The Polytechnic

DEEDS has announced the 360degree conference, and has made a call for ‘pods’, below….

360o – Charting New Territory in Sustainable Design Education. September 19th, 20th and 21st in London and Brighton.

A conference aimed at international design and architecture educators engaged in sustainable design education; practitioners interested in higher education and continuing professional development (CPD) in sustainable design, and students of design.

360o is convened by DEEDS (Design Education for Sustainability), an international, multi-partner, EU-funded project that aims to integrate sustainability into mainstream design education and practice, and organised and hosted by the Faculty of Arts & Architecture at the University of Brighton.

As part of DEEDS’ ongoing work, 360o aims to track a range of approaches, experiments and results in sustainable design teaching across Europe and beyond, by bringing together design educators and practitioners who are moving to the forefront of the current radical rethinking of production and consumption patterns from the standpoint of sustainability – whether defined as systematic, green, community-oriented, ethical, environmental, or simply “better” design. We ask: where does design education stand in relation to sustainability?

Can design education be a positive change agent, or does it merely follow practice?

Does it have the power and means to make the tables turn, in radical, inspirational and efficacious ways?
What are the mindsets, methods and materials that will give rise to a new culture in design education and practice?
What are the drivers and gains of breaking new ground in sustainable design education?
360o offers three days of exciting events and opportunities to share and exchange ideas, knowledge and experiences in sustainable design education and practice:

19th September: 360o @ 100% Design / 100% Sustainable?, Earls Court, London, UK
Workshops, presentations and exhibition visit at the ‘100% Sustainable?’ stand at 100% Design

20th September: 360o @ University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
A one-day academic conference in Brighton, UK

21st September: 360o @ Large
Tour of local eco-architecture sites around Brighton, UK

Speakers include: Anne-Marie Willis (D/E/S Team, Australia, and Founder-Director of the EcoDesign Foundation); William Wong (RSA, London); Susannah Hagan (University of East London, UK); Alastair Fuad-Luke (author/educator); Karen Blincoe (DEEDS Director and Director, Schumacher College, Devon, UK), and Jonathan Chapman (co-director, If:Lab: the Inheritable Futures Laboratory).

Tour destinations include: Woodland Enterprise Centre, Flimwell, East Sussex; the Weald and Downland Museum, West Sussex, and the Earthship, Brighton

CALL FOR ‘PODS’

As part of the conference, we call on educators and practitioners to contribute to the ‘Podscape’, a web-based platform to share Teaching & Learning resources (‘pods’) for sustainable design, piloted by DEEDS. Submitted Pods will be presented, displayed and discussed at the conference, and become part of the emerging body of knowledge and resources in sustainable design education.

Pods may address one or more of the following themes:

Pedagogic research, theories, approaches and experiments in sustainable design education
Practical implementation of sustainability design education (e.g. project work, case studies, best practice, partnership with industry)
Political, institutional and philosophical aspects of sustainable design education
Pod abstracts: 300 word descriptions of a Pod, or completed Pod form (downloadable here). Email to t.c.ainsworth@bsms.ac.uk by 1st Sept.

CONFERENCE FEES:

(Includes registration to 100% Design and VIP lounge, one-day conference at University of Brighton and optional tour on Sunday 21st September). By 15th August: £80 Conference fee (after 15th August): £120

Click here for the delegate form.

For those travelling from overseas, a small number of bursaries will be available for delegates without institutional funding, to help cover travel expenses and accommodation. Accommodation will be advised on booking.

Conference contacts:

Tom Ainsworth, School of Architecture and Design & DEEDS Project t.c.ainsworth@bsms.ac.uk

Karin Jaschke, School of Architecture and Design & DEEDS Project K.Jaschke@brighton.ac.uk

Jo Moulds, DEEDS Project and Environmental Marketing & PR
jo@jomoulds.co.uk

Dear conference,

We apologies for not being with you in person. We are writing in response to the short opinion piece by Iain Borden on this Oxford Conference, sustainability and architectural education, which is circulating amongst delegates, and which is going to be published in the September issue of Blueprint. We are also writing to report back on the major international pan-disciplinary design research conference held in Turin earlier this month, ‘Changing the Change’, to which we contributed.
In his piece, Iain refers to ‘a certain sense of unease’ that he feels at the ‘clarion call’ of sustainability. His uneasiness is shared by many colleagues. Indeed, we have been watching with some fascination the real sense of fear that the ‘environmental question’ has instilled in many architectural educators in recent years. For many design tutors this fear is well founded, as they are in no way intellectually equipped to deal with the practical demands of students, nor the critical demands of the issues at stake. We find ourselves in the curious position of watching design tutors demanding their right to autonomy, that is to say, demanding their right to social irrelevance, and we wonder with Marx, who will educate the educators?
Yet the challenges ahead might prove to be architectural and design education’s greatest moment. To understand why this is, we need a sober reflection upon where we are now, and the nature of the intellectual, social and political struggles that we face.
Firstly, let us be clear, the ‘environmental question’ is of a completely different order to any other issue that we are facing. This is because the environmental question forces us to confront the question of value production in capitalism head on, in a way that no other contemporary issue does. Iain wonders whether, “global health, intercultural interaction, and well-being”, might be “other challenges of equal or perhaps greater significance.” These are all important issues, and indeed for many thinkers they are inseparable and fundamental to the question of sustainable living. However, they will all be completely determined by outcome of the confrontation between ‘the environmental question’ and capitalist production. Period.
The kind of scientific reports on climate change that have been coming out over the last year are of a different order to what has come before. Benchmarks that had been thought to be fifty years away in a worse case scenario are now, it seems, upon us. In the coming weeks the North Pole will be navigable to normal shipping for the first time, whilst Australia has already shifted to a new pattern of seasons and rainfall. The recent Stockholm Networks report suggested that even if we were to meet Kyoto plus standards, which we certainly will not, there will still be fast and massive negative change to the world that we know. The kinds of discussions that we are having in construction, which are almost exclusively around carbon emission control (ie a tiny part of the environmental impact of building), will at best slightly delay change. Considered as technical solutions alone, they are irrelevant. There is after all nothing special about carbon - it is the most currently pressing of many natural cycles that have been distorted as capitalist growth hits planetary limits, but we are also losing control of our food, water, material and energy futures too. We need to start asking, exactly what scenarios are we designing for, and for whom?
Naomi Klein in her recent book has brilliantly exposed how some of the most criminal and un-progressive forces in global capitalism use crises to dominate entire areas of the global economy. On the basis of our current situation, we have to conclude that by far the most likely scenario that we are heading towards, is that of a degraded planet, with huge regions becoming increasingly uninhabitable, producing massive migration shifts, whilst even the wealthier areas struggle to meet energy and material needs, and have significant problems with food crops and supplies.
These are unfortunately exactly the kind of conditions that ‘crisis capitalism’ loves. In the absence of any popular shared vision of a new way of being on the planet, an atmosphere of real fear will emerge. In this situation, the corporations with for example interests in nuclear power and GM foods will put pressure on governments to give them full access to global markets. These will even seem like common sense solutions.. indeed to our current Prime Minister they already do. Increasingly, the only food that will grow is from the seeds of privately owned and centralised GM corporations (with proprietary pollinating GM insects already being developed!), and the main energy supplies will come from centralised nuclear ‘big power’ interests. This is not centuries away. This is being put in place now. This is Green Capitalism!
So what does this have to do with architectural practice, education, and the Oxford Conference? Well, firstly, we need to understand that the questions confronting us are not about avoiding climate change - it is already far too late for that. It is about damage limitation and amelioration. It is about creating positive visions of alternative futures, as a form of resistance, and to counter the fear that will come. It is about designing properly local-global decentralised network structures of power, food, information and infrastructure that are both robust enough to exist on their own in a worst case scenario, and which take power away from the criminal centres of capitalism today. It is about properly training designers in systems theory, ecology, cybernetics etc… training designers to be social facilitators and political activists, designers of processes and economies as well as beautiful objects. It is about producing new kinds of design schools, which are active agents of local and global change. It is about producing new kinds of professionals, and facilitating new kinds of participatory design.
If architectural and design education is to meet this historic role, then it will need to free itself from the constraints of the professional bodies to which it is shackled, or it will need to transform those bodies entirely. Let the students redesign the curriculum, and not only will you find that sustainability issues are suddenly at the core of all subjects areas, but that some very interesting shifts in pedagogy, content, and indeed definitions of architecture and architectural work would materialise. Indeed, among the first critiques that properly sustainable architectural institutions will make will be concerning the many relationships between professional architecture and capitalist criminality.
Iain’s unease is then understandable. Sustainability is in its broadest form grounded in values that are antithetical to those underpinning the architectural profession and architectural education in most institutions today: the importance of authorship, the premium on individualism, an idea of creativity that is still fundamentally rooted in 19th century romantic and idealist artistic thought. Instead sustainability thinking, at least tendentiously, foregrounds co-authorship, co-creation, and an agency oriented rather than ego-centric approach to design.
Last week’s ‘Changing the Change - An international conference on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability’ conference in Turin, chaired by Ezio Manzini, demonstrated the breadth of definitions that are active in current sustainability discourse, ranging from environmental and carbon-focused thinking to socially and psychologically oriented research; from highly theoretical systems thinking to hands-on, bottom-up engagement. Manzini’s research project, ‘The Sustainable Everyday’, is grounded in designers going out into the world and looking for progressive grass roots activities to network, up-scale and support. It is a living demonstration of real design research in action. It has wide geographical spread and enormous trans-cultural and co-operative potential. Designers (architects were invited but thin on the ground) have clearly caught on to the fact that sustainability is an infinitely sensible, realistic, and energising proposition in a world with obvious and potentially lethal flaws in its structural (economic, material) and, arguably, philosophical (social, spiritual) set-up. Yes, sustainability is a systemic cultural critique.
Ultimately Iain’s unease is in defence of a plurality of approaches to architecture, and with this we concur - diversity is fundamental to the robust health of any ecology. We would also join him in resisting any overly ambitious common declaration of intent. There is very little consensus or understanding around what sustainability is or means in architecture, and we should not pretend otherwise at this stage. And above all, architectural education should be in the business of critiquing definitions of sustainability provided by the profession, for reasons that we hope are by now clear.

Jon Goodbun (University of Westminster/Greenwich) and Karin Jaschke (University of Brighton)

How to be (a) good (designer)
or
sustainable design for REAL human needs
Based on the DEEDS Project’s 24 Core Principles, or ‘SCALES’ (www.deedsproject.org)

1. Get a grip
Make real human needs, aims and values, including caring for the natural environment, the guiding principle of your work.
[Design with integrity.]

Be clear whom you feel responsible to and what kind of society you work towards, as a designer (teacher, student), citizen and person.
[Know why you bother.]

Be sensitive to the powers, limits and impacts of design.
[Be aware that design is part of a complex and biased system.]

2. Get real
Design sustainably, that is, holistically and realistically.
[Being sustainable means being realistic, over time and across space.]

Design-out human and animal exploitation and environmental degradation by applying lifecycle and systems thinking to the material, functional and aesthetic-symbolic aspects of the work.
[Do no harm.]

Make products that enhance human well-being by satisfying real human needs, both material and non-material.
[Design for people, not false consciousness.]

Aim for local, community-based and decentralised solutions.
[Decentralisation is a key systemic factor in longterm sustainability.]

Create extraordinary products and services that challenge the mainstream and inspire positive mental and behavioural change.
[Be creative and shake things up.]

Make products work in multiple dimensions, environmental and social as well as economic and institutional, to achieve mainstream acceptance of sustainable products, where appropriate.
[Weigh the need for working within the existing system against the need to resist and change it.]

3. Get it right
Design products and services that work as intended and stand up to scrutiny, by using appropriate tools.
[Don’t provide sceptics with ammunition.]

Employ analytic tools like Life Cycle Analysis and other LC software; creative techniques such as scenario-setting and blue-sky thinking; interactive methods such as teamwork, interdisciplinarity, and co-design.
[Be hard-nosed and open-minded in designing.]

Be convincing and professional in communicating your work.
[Sustainable doesn’t mean amateurish.]

4. spread the news
Share your knowledge and insights, your experience, vision and achievements.
[Don’t sit on your sustainable credentials.]

Develop leadership and inspire others to engage in sustainable design practice by showing that the sustainability context expands the design context.
[Lead the way and be a role model.]

Highlight the tangible benefits of sustainable design for users and consumers and encourage a new, sustainable cultural representation of the “good life.”
[Show that it can work great for everybody.]

Shift public and business perception of sustainable design by exposing the vast range of significant value-added outcomes associated with it, both economic and ‘non-materialistic’, immediate and long-term.
[Show that it can work in a thousand ways and on a big scale.]

Open Invitation to the Camp for Climate Action, Kingsnorth, Kent, 3-11 August 2008

This is an open invitation to anyone and everyone to come and join the Camp for Climate Action at Kingsnorth in Kent between the 3rd and 11th of August. Come for as long or as little as you like, but if possible make sure to be there on Saturday 9th before midday, for an inspiring day of mass action to shut Kingnorth power station (see: http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/massaction). The Camp is easily accessible, the nearest train station is only 50 minutes from Central London.

The Climate Camp is saying NO to proposals to build a new generation of coal power stations, and YES to sustainable living - a world which fairly represents the needs of the people and planet rather than the corporations.

This is probably the best opportunity we have to really kick-start a huge social movement in this country capable of avoiding catastrophic climate change. It may also be the most amazing and inspirational week of your life. We need you there!

HOW TO GET THERE?

Easy. Jump on a train at either Charing Cross or Victoria and under an hour later arrive at Strood. We will be running shuttle buses from Strood to the camp (a few miles). There are also buses and private coaches running, including a local bus service to Hoo Saint Werburgh, which is only a mile from Kingsnorth. Keep an eye on the website for the latest travel updates (http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/node/11).

WHAT TO BRING?

Your friends, a tent, basic camping equipment, and a sense of adventure. All food is provided on camp and is very healthy and tasty so please don’t bring cooking equipment. But do bring a mug, plate and cutlery, and insect repellent if you plan to go near the estuary! Other useful things are a small radio so you can listen to the climate camp’s radio station and catch up with all the camp news! For info on what to bring is at: http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/node/19

WHAT CAN I DO?

Want to help us make the camp a success? Great. We are holding a Skill Share introductory day for the camp this Sunday 20th in London at Greenpeace (Canonbury Villas, N1 2PN) 11am till 4pm. This is a great chance to meet others who will be coming to the camp.

Otherwise just turn up and there will be plenty you can do on camp: setting up and building the structures; helping out in the kitchen; working with the legal support or media teams; getting involved in the workshops (see http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/node/10 for full list); and of course….shutting down Kingsnorth!

Oh, and don’t forget…

The Climate Camp returns to Heathrow on Saturday 26th for a Conference in association with local residents groups to organising a plan of “what to do if the worst comes to the worst and the government says yes to Heathrow expansion”. The next day there will be an amazing Climate Caravan departing from Heathrow which will traverse London to arrive at camp on Sunday 3rd August. The last few miles will see the Campaign Against Climate Change join the Caravan at Rochester Train Station, 12 noon to march to the Camp.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS, SPREAD THE WORD AND COME JOIN THE LONDON NEIGHBOURHOOD AT CLIMATE CAMP – 3-11 AUGUST. KINGSNORTH.

www.climatecamp.org.uk

David Harvey’s reading course on Karl Marx’s Capital has achieved near legendary status. I friend of mine (Indebir Riar) attended the course in NY a couple of years ago, and doesn’t stop raving about it, given half a chance.

Incredibly, it is now available online as video and audio at http://davidharvey.org/

Compulsory viewing for anyone with a brain.

Architecture 08 exhibition at the University of Greenwich.
Students of Architecture and their end of year work.

Atelier 6 2007/08:
Tutors: Jon Goodbun, Filip Visnjic, Cordula Weisser

This year the WAG studio has continued the work of previous cohorts, exploring the intersection of demographic, technological and environmental change. We consciously attempted to envisage new sustainable social forms by exploring the possibilities opened up by rethinking, from the bottom up and top down, architectural design method in the light of planetary limits.

We started the year looking at a single dwelling unit, and finished with a series of master-planning exercises for Hackney Central, which explored food production, energy management, cohousing and urban transport. In both cases we developed with the students a new kind of drawing - The Ecology Diagram - which aims to capture the material and energy forces and flows acting upon the site - whether environmental, economic, social, or technological. By working with Ecology Diagrams students were able to design processes as much as products, and imagine new social scenarios as solutions to new problems. WAG will be presenting the research of Atelier 6, as part of a wider study, to Hackney Council and local community groups over the summer.

You see more examples of students’ work here.

To find out more about Architecture at University of Greenwich please visit DigitalStudio.

This weekend, TWO, a pair of performers from London presented their piece Hide or Reveal in a small basement venue in the heart of Brighton, as part of the Fringe festival. Hide or Reveal is neither theatre, nor dance, nor performance, nor pantomime or comedy alone, it is all of these, wrapped into a forty minute non-stop performance. The piece explores how individual emotions, feelings and affects are shown, suppressed, put on and played out. For this Katarina Djenadic and Michal Paker use dance, gestural body-language, mimicking and grimassing, and play-acting in a fast-paced choreography that is at different times hilarious, melancholy, tragic, and parodic, and has a critical and (self)-ironic edge throughout. The self-absorbed narcisism of beauty routines is the subject of the flowing, balletic, gesture-based opening scene, executed by both performers in perfect synchrony but also isolation, until they suddenly realise that they are mirroring one another: a subtle but effective questioning of female self-perception and self-styl(is)ing. In another scene, the seizure-like effect of all-consuming envy, or jealousy, frieze-frames Michal in a grotesque, contorted posture and grimace for minutes on end while Katarina experiences the exhilaration, frenzy and intermittent moments of panic of new-found love or passion. And in a deliberately over-the-top scene both of them decide that they want “‘lips like Angelina Jolie” and “breast as big as my bum”: the reckless lip-painting and bra-stuffing that follows spirals out of control, exposing the absurdity of beauty cults and celebrity culture while also being hilariously funny. Both performers have great expressive talent and the routine is for the most part perfectly rehearsed and coordinated with a well-chosen sound-track. Katarina’s stark and haunting facial expressions combine intriguingly with her flowing, graceful movements, while Michal can switch from the clownesque to the doll-like to the witchy literally in the blink of an eye. They fill out the small stage and in fact make it feel twice its size. A great little piece.

David Greene joined us at Greenwich for degree studio crits last week, where he was as insightful and amusing as ever, and full of anecdotes - telling one student that they needed to find someone to bully them into finishing - “I was lucky, I had Peter Cook to bully me into finishing projects!”.

More recently Peter Cook’s bullying role has been filled by Samantha Hardingham and Kate Heron, and the results are currently being exhibited as LAWUN no 20 at the Architectural Association (AA) on Bedford Sq until May 25th 2008, and have been published as LAWUN no 19.

For the last few years Greene has been continuing the LAWUN and Invisible University projects that were started in the pages of Archigram in the sixties and seventies, as part of Experimental Practice EXP at the University of Westminster. For this piece Greene and Hardingham commissioned Theodore Spyropoulos, Nic Clear, Rowan Mersha and Shin Egashira to revisit and rework some of old projects including The Logplug, The Bottery, high-rise Living Pods, and his diploma project, a mosque for Baghdad.

Last Thursday David and his ‘assistants’ discussed this latest piece of work, and the results are definitely worth a visit. Egashira’s work on the Bagdad Mosque and Mersha’s imagining of an Electric Aborigine’s hairy coat - “more a communications habitat than a garment” - I found particularly enjoyable.

Greene’s work has been so important to those who have engaged with it, for its consistent struggle to think about the effects of modern ‘electric’ technology upon our visual and spatial cultures. The results of Greene’s research often outlines a profound crisis for conventional architectural practice, even as it opens up new pastures for architectural knowledge - a dilemma that seems to describe the man himself as much as his work.

Through a moment of synchronicity, I happened upon a piece of writing by Farshid Moussavi (whilst researching-writing a piece on pattern and decoration in architecture) which can be used to describe why Greene’s work remains vital:

“Architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture. It achieves this by continually capturing the forces that shape society, as material to work with. Architecture’s materiality is a composite one, made up of visible as well as invisible forces. Progress in architecture occurs through new concepts by which it becomes connected with this material, and it manifests itself in new aesthetic compositions and affects. It is these new affects that allow us to constantly engage with the city in new ways.” Farshid Moussavi, The Function of Ornament

The first article of a new regular column is up on the BD Online site. The new column is the product of an extended, and often weblog based, conversation around sustainable thinking that I have been engaged in with editor Phil Clark over the last year. This column aims to address over the coming months some of the broader questions raised by the need to rethink, in the light of emerging evidence of fast approaching planetary limits, our methods of design, production and consumption, specifically with regard to architecture-urbanism and construction. Most of the time I will be speaking from a research based position, at the intersection of academia, design education and architectural practice.