nature’s creatures are talented engineers. In ancient times, human civilizations started designing with what they could find on site, they created architecture as an immediate response to nature. Knowing what works, we still favored development, industrialization, technology and individualism. Today’s economy has led us to believe that creating something and distributing it as fast and cheap as possible are the most important concerns. Instead of worrying if the material was appropriate or by which means was it created. Each design should respond to a specific place or purpose, trying to emulate something is not the solution.

Designers have the responsibility of creating with positive intentions, always keeping in mind that the more we design new things, the more we encourage consumerism. In the demanding world that we are living in, we need to rethink cities as they are. The preservation of our planet relies on designing one that returns human spirituality, which will reconnect us with our ancestral origins and the environment. We have seen this happen throughout time, past civilizations have risen and fallen due to some ecological problem. Having past cultures to learn from, we can not underestimate the importance of nature and realize how inspiring it can be.

Designers are taught to make "new" when it isn't really better or when "old" doesn't need replacing. Often, designers are complacent when their engineering and marketing colleagues suggest (or insist on) low quality over longevity, cheap materials, or bad usability.

A sad truth is that almost every solution designed today, even the most "sustainable" one, has more of a negative impact on the planet than a positive one. This means that the world would be better off if most of what was designed was never produced. This is changing, and it doesn't have to be the case in the future, but we have a long way to go in order to change this pattern.

We probably don’t realize it, but our buildings consume forty percent or maybe even more of the world’s energy. That is if we add up all the energy spent on making each building. They give form to our way of living, inside buildings we work, we live and we socialize. However, most of them are designed with no ecological principles. How is this possible if we have access to all the technology we could think of ? In the U.S. if someone is building a building, the chances of either leasing it or selling it are extremely high. They only care for saving money in cost production.

We need ambitious environmental guidance that reflects a smarter way of building. New green designs have some pretty high-tech stuff that I never thought possible. We have large mirror computer tracking devices that can reflect sun light, we can build with concrete that reduces CO2 emission and we can have a green roof growing at the top of a building. The only problem with all the new technology is that it is still really expensive, but not completely out of reach. Our government has to realize that this is an important step towards the future and that building green can solve part of our environmental problems. Nevertheless, people need to transform their way of living. A greener lifestyle calls for a critical shift in personal habits. I know it is not going to be easy, but we have no other choice. Sustainability is the way to go.

“We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization.”