Sustainable design (environmental design, environmentally sustainable design (ESD), environmentally-conscious design) is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment and services to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability.
The intention of sustainable design is to "eliminate negative environmental impact completely through skillful, sensitive design". Manifestations of sustainable designs require no non-renewable resources, impact on the environment minimally, and relate people with the natural environment.
Applications of this philosophy range from the microcosm - small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm - buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface. It is a philosophy that can be applied in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, urban planning, engineering, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, and fashion design.
Sustainable design is mostly a general reaction to global environmental crises, the rapid growth of economic activity and human population, depletion of natural resources, damage to ecosystems and loss of biodiversity.
The limits of sustainable design in reducing whole earth impacts are beginning to be considered because growth in goods and services is consistently outpacing gains in efficiency. As a result, the net effect of sustainable design to date has been to simply improve the efficiency of rapidly increasing impacts. The present approach, which focuses on the efficiency of delivering individual goods and services does not solve this problem. The basic dilemmas not yet well addressed include: the increasing complexity of efficiency improvements, the difficulty of implementing new technologies in societies built around old ones, that physical impacts of delivering goods and services are not localized but distributed throughout the economies, and that the scale of resource uses is growing and not stabilizing. 'Transformative' technologies are hoped for, but workable options are not yet evident. Only if the scale of resource uses stabilizes will the efficiency of how they are each delivered result in reducing total impacts.
The motivation for sustainable design was articulated famously in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful. In architecture, sustainable design is not the attachment or supplement of architectural design, but an integrated design process. This requires close cooperation of the design team, the architects, the engineers and the client at all project stages, from the site selection, scheme formation, material selection and procurement and project implementation.
Principles of sustainable design
While the practical application varies among disciplines, some common principles are as follows:
- Low-impact materials: choose non-toxic, sustainably-produced or recycled materials which require little energy to process
- Energy efficiency: use manufacturing processes and produce products which require less energy
- Quality and durability: longer-lasting and better-functioning products will have to be replaced less frequently, reducing the impacts of producing replacements
- Design for reuse and recycling: "Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial 'afterlife'."
- Design Impact Measures for total earth footprint and life-cycle assessment for any resource use are increasingly required and available. Many are complex, but some give a quick and accurate whole earth estimates of impacts. One is estimating any spending as consuming an average economic share of global energy use as 8000btu/$ and CO2 production of .57kgCO2/$ (1995$) from DOE figures.
- Sustainable Design Standards and project design guides are also increasingly available and are vigorously being developed by a wide array of private organizations and individuals. There is also a large body of new methods emerging from the rapid development of what has become known as 'sustainability science' promoted by a wide variety of educational and governmental institutions.
- Biomimicry: "redesigning industrial systems on biological lines ... enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles..."
- Service substitution: shifting the mode of consumption from personal ownership of products to provision of services which provide similar functions, e.g. from a private automobile to a carsharing service. Such a system promotes minimal resource use per unit of consumption (e.g., per trip driven).
- Renewability: materials should come from nearby (local or bioregional), sustainably-managed renewable sources that can be composted (or fed to livestock) when their usefulness has been exhausted.
- Healthy Buildings: sustainable building design aims to create buildings that are not harmful to their occupants nor to the larger environment. An important emphasis is on indoor environmental quality, especially indoor air quality.
Conceptual Problems to Solve
- Diminishing Returns: The principle that all directions of progress run out, ending with diminishing returns, is evident in the typical 'S' curve of The Technology Life Cycle and in the useful life of any system as discussed in Industrial Ecology and Life Cycle Assessment. It's as reliable an expectation as any principle of science that diminishing returns signal natural limits. Common office and business management practice is to read diminishing returns in any direction of effort as an indication of diminishing opportunity, a potential for accelerating their decline and signal to turn elsewhere. see also: Law of Diminishing Returns and Marginal Utility and Jevon's paradox.
- Unsustainable Investment: A problem arises when the limits of a resource are hard to see, so increasing investment in response to diminishing returns may seem profitable as in the Tragedy of the Commons, but may lead to a collapse. This problem of increasing investment in diminishing resources has also been studied in relation to the causes of civilization collapse by Joseph Tainter among others. This natural error in investment policy contributed to both the Roman and Mayan collapses, among others. That 'sustaining development' can be confused with 'sustaining resources', and the global scope of our investment with effects we don't see, however, should be a great concern. Relieving over-stressed resources requires reducing pressure on them, not continually increasing it whether more efficiently or not.
Sustainable planning
Urban planners that are interested in achieving sustainable development or sustainable cities use various design principles and techniques when designing cities and their infrastructure. These include Smart Growth theory, Transit-oriented development, sustainable urban infrastructure and New Urbanism. Smart Growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented development, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including mixed-use development with a range of housing choices. Transit-oriented development attempts to maximise access to public transport and thereby reduce the need for private vehicles. Public transport is considered a form of Sustainable urban infrastructure, which is a design approach which promotes protected areas, energy-efficient buildings, wildlife corridors and distributed, rather than centralised, power generation and wastewater treatment. New urbanism is more of a social and aesthetic urban design movement than a green one, but it does emphasize diversity of land use and population, as well as walkable communities which inherently reduce the need for automotive travel.
Both urban and rural planning can benefit from including sustainability as a central criterion when laying out roads, streets, buildings and other components of the built environment. Conventional planning practice often ignores or discounts the natural configuration of the land during the planning stages, potentially causing ecological damage such as the stagnation of streams, mudslides, soil erosion, flooding and pollution. Applying methods such as scientific modelling to planned building projects can draw attention to problems before construction begins, helping to minimise damage to the natural environment.
Cohousing is an approach to planning based on the idea of intentional communities. Such projects often prioritize common space over private space resulting in grouped structures that preserve more of the surrounding environment.
Cohousing community illustrating greenspace preservation, tightly clustered housing, and parking on periphery, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003.
Source : Wikipedia
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