Ann Thorpe, author of The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, gave a talk entitled “Central Debates of Sustainable Design” as part of the UW’s Luce lecture series. My notes from this are below.
- Wanted to cover in the book where people come from when approaching sustainability and how to “do” sustainability
- Book systematically and visually presents the concept
- “The making of” – the book started in 2001
- Based on the principle of “If worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” – had to start somewhere for the idea
- Central debates: responsibility, pace (of adoption), scale, operation, and appearance. The talk focused on the first three central debates.
- Designers rarely have time to get up to speed if they don’t know about sustainability
- The market is not the same as the overall economy
- Natural resources have different prices
- “Let the market decide”
- The operational spheres of nonprofits, private, and public organizations all overlap with the economy
- It appears cheaper to destroy natural or societal resources than it is to preserve them according to the market
- What responsibilities do designers take across a market economy?
- Nonprofits will be seen as having a potential for a proactive stance in promoting issues
- Part of the problem is how we take things from the ecosystem and then redistribute it
- We don’t see the costs for the global distribution of produced materials
- Different things work at a different pace – art/fashion, communication, infrastructure, culture, nature (this list is actually sorted fastest to slowest in terms of rate of change)
- Commerce is starting to control the pace of change
- Much as we want to push change, we need stability in the (economic) system
- Change takes three forms: physical, economic, and cultural
- Audience question: sustainable costs more – can we make it cost less? Do cases of this happening exist?
- Answer: marketplace tools are a solution here. There are some cases where this has happened.
- Things are cheap in monetary terms that aren’t in sustainable terms – this is a systemic problem
- “Be an active citizen” to make sustainability viable – knowledge is power
- Sustainability is complex and depends on context of values
- How might open source play into sustainable design?
- Audience: We do sustainable buildings, but it “doesn’t look good”