Design is an act of optimism

Design for One Earth is not a singular solution. It’s a journey toward a sustainable future through the design of the built environment.  The stakes are high and the need for design innovation is pressing. Innovation requires thinking big, setting significant sustainability goals and following a holistic systems thinking approach. Designing a bright green future requires a strong sense of optimism and the results can be extraordinary. As the saying goes – “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

 

Design for One Earth has four basic steps.

1. Awareness - Understand the scope and scale of the problems at deeper levels– both locally and globally.
2. Measure - Measure the global and local implications of the problem and set quantifiable goals.
3. Implement - Design, plan and implement solutions to meet one earth sustainability goals.
4. Improve - Celebrate implemented solutions that generate improvements to our built environment. Learn from successes and failures to improve future solutions.

 

The Design for One Earth framework encourages you to ask a different series of questions about design objectives for sustainability. In the current model we set performance goals for design as a percent reduction than our current baseline consumption (i.e. 40% water use reduction or 30% energy use reduction). Although this approach has value because it can set very tangible goals it doesn’t ask the bigger question which is how do you set a performance goal for a design based on the carrying capacity of the earth considering both global and local resources. The Design for One Earth approach also asks you to balance social and economic concerns with important environmental measures. One Earth is the Ultimate Design Metric.

 

The Design for One Earth framework encourages holistic design through systems thinking. System thinking provides better solutions by looking at whole systems and their interconnections rather than addressing individual design components separately. There are many design systems that flow through the built environment such as energy, water, air, materials, waste, transportation, land and food. Consider the flow of all systems through a built environment and work to close system loops and optimize and integrate all systems. Think of the built environment as an ecosystem.

 

The built environment must also be a great place for people. Design of the built environment can provide tremendous value. It can generate savings through reductions in energy and other resource use, but it can also positively impact health, well-being and happiness. Design can create places where people want to live, work and play – places that are beautiful, enduring and cherished over time. Design for One Earth can create the infrastructure for a new improved lifestyle with tremendous quality of live and low resource use. Can we live abundantly within the limits of one earth?