Category: Design for sustainability
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The impact of the built environment on climate change – and of climate change on the built environment
Why is the built environment important to climate change? We all live and work in buildings, and they provide us with shelter and warmth, belonging and protection. However the built environment is responsible for a huge 39% of all global carbon emissions, far higher than any other individual sector. This 39% can be divided into […]
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Homeworld ’81 revisited
The Homeworld ’81 BBC Future Home 2000 Last month I attended one of the online events celebrating the 40thanniversary of the Milton Keynes Homeworld ‘81 exhibition. Yes, I am old enough to have been there (so was Robin Roy and a number of other old timers from the OU). Indeed, as I was covering the […]
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Design for repair and maintainability
Recently, I have been thinking about design for repair and maintainability. The three ‘R’s of sustainability remind us to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but ‘Reuse’ can be a challenge when so many products are not designed with maintenance or repair in mind. Home printers are a good example, with huge numbers of printers ending up in […]
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Pick a metric, any metric! Designing Building Energy Standards
The UK Government is currently consulting on the Future Building Standard which includes updates to parts of the building regulations dealing with energy use in buildings (MHCLG, 2021). The built environment is a major user of energy and contributor to carbon emissions so tightening standards for new buildings and retrofit is an important step for […]
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Attitudes and Behaviours
We’re on design as a set of Cognitive Superpowers (again). This time looking at two properties we take for granted and don’t seem to include in learning outcomes: Attitudes and Behaviours. I’m going to argue that these are as important as developing Skills or Cognitive Abilities. In particular, that they are necessary aspects of being […]
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Reducing carbon from older buildings: the need for holistic heritage approaches or… hot water bottles, curtains and lifecycle carbon
My research is investigating ways to reduce carbon emissions from residential heritage buildings while retaining their heritage values. It is generally acknowledged that many more buildings can be considered heritage buildings than merely those designated in planning as listed or in conservation areas. It is unclear how many buildings fall into the ‘heritage category’ but it […]
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Covid-19: a catalyst for redesigning transport services?
Among his plethora of typically journalistic sound bites, last week the Prime Minister expressed the desire that the Covid-19 pandemic could be a “catalyst for change”. He was picking up the growing desire not to return to the ‘old normal’ but shift to a new, more sustainable and regenerative trajectory. There’s a lot of this […]
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The Challenge of Re-Opening a Community Garden – The Covid-19 Crisis and Access to and Uses of Green spaces in Cities
Now that the UK lock-down has been eased, although we observe increasingly local lockdowns being actioned, we can start to look back at what impact the Covid-19 crisis had and continues to have on social life in cities. In this short blogpost, I want to share some initial thoughts on the access to and uses […]
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An ecological turn
As is the usual way of things for me, it was a couple of days before the abstract deadline that I clocked this conference in Bologna next January: The Ecological Turn. Design, architecture and aesthetics beyond “Anthropocene”. A key question they ask and describe is: ‘How does the ecological thinking affect architects, designers and the […]