2/12/13 – Sustainability and Design – Whole Thinking

“…the only long-term approach to building a sustainable is to redesign the details of the products, buildings, and landscapes around us. Such redesign –attending carefully to scale, community self-reliance, traditional knowledge, and the wisdom of nature’s own designs—requires patience and humility. It is a search for the nitty-gritty design details of a sustainable culture, one grounded in the texture of our everyday lives.” (pg. 23 from Ecological Design by Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan)

I really love this quote because it brings sustainability and design down in scale to something that is an innate detail of our lives. The part where the authors reference the details of the products is really interesting – think about how much influence that has in creating a sustainable world. I really love it, it is a simple statement (in words), but it has so much open-ended power.

If we thought about how our products were made, how much waste they generated to create said product, would that change our habits as a consumer? If I knew that a certain product I purchased fairly often was destructive with how it was made, if I was actually more conscious and aware of that I honestly think I would choose not to use that product. I would demand that the producers of that product change how they make it. 

The fine detail of the idea of this scale is really awesome to me and one can either be optimistic about it and say, “Oh, look at all the potential! (for change),” or one could get overwhelmed with all the detail. I want to be optimistic about it and say that there are endless possibilities for change, and that we can all work together with our different and unique passions to drive change in our buildings, products, and landscapes around us.

Specific to me, in part, is the design of cities and buildings. On page 29 the authors mention the very well-known fact that 40% of energy consumption in the United States is from building construction, materials, and maintenance. I am somewhat responsible to help mitigate this large consumption of energy in the design of the buildings that I will create.