(skip navigation)

Wed AM2a Summary

Indicators and aspects of our current predicament:

  • We tend to think in pieces as opposed to the whole (“Fragmatic thinking”).
  • We are undermining life and evolution on the planet.
  • We think of buildings as objects.
  • Humans think they need to control systems…the only way to control systems is to kill them.
  • We often don’t measure the right things (you can’t measure everything, and just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should).
  • Many of our tools are not grounded in principles--The Intentions in LEED are powerful and based in principles, but the implementation has moved from principles to “laws” (scoresheet).
  • We don’t have the language to name what we care about.
  • Our standards (such as energy codes) are dysfunctional, spurring a race to the bottom. (50% will try to just meet a standard, while the other 50% will spend their lives trying to get around the standard.)
  • Some images that describe the current predicament: Trees in suburbia as prisoners of war (from a 9th-grader’s private essay), lawns as drug-dependent rug.

Looking at the potency for change:

Successful change has three aspects: shared mental model across disciplines, leadership, execution. Buckminster Fuller said: “The only way to make change is to make the thing you want to change obsolete.”

If we create more elegance we won’t need laws (beauty is an end in and of itself). Laws protect principles--they don't drive them.

Frijof Capra describes the defining characteristics of living systems as: 1. Bounded by a membrane that controls the flow of matter and energy; 2. Organizationally closed; and 3. Self-generating and regenerating (autopoiesis)

Existing lenses, approaches, models:

  • Ecological footprint
  • CO2 balancing
  • New urbanist checklist
  • Biomimicry
  • Cradle to cradle
  • LEED
  • GB Tool (from the Green Building Challenge)
  • Post occupancy evaluations
  • Education for sustainability
  • Integral thinking
  • Natural Step
  • Regenerative Design
  • Green Globes
  • IISD global indicators
  • Bioclimatic, climate responsive design

Some aspects of education for sustainability (turns out these may be pretty universal principles for pursuing the change we seek):

  • Learner centered (not content centered)
  • Mental models (uncovered, shifted)
  • Interdisciplinary (and cross-disciplinary, and multidisciplinary)
  • Critical thinking (How do you teach a child that even their teachers are infinitely ignorant?)
  • Learning organizations, learning communities
  • Upstream thinking (what we’re thinking about, differs from critical thinking, which is about how we think)
  • Constant improvement

Other related aspects of a better approach:

  • Inclusive participation--buy-in; synergy (have to have a good process for this);
  • Strong and steady, but without hubris & with humility;
  • Hands on learning--if the building itself is a teacher (designed for manipulation) huge leaps of learning are possible.
  • Notion of questioning (Socratic)
  • Creativity, lateral thinking--use a different kind of thinking to address an issue.

Basic principles of LEED are good. Add “process” to the five categories, and you could envision a very holistic system. LEED's success is something we should look to (very potent). Some drivers of that success are: 1. A shared mental model 2. Simplicity of structure 3. Demonstrates leadership 4. Not overly prescriptive 5. Validated by a third party.

But--standardized testing is similar to LEED—takes away intrinsic motivation to follow one’s heart, and replaces it with an externally generated goal;

Placed-based, regenerative design (engaging communities)

  1. Setting the stage: Core purpose; Big questions (what is your relationship to “here”); Aspirations—hopes and dreams for the place
  2. Learning about place: Patterns/systems/relationships; Story of place; Past/present/future
  3. Frame the story: Extract keystone issues; Leverage points
  4. Reconcile story of place with aspirations; Revising aspirations (revisit original thinking): Engaging community
  5. Identify Indicators: LEED; Functional (Health, Biodiversity, CO2, Eco footprint)
  6. Integrative Design: Construction
  7. Feedback

Wrapping up

Return to the whole group with a synopsis of the above universal principles, and presentations on:

  1. LEED’s structure as a basis for the next generation tools
  2. Green Globes
  3. Natural Step
  4. Integral thinking basics
  5. Integral thinking applied to buildings
  6. Solving for place