Principles of Sustainability (& Where they come from)

Principles ———- of -———

sustainability ———— & ———— where they come from by kristian bjørnard

contents

————————— Introduction

p2

Services

p4

Time

p6

Flexibility

p8

Constraint

p10

Meaning

p12

Systems

p14

introduction 2

Sustainability is not hard nor easy, it is simply a state of mind. It takes into account everything that is around us. While seemingly ground breaking and innovative, it is a way of thought that has existed for a long time, and requires little that is new or “extra” in implementation.

Considerations come from environmental concerns (does this require burning down forests?) to economics (will it sell?) to social concerns (does it provide a living wage? can we live in a place together?). Searching and thinking about how the arenas of sustainability and design interact revealed commonalities in works that come at the topics from many different angles.

These commonalities have been evolved into these principles to help guide further investigation and process. And while Cradle to Cradle may be the modern sustainable design handbook many thanks must be given to other thinkers and texts that came before it.

The sustainability that Cradle to Cradle talks about is a direct decendent of the environmentalism that was jump-started by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It also pays homage to E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful in approaches to the economy, and to Jane Jacobs in the way they deal with society and urban planning. The general principles and ideologies of all the above texts can be traced all the way back to Thoreau’s Walden.

services 4

We want the functions objects provide; not the objects themselves. Objects meant for serving legitimate functions (like the cellular phone, cars, most clothing, etc.) into status symbols that must be upgraded at every possible turn. Why own what you know will be obsolete—what is intentionally made obsolete—by the next rollout of products? Durable goods should be designed to last longer than a single style cycle, perhaps by being less styled and more designed.

Needs like cooling, heating, washing, food, and transportation are all perfect for approaching in the manner of “use, not own.” The milkman and his ubiquitous bottles are a good example: we want milk, so the milkman brings us bottles filled with milk. We pay the milk man, and he arrives at our home to refill our milk without effort or materials on our part.

Victor Papanek sets the stage for this thinking in Design for the Real World—only he refers to it as “purchasing-owning” and “leasing-using” instead. Cradle to Cradle uses the phrase “use, not own.” John Thackara, in In the Bubble, brings this idea up a variety of times with the expressions “more people, less matter,” “fly less, communicate more” and “focus on services, not on things.” While not exactly the same, these other terminologies share the same guiding principle as “use, not own;” that we have to much cheap, manufactured junk! Look into the Whole Earth Catalogs and WorldChanging for places to buy and find these types of real “sustainable” goods.

time 6

Incorporating the temporal into design creates room for adaptability, flexibility and evolution.

We must realize that something will have to be done with each thing we create, whether it is exchanging it, throwing it away, etc. Washing machines wear out, cars rust, jeans can only be mended so many times, we get old and die. Time has its way with everyone and everything. We can reject this and create things that are meant to last forever—things that outlast us, outlast civilization, outlast environmental destruction (like most plastic)—or we can take it into account. One way is by examining what durability means: objects should be made to last as long as they are intended for use. An important building (e.g. a renaissance cathedral) is understandably built for permanence; a candy bar wrapper, not.

Permitting both the users and makers to learn from their products as time advances is another way. According to The Design of Everyday Things the best way to make a product better is to use it, find what is wrong, use it again, fix what is “bad” again, and repeat—this takes time. How Buildings Learn revolves around timeless building techniques. Vernacular builders learn from past construction and apply new techniques and thinking only where previous failures exist. In the Bubble utters a similar sentiment: “Nature never stands still. So neither should we (pg.197).”

We must always be learning and updating and evolving through time.

flexibility 8

Once the understanding of how to use and exploit time has been allowed into the process you open up the door to flexibility and adaptability.

Extremist modernism declared that to handle the needs of the future we must design so in a manner that welcomes and accommodates any possible future need. This lead to a unilateral blankness with a goal of universality, and yet is suited for nearly nothing. Form Follows Fiasco provides examples of modernist architecture failing like this time and time again. The methodology developed by the vernacular designers and builders provides a better model. These common people making common designs are unafraid to create what they need for today, and then update or change it when needs and desires change tomorrow (Cape Cod house construction methods from Nantucket are an example in How Buildings Learn). Design must take into account that re-purposing and misuse occur, regardless of our intentions. Openness to the idea of adaptive reuse, to change as needed to fit circumstances, are what flexibility in sustainable design means.

There will be no perfect approach, no one-sizefits-all solution. Accepting this ideal up-front provides the best for the present and still allows for the future to be what it will (for we know it will change in unpredictable ways). [The Design of Everyday Things does have a few examples, in terms of user interfaces (like door handles and car stereo buttons), where in-flexibility is actually desired]

constraint 10

This is the realm of restriction, of stipulations, of specifications. It is about doing the most with the least. Limitations, defined at the outset of a problem, can help guide a solution, often allowing for innovation to take place outside of initial expectations.

Each day we encounter constraints of the biological and political spheres (surpassing these limits would result in environmental collapse and anarchy). We should then look for the other existing constraints and adopt them into our design thinking.

Keeping within specified boundaries is not to be confused with sacrifice. Sacrifice is about surrendering something or giving something up—it leads to loss. Constraint is simply accepting limitations. Again, nature and vernacular design and building contain valuable examples.

The vernacular is all about constraint in choice: what is cheap, what is local, what is best suited for the purpose, and what is available. Cape Cod houses look the way they do because of materials, location and desired use. Teepees, nautilus shells and intuitive door handles are all the same.

meaning 12

All great works that elicit response, regardless of medium or style, share one thing in common: they mean something to people. In the quest for beauty and quality (and sometimes cheapness) we have left out the idea of meaning. Having purpose, having substance, prompting thought: this is what meaning, well, means. Design must start taking into account considerations outside the simple duality of Form and Function. Vectors of creation shouldn’t just point back to the designer, point to how refined the style is, how “good” the design is, but to context of the product itself and the enjoyment and engagement of the user.

The use, the emotional participation, a thing’s place and time, these are the elements of importance in meaningful design. Victor Papanek says in Design for the Real World that “ ‘meaningful’ replaces the semantically loaded noise of such expressions as ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘cool,’ ‘cute,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘realistic,’ ‘obscure,’ ‘abstract,’ and ‘nice’…” What Papanek’s work and the aims of sustainability require is the human value, in addition to aesthetic and pragmatic values, are taken into consideration.

systems 14

At its heart, Sustainability is really just about systems: the analyzing, using, creating, and exploiting of our natural and manufactured systems. We must examine our existing systems and ask ourselves what we can change and what is worth keeping. Systems thinking has been an integral part of sustainable theory for fifty years—from Buckminster Fuller to John Thackara [Thackara’s In The Bubble is the modern bible of systematic thinking and design]. Fuller refers to it as General Systems Theory, and while other thinkers (like Victor Papanek and Stewart Brand) have their own investigations and examples into systems thinking, it all comes down to the same thing: achieving a logical pattern for growth and success.

The vernacular builders of How Buildings Learn use systematic approaches to additions and expansions of buildings and communities.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Fuller begs us to see the entirety of the Universe as the main system running all our lives, just to make sure we leave nothing out. Cradle to Cradle models a cyclical manufacturing cycle creating a system of object creation specifically geared towards sustainability. The evolutionary design approach described in the Design of Everyday Things is also systematic. While not necessarily about “systems” in general, WorldChanging is a systems driven concept: it is a contemporary systematic collection of all things sustainable and follows in the footsteps of the Whole Earth Catalogs before it.

type: Berthold Akzidenz Grotesque Bodoni Poster Italic Grad