Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317232193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design considers the design, not only of artifacts, but of structures, systems, and interactions that bear our decisions and identities in the context of sustaining our shared planet. In addressing issues of design for global impact, behavior change, systems and strategy, ethics and values, this handbook presents a unique and powerful design perspective.

Just as there are multiple definitions of design, so there are several definitions of sustainability, making it difficult to find unity. The term can sometimes be seen as a goal to achieve, or a characteristic to check off on a list of criteria. In actuality, we will never finish being sustainable. We must instead always strive to design, work, and live sustainably. The voices throughout this handbook present many different characteristics, layers, approaches, and perspectives in this journey of sustaining.

This handbook divides into five sections, which together present a holistic approach to understanding the many facets of sustainable design:
Part 1: Systems and Design
Part 2: Global Impact
Part 3: Values, Ethics, and Identity
Part 4: Design for Behavior Change
Part 5: Moving Forward

This handbook will be invaluable to those wishing to broaden their understanding of sustainable design and students and practitioners of Environmental Studies, Architecture, Product Design and the Visual Arts.

1
The Political Economy of Design in a Hotter Time

David W. Orr

Design is all the rage. We wear designer jeans; some of us live in designer houses; a few drive cars with designer interiors. Buyers of luxury houses and buildings pay “starchitects” sizeable fees to design buildings that defy gravity, conventional geometry, and human scale. Some propose to redesign our genes by means liberated from sexual selection unhindered by philosophy or the piddling constraints of convention. The goal is super-human perfection, but the more likely result would be the geneticists’ version of an arms race. Others are designing the means to further expedite consumption by tailoring our electronically tracked proclivities to the expanding bazaar of commercial opportunities. The goal is higher profits. Whatever you want someone will design it for you but at a price high enough to exclude the great majority of humanity and without any thought for those who will follow us and will find their grasp on life, liberty, and happiness made more tenuous by previous design decisions.

Missing in the buzz about design are flesh and blood people and the long-term effects of the design choices being made. The poor and disadvantaged are conspicuously absent from the articles and advertisements in airbrushed architectural and design magazines. Missing, too, is a thoughtful analysis of the fine print of the deal where, it is said, the devil resides. What are the social, ecological, and spiritual implications of various design choices? How might these affect the prospects of other species and future generations? And nowhere in the high-tech fluff and puffery do human fallibility, ignorance, and our propensity for goof ups raise their not-so-perfect heads.

The ironies stack up like cordwood. For one, we pay lots of money to visit the historic cities of Europe precisely because their cramped old towns with crooked, narrow streets and ancient buildings retained much of their charm and attraction because they grew, imperfections and all, much as Jane Jacobs once explained, by trial and error. They grew incrementally to meet particular needs in specific places, not as the result of the grand design schemes of logical and linear minds of men like Robert Moses and le Corbusier with their straight lines, motorized transport, and efficiencies tailored to the needs of the hurried class.

No reasonable person can deny the need for intelligent design, particularly as it reduces material, water, and energy use, and therefore pollution. But since World War II we discarded much of that kind of older design intelligence and infrastructure. I recall, for example, the light-rail system of Pittsburgh that was once an efficient, dependable, and cheap way to move around the city. My present home, Oberlin, Ohio, was once part of an interurban system that connected many of the cities and towns between Toledo and Cleveland. Light-rail systems like these were dismantled all over the United States not because they were inefficient or unpopular, but because companies like General Motors acquired them in order to put them out of business. We now drive their cars, with umbilical cords that stretch to depleting oil fields in distant places where we are not much appreciated, spend much of our lives caught in traffic jams, burn up our emotional energy in road rages, drive through award-winning ugliness, breathe air contaminated with byproducts of combustion, attend the funerals of the thousands annually killed in highway crashes, continue to pay exorbitant taxes to protect our access to other peoples’ oil, and patch over the problems caused by monumental design and planning mistakes attributable to flaws in our political economy by which private mobility and its corporate vendors was deemed better than public mobility. No reasons were given; no vote was ever taken. The market, it was said, had spoken, but in truth the public good was hijacked by corporate pirates in three-piece suits. Advertisers, long-before mobilized to sell cars and automotive accessories, joined in the hijacking and geared up for the post–World War II boom that drove our economy for the next half century by selling chrome-trimmed fantasy, social status, roadside wonders, fast foods, and the promise of excitement just over the next horizon.

In this case the political economy of design was neither political in the sense of being the result of public decisions reached through democratic deliberation, nor economic in any honest way. A great deal of the debt for that half-century binge of individualized, oil-dependent, land-eating, polluting, and democracy-corrupting system of transportation will be passed on to our descendants. Any true accounting of the full costs of our automobile culture also would have to include the role of ExxonMobil and other oil companies in delaying action on climate change that they knew to be a reality as far back as 1977. How many people have died because they lavishly funded four decades of climate denial? How many more will perish in the climate mayhem ahead? How many trillions of dollars of damage might have been avoided had they chosen to lead the transition away from the fossil-fuel-powered system they created? Of necessity there will be an accounting of sorts, but not likely a reckoning with truth and reconciliation because we have neither laws nor institutions to adjudicate lethal malfeasance at this scale.

My point is that all design exists in a larger framework of political economy by which costs and benefits are distributed within society and across generations. Whether we acknowledge them or not, the failure to design with physical and ecological realities incurs irrevocable costs as well. Commercial and industrial designers, however, mostly regard their work as politically and ethically neutral or merely a matter of esthetics and novelty. Steve Jobs, for one, learned how to make computers that were considerably more than tools of computation and communication but rather something designed to light up the pleasure centers of the brain. Jobs, in Sue Halpern’s words, used “enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging to convince millions … that the provenance of Apple devices was magical, too.”¹ Lost in the hype and cultish aspects were the lives of underpaid, exploited workers and the mountains of electronic trash thrown out to buy next year’s I-whatever, which Halpern muses “may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’ art.” As Jobs knew, design has powerful effects.

It is a fact well understood by all designers. “Once people come in,” as a software engineer at Instagram reports, “the network effect kicks in … then it takes on a life of its own.”² The goal is to make it “enthralling” and “difficult to put down,” in a word, addictive. Every person so addicted faces “1,000 people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down the self-regulation that you have.”³

Frank Lloyd Wright once bragged that he could design a house for a newly married couple madly in love that would cause them to divorce in a matter of weeks. But Wright, the architect, would have been able to manipulate only materials, geometry, space, and landscapes. Contemporary designers work with much more powerful tools and sometimes with very bad effects.

In Addiction by Design, Natasha Schüll describes the use of design to turn gamblers into gambling addicts. One gaming machine designer, for example, “really knows how to get into the head of a fifty-year-old woman and figure out what she wants.” The casino owners who buy his machines only want her money, but he knows that her purse is connected to specific parts of her brain that can be manipulated. “Gambling machines,” like those he designs, “are complex calculative devices that operate to redistribute gamblers’ stakes in a very precise, calibrated, and ‘scientific’ way … [they] operate as vehicles of enchantment, galvanizing what political theorist Zygmunt Bauman has described as ‘human spontaneity, drives, impulses, and inclinations resistant to prediction and rational justification,’ or in Weber’s words, ‘irrational and emotional elements that escape calculation.’”⁴ Such machines work in the “fashion of psychostimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines. They energize and de-energize the brain in more rapid cycles.” In the words of one gambler, “you’re in a trance, you’re on autopilot … the zone is like a magnet, it just pulls you in and holds you there.” As long as you have money that is. “It’s our duty,” as the CEO of Las Vegas Stratosphere puts it, “to extract as much money as we can from customers.” The entire design of the modern casino aims to create a womb to keep gamblers oblivious to everything else, until the wallet is drained. “It is not uncommon,” Schüll writes, “to hear of machine gamblers so absorbed in play that they were oblivious to rising flood waters at their feet or smoke and fire alarms that blared at deafening levels … or even a dying man at their feet.”⁵ Severely addicted gamblers will stay at it for twelve hours or longer ignoring all bodily needs to satisfy the craving.

The gambling industry described by Schüll resembles in many ways the larger world of modern advertising that drives consumption. At least since Edward Bernays created the prototype for the modern advertising firm, capitalists have intended to make us dependable and dependent consumers, that is to say consumption addicts by design. The sellers often know more about us than we know of ourselves. They track our behavior: bodily responses to various stimuli, eye motions, and our every flinch and fantasy trolling for any information that might be useful in order to sell us more of what we don’t need or don’t want but can be made to crave. They have designed a system that orchestrates our fears, phobias, and desires and shapes us into more dependable consumers.

Worse, designers can do work that is purely evil. The designers of Auschwitz and its machinery of extermination, for example, participated in “the greatest crime committed by architects.”⁶ One can make an even more compelling case against weapons designers who created a world still suspended over the nuclear precipice.⁷

The point is that the art and science of design, in other words, should not be exempted from the standards of morality and decency. Designers now are equipped with powerful tools drawn from the disciplines of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, computer science, architecture, and interior design. These can be used to manipulate, deceive, and render dependent, or they could be used to help us undo our addictions and mindless consumption and build a convivial, democratic, fair, decent, healthy, pollution-free, and nonviolent world powered by renewable energy and populated with competent people. There is an important distinction between conventional design, which is simply the making of things to appeal to status needs and transient fashion, and ecological design, which is the skill to make things of value that last and fit harmoniously in their ecological, cultural, moral, and historical context.

The art and science of ecological design has come a long way in the decades since Victor Papenek, Sim van der Ryn, John Todd, John Lyle, Bill McDonough, and others launched the green building revolution. Rapid technological development has made solar and wind technologies competitive with baseload coal almost everywhere and without the many costs of mining, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. The same is true of energy efficiency that could, with more accurate accounting and better policy incentives, eliminate perhaps half or more of our present energy use while providing superior quality in a growing economy. Investment in renewable energy worldwide is growing rapidly, and consistently providing higher and safer rates of return than those in coal, oil, and gas. As a result, it is possible to create buildings and cities powered entirely by improved efficiency and renewable energy.

Ecological design aims to calibrate human actions with the way natural systems work as particular places, larger landscapes, and ecologies. It aims to work with, not against, the flows of energy and natural cycles. It aims to conserve, preserve, and regenerate the basis for life and human flourishing. Architect Stuart Walker writes, “if design is to more effectively address sustainability it has to transcend utility and conventional function-led, and especially technology-led approaches.”⁸ He calls on designers to rise above “the calculated creation of dissatisfaction” and to “think more comprehensively about the products we already produce and their implications.” Design, in other words, must be an act of integration, not just specialization, with the goal of creating wholeness and spiritual well-being.⁹ In Robert Grudin’s words, design, “unlike any other concept … calls for us to create a unity of part with whole, a concord of form and function, a finished product that is harmonious with society and with nature.”¹⁰

By that standard, there are some things that should not be designed. But the distinction between what designers can do and what they should do requires a design ethic to inform professional conduct, rather like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine.¹¹ Engineer, M. W. Thring, for example, proposes a standard that includes all of the consequences of engineering and design including those affecting “the subjective qualities of human life such as self-fulfillment, happiness, inner freedom and love.”¹² Specifically, designers should see all of their work, as engineer Seaton Baxter puts it, as a manifestation of “co-evolution with the natural systems of the world” increasing the quality of life while reducing the consumption of resources.¹³

In summary, the basic rules for ecological design are these:

• maximum use of solar energy
• protect diversity of all kinds
• eliminate waste
• use nature as the model
• make it affordable
• design for repair and disassembly
• build in redundancy and resilience
• maximum public participation, and
• beauty¹⁴

Design, in other words, is a healing art in the broadest sense of the word. It is no accident that the word health is related to the words holy, whole, holism, and healing. Neither, I think, is it an accident that the root words for religion and ecology imply wholeness and connection. Design should embrace the health of people, ecologies, and social institutions as interacting parts of a larger whole.

Further, good design should increase the reservoir of practical ecological competence at the local level allowing us to ...