Bringing Design to

Life
DEPARTEMENT OF ARCHOTECTURE
INDRAPRASTA UNIVERSITY
JAKARTA
2015
 Two Views of Sustainability

 Today, our rapid exploitation of fossil fuels is already changing

climate patterns so catastrophically that many insurance
companies will no longer insure against extreme weather events.
 One hundred square miles of rainforest are being lost each day.
 Species are going extinct at the unprecedented rate of three per
hour.
 Chemicals once thought relatively harmless to humans are turning
out to affect immune and endocrine systems.
 In search of comfort, convenience, and material wealth, we have
begun to sacrifice not only our own health, but also the health of
all species.
 We are starting to exhaust the capacity of the very systems that
sustain us, and now we must deal with the consequences.

Sustainability and Design

 • technological sustainability and ecological sustainability

• Technological sustainability, which seems to get most of the airtime,

may be characterized this way: “Every problem has either a
technological answer or a market solution. There are no dilemmas to
be avoided, no domains where angels fear to tread. It is about expert
interventions in which the planet’s medical symptoms are caref ully
stabilized through high-profile international agreements and
sophisticated management techniques.
• Ecological sustainability, in contrast, “is the task of finding alternatives
to the practices that got us into trouble in the first place; it is
necessary to rethink agriculture, shelter, energy use, urban design,
transportation, economics, community patterns, resource use,
forestry, the importance of wilderness, and our central values. While
the two approaches have important points of contact, including a
shared awareness of the extent of the global environmental crisis,
they embody two very different visions of a sustainable society.
 • the highly influential 1987 report of the World Commission
on Environment and Development, Our Common Future.
• “Sustainable development is development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs”
• we find that sustainability is to be attained by “more rapid
economic growth in both industrial and developing
countries, freer market access for the products of developing
countries, lower interest rates, greater technology transfer,
and significantly larger capital flows.”5 This prescription
implies a highly technical approach based on more and
better management and technology.
 • Four of David W. Orr’s characteristics of ecological sustainability
are worth summarizing here.
• First, people are finite and fallible. The human ability to
comprehend and manage scale and complexity has limits. Thinking
too big can make our human limitations a liability rather than an
asset.
• Second, a sustainable world can be redesigned and rebuilt only
from the bottom up. Locally self-reliant and self-organized
communities are the building blocks for change.
• Third, traditional knowledge that coevolves out of culture and
place is a critical asset. It needs to be preserved, restored, and
used.
• Fourth, the true harvest of evolution is encoded in nature’s design.
Nature is more than a bank of resources to draw on: it is the best
model we have for all the design problems we face.
 The Design Connection

• The most significant change in architecture over the last century has
been the growing dependence of homes on centralized technological
infrastructures for the provision of food, fuel, water, and building
materials. . . . One BTU in twelve of world energy production is used to
heat and cool the U.S. building stock. . . . On average it takes as much
energy to heat and cool the U.S. building stock for three years as it
took to build it in the first place. Home furnaces are the largest source
of air pollution after automobiles. . . . An average house uses between
150 and 200 gallons of water per inhabitant per day. . . . All water used
in buildings, no matter for what purpose, exits as sewage. Our water
and sewage systems are coupled in series. We quite literally defecate
in our water systems in the name of personal hygiene. . . . The average
home produces 4.5 pounds of garbage per person per day, or
anywhere from 2.5 to 5 tons per year. Fibers, plastics, paper, wood,
glass, metal and food scraps are usually all thrown in the same trash
bin. A lot of highly organized materials in the input channels are
combined in one “noisy” exit channel and dumped; disorder or
entropy is maximized.
sean wellesley-miller, “Towards a Symbiotic Architecture”
 • design as the intentional shaping of matter, energy, and
process to meet a perceived need or desire.
• Design is a hinge that inevitably connects culture and nature
through exchanges of materials, flows of energy, and choices
of land use. By this definition, architects, landscape
architects, and city planners are clearly designers, but so are
farmers, chemical engineers, industrial designers, interior
decorators, and many others. All are involved in shaping the
physical details of our daily experience.
 • the environmental crisis is a design crisis.
• It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are
constructed, and landscapes are used. Design manifests
culture, and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what
we believe to be true about the world. Our present forms of
agriculture, architecture, engineering, and industry are
derived from design epistemologies incompatible with
nature’s own.
• It is clear that we have not given design a rich enough
context. We have used design cleverly in the service of
narrowly defined human interests but have neglected its
relationship with our fellow creatures. Such myopic design
cannot fail to degrade the living world, and, by extension,
our own health.
 • dumb design:
• design that fails to consider the health of human communities or
of ecosystems, let alone the prerequisites of creating an actual
place.
• Dumb design is wasteful of energy and resources. It is polluting,
extravagant, and profoundly dangerous. Unfortunately, we are
surrounded by it. We have let dumb design come to dominate the
scene because we lacked the words and awareness to fight it. We
have been late to acknowledge that the environmental crisis is also
a crisis of design, and slow to generate forms of knowledge and
policies that might favor more sensible kinds of design. We have
created sterile places because we have not honored the small,
constant acts of compassion required to care for the living world.
• On the other hand, if we build a rich enough set of ecological
concerns into the very epistemology of design, we may create a
coherent response to the environmental crisis.
 • The case of architecture is typical
• For most of this century, architectural design has been
informed by the metaphor of the machine. At best, nature is
seen as a picturesque backdrop to the dominant form, the
piece of architecture itself, representing an expression of
unfettered creative will
• Architecture is sometimes taught and envisioned as though
sites were interchangeable background slides projected
behind the manmade object.
• If we are to take sustainability seriously, we must admit to
ourselves that the emperor has no clothes: conventional
design is failing because its epistemology is flawed. Gas
courses into the tank, the dials spin round on the pump—this
much is visible and immediate. What is less visible is the
climate change being induced by the rapid and widescale use
of fossil fuels. In the same way, farming practices that do not
account for the health of water or soil, industrial processes
that produce vast quantities of known carcinogens, and
buildings that deplete resources and off-gas formaldehyde
can be designed only within environmentally impoverished
epistemologies.
• In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson
pursued a similar theme: “You decide that you want to get rid of
the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good
place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called
Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if
Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger
system of your thought and experience.” Some even speak of the
ecological unconscious, the deep, unacknowledged pain we feel for
the ecological destruction all around us.
• The tragedy is that dumb design has provided so little of enduring
value at such a great environmental and social cost. The
industrialized world, with its science, technology, and borrowed
affluence, has developed by denying wholeness within the art of
living.
• We need to ask questions, to intervene, to render visible what has
so long been hidden from public discussion: that sustainability, or
its lack, is inseparable from the particular characteristics of the
objects, buildings, and landscapes we design.
• What is an appropriate level of density for a town? How can land-
use patterns be made more conducive to the needs of wildlife? The
details of design give a new tool for understanding and
implementing sustainability.
• We can learn a great deal by moving beyond abstract statements of
policy toward the particulars of design. It is here, at the level of
actual farms, buildings, or manufacturing processes, that
relationships of culture and nature are thrown in sharp relief. It is
here that the contours of a sustainable world become definable.