Creative, Sustainable Design

This article, titled, Dysfunction, Deconstruction & Reconstruction: Exploring Sustainable Thinking Through Design Making by Andy Milligan and Jason Nelson, asks foundational questions regarding the circularity of a building’s life cycle. By circularity, I mean, we design a home, build it, move in and use it, and then over time the home reaches the end of its life cycle. If the home is deconstructed and salvageable materials reused, it creates something of a “circle of life” for the building. The author’s premise is to ask how we can collectively begin to connect the beginning, creative stages of designing homes to the end stages of sustainability and preservation of natural resources so that we are designing with reuse in mind from the beginning.

Here is the introduction:

Design is sexy. Waste is not! Sustainability is not merely an issue, but represents ‘the’ only issue affecting design and the planet. Baxter [18] reminds us that society needs to move beyond a culture of affluence towards a more creatively global society. Affluence is not a guarantee of happiness. But how do we win the hearts and minds of design students when conscious of the scale of the problem? How do we embed sustainability within design education? How can educators engage intelligently with sustainability given the saturated educational market we exist within? Pressures on resources, increasing student numbers, reduced teaching time, decreases in staff, impact on how and what we teach? However, the authors suggest that not all disciplines need to respond to sustainability with the same intensity, scope or direction. Disciplines across the sector, (Engineering, Product, Painting to Poetry), will have their natural limits of engagement. We might define this as ‘a sustainable spectrum of engagement’, [10], but deepest engagement (eg. Engineering perhaps), need not necessarily diminish alternative or other experimental methods. What may appear ‘superficial green gloss’ may carry equal legitimacy, resonating at a different design frequency within a sustainable spectrum.