Sustainability II

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How does one act in a sustainable way? 
It is all about asking questions and making decisions based on those answers. To ask the right questions, however, there are six key ideas to keep in mind.

1. Almost everything around you is designed. From the tiniest iPod, to crops, economies, infrastructure, houses, and cities are all designed and shaped by people's decisions. Anything can be changed, and you have incredible power in your decision making.
2. Everything has a life-cycle. Food is grown, cities are built and razed, the iPod purchased from BestBuy gets tossed in a few years. What resources went into that thing? How much energy did it take to make it? Where did it come from and where will it go?
3. Sustainability stems from behavior. If you drive a Prius to work every day, it's less sustainable than driving a SUV to work once a week. How a thing is used, and how often, are key to understanding somethings sustainability. Work your way up to sustainability by baby steps if you need to, but what will have the greatest effect on sustainability is the major decisions you will make. Where you live and work, how you choose to live; forget the aluminum water bottle and fair trade hemp bag. Lifestyle determines sustainability. 
4. Everything in the natural and man-made world is deeply and tightly interconnected. As a human being, we are part of countless cycles, both man-made and natural. The ecosystems of the world link together and connect to the various economic, political, and social system. Fertilizer used to enhance a crop cycle which ties into an economic cycle washes into the oceans via the water cycle and alters the biochemistry of the local ocean ecosystem, which kills the shrimp, which decimates the local economy, ad infinitum. Our small world is tightly bound. Nothing is autonomous, which brings me to
5. Every decision has a cost. There's a cartoon from the 90's about an ecologically minded person who has goes crazy when asked "paper or plastic" at the grocery store*. Making sustainable decisions is difficult because many complex factors are in play. It is really up to the individual to decide which has the least impact on the future environment. Recycled paint or low VOC. Tough call.

Making sustainable decisions, especially the ones that count the most, is tough, and few people living in first world conditions can really claim to be truly sustainable in the zero-impact way. However, I think it is important to make these decisions now from both an ethical and a pragmatic point of view. There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic that shows Calvin sneaking up on Hobbes with a water balloon. Without turning around, Hobbes asks Calvin what he would do if it was his last day on Earth. Without waiting for a response, Hobbes follows up with the question to the effect of, by doing something different, it might not be Calvin's last day on Earth. Calvin ditches the water balloon. 

*So, paper or plastic? Paper comes from trees, a renewable resource. Plastic comes from oil, a non-renewable resource. It probably takes less energy to make paper than to refine and process oil into plastic. Paper will decompose a lot more quickly than a plastic bag, but then I usually throw paper bags away after getting my groceries home, although I could recycle them. Plastic bags on the other hand, I use them for trash bags, AND they keep me from using even more plastic in the form of the plastic trash bag they're replacing. It's a hard call. I might switch to paper if they could design a paper bag that had the grocery-carrying strength of a plastic bag and handles. 

Sustainability I

Definition, via Merriam-Webster:

Pronunciation: \sə-ˈstā-nə-bəl\

Function: adjective

Date: circa 1727

1 : capable of being sustained
2 a : of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged

A relatively simple definition with complex terms. Another way to understand sustainability is as not stealing from the future.

Personal standpoint- I believe that theft in general is wrong, stealing from your future self; stupid, and stealing from your children; neglectful to abusive. I consider myself a "people first" kind of person who values quality of life for all mankind. Trees aren't people, and neither are animals. You will never see me chaining myself to a tree or fighting for whale's rights. However, both trees and whales are vital in this incredibly interrelated world, and if I fight for them, I fight for the role they play in sustaining mankind. We need the Earth and it's resources, but we can't continue to use them in the way we have been. Either we can radically change our approach, or we will have change forced upon us. When I talk about sustainability, I am talking about sustaining the human race.

Alec Misses a Good Opportunity to Practice Networking

One of the other ecologically minded members of my office tapped me on my shoulder this afternoon and asked me if I had any plans for tonight. Apparently there was some kind of green event that she had signed up for / had been signed up for, that involved some speakers talking about sustainability. Drinks and "power networking" followed by a panel discussion. Saori is working tonight, so I thought, sure, why not. I can always learn something new about sustainability. My coworker didn't really know much about the event, not even who it was hosting it, or why it should cost non members of the IFDA (International Furnishings and Design Assoc.) $60 to go. In retrospect it seemed oddly convenient that her daughter should be sick so that she needed someone to take her spot. 

At any rate, I took her up on the offer, left work an hour earlier than usual, classed up my professional attire by putting on socks, and drove out to Scottdale. I got there about midway into the "power networking" and to be honest, I should have driven slower. Didn't see anyone I recognized from industry. A few architects, not many, mostly custom home builder types. The predominant group were older interior designers. For the most part, these middle-aged women all had very elaborately styled hairdos, heavy makeup, and very distinctive (read: chunky, colored, odd) eyewear. The uniformity made me wonder if it was a kind of professional standard. 

I was not exactly a "power networker." To be perfectly honest, I network like a cat taking a bath. I'm minimally sociable, and I have to constantly reiterate to myself the advantages of networking in order to engage with strangers in a professional setting. This is not a good state to be in as an architect, and I was not really in the mood to practice tonight. Plus, it was a cash bar. You'd think that with a limited number of people attending and a $60 event fee, that they'd at the very least throw in a cheap glass of wine. No such luck. I bought a beer and wandered into the auditorium.

What the $60 DID get me, remember this is a conference on sustainability, is one of those cheap nylon woven tote bags that feel like a greased paper towel, filled with product information for "sustainable" paint and furniture. Oh, I also got a pen and a few notepads with manufacturer's logos all over it. Additionally, we were each handed, as this "Going Green" event, a stapled printout of one of the presentations, single sided.

I quickly realized that I was at an event directed to the interior designers who had heard some stuff about this "green movement" in design and who wanted to learn more, or at least, where they could buy it. While some of you may sense a slightly deprecatory tone, I do have to give them credit for coming out to learn about it, and for making the investment in time and money to do so in an unfavorable (read: starvation) market. 

The speakers at least were interesting. One was a venerable (read: nevermind...) architect with a firm to his name, who was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, and in the work this architect showed, you could almost see some of it under the heavy FLW style. At least he went through his images quickly and described them generally, not making the mistake of many architects who attempt to describe the entity of the creative process for each piece. He had some interesting points that I happened to agree with, namely that while technology defines our lives now, behavior will define our lives in the future. (LEDs vs turning off the lights). There was talk about green building codes and the city, which probably went over a lot of people's heads, on sustainable paint, on getting LEED certified and what that meant (I was the only LEED AP in attendance apparently) , and on furniture. 

One big difference about these interior designers, as the older architect was going through his images, I could hear constant murmuring "oooh!"s and "ahhh!"s and quiet "Fabulous!"s and "How Gorgeous!"s. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. 

The furniture guy kind of irked me with his presentation. He's a local furniture/upholster company, but he kept hammering in the whole "local" thing. In big picture sustainability, this is important to remember,  9 times out of 10, HOW something is made and WHAT is its made of has more impact on the environment than WHERE it comes from. If you're comparing apples to apples, then yes, there's a less environmental impact of sourcing your granite slab from Colorado instead of say, Italy. However, if you're looking at different products, it's a lot more sustainable to ship doors of reclaimed barn wood from Pennsylvania, than solid core doors made from local pine at the corner mill worker. 

In the Q and A section, the two main questions the audience focused on was "how do I justify this to my client", "why does green cost more," and "where can I find a list of green products." The first two are pretty good questions, the third is just ignorant, bordering on inane. However, the panel did a good job of explaining that it is the designer's responsibility to determine the greenness of the product. There is no list. What makes a product sustainable is different for each application, although questions about what it is made of, how it it made, what are its harmful direct and indirect byproducts, etc are a good place to start, and reps for truly sustainable products will be able to give you good answers on all of these questions. 

My question: what am I supposed to do with this stupid tote bag?

Sustainability (!)

Our lighting class is rolling along interestingly. It's a lot of data we need to know for the workforce, and better, its what's contemporary. Our teacher one day explained to us that it was his job to teach us what the latest softwares, technologies, and lamps are in the field, so that we leave, we can find jobs at firms and show them how to do it. One of those things he's teaching us is a new type of CAD software called AGi32. Its user interface is clunky but logical, but its not really designed for building complex forms. For example, if I wanted to make a room, I would click the "Add" menu, go to "Room" and select "flat" for a flat-roofed room. Then you draw a box and it creates a room for you. At this point, I still don't know how to make a room of a specific entered size. I just "add" "object" "library" "chair" and use that chair as a scale to rough out the size. If I want to modify any of that stuff, I have to go back to "modify" "object"..etc. etc. This ain't autoCAD. On the plus side, this is the hottest, latest and cutting edge software used in the lighting design industry. This entire program is devoted to light calculations and hyperacurate raytrace rendering. In laymans terms, it lets you see how a light will really make a room look when you put it in.

Once you get past building the model, all you do is go to a lamp manufacturers website, download the photometric data sheet, and then you plug that back into the program and it generates that light for you. More importantly, it shows you how bright the room average is, at certain points, power usage, watts per foot which is vital for LEED certification and strict lighting code, amongst other functions. Basically once you have your space, it's plug and play from then on.

So that's lighting design. I was slightly disappointed that I didn't get to go see the US national soccer team play Mexico in a sold-out game here in Phoenix. However, considering that they filled the massive stadium, I don't think I would have been able to get tickets anyway. At least the US won 2-0, which was a huge letdown for my roommate Sal.

My human behavior and design class is still very stupid and ridiculous. Our "attendance question" was "who won the superbowl?" My roommate assured me that the teacher of the class is actually quite intelligent, but I can tell she hates the class and is only teaching it so ASU will waive her Doctorate tuition fees.

Today we went to a mandatory lecture. What, I thought, is mandatory about it? Our studio teachers were not there at the door, marking attendance, we were given no crucial bit of data to pass the class, and there was no other threat against us, so what makes it mandatory? I went anyway, since the language suggested that it was advisable to attend, and because it concerned Sustainability. This was the kick off lecture of the spring 07 lecture series. When a faculty member read off the list of who else was coming to talk, I had heard of none of them before- which, admittedly, could be the fault of my own, although I didn't hear any delight from anyone else recognizing a name. Last semester, for sake of comparison, were lectures by Teddy Cruz and Shigeru-ban. Shigeru-ban is probably the best known architect of Japan, in recognition second only Tado Ando. This whole semester lecture series centers on Sustainability.

I get the feeling that my posts have become somewhat fragmentary of late, it captures the feeling of this semester to an extent- my trying to piece everything in my current life together, taking freshman level classes along with a fragmented, self-guided studio, decisions on post-graduate life, the feeling of the temporarity of this apartment, etc.