Design Currency - Sustainable Cities Panel and Oscar Pena

Design Currency - Sustainable Cities Panel

Some of my notes and my thinking in italics...

Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity)

• More of our species live in cities than outside; 19 cities will have 20M people in the 21^st century.
• 4B people emerging middle class.
• When they have a few extra cents: education, health care and improve living standards.
• 1 in 7 live in formal slums/refugee camps; in 30 years that will be 1 in 3.
• “Design is the ultimate renewable resource”.
• Need to go to the decision makers (e.g. World Economic Forum).
• Have to educate the decision makers at the top as well as when they’re grown (love this dual pronged approach; need to get this humanistic thinking in leadership programs as well as C-suite sessions).

Peter Busby (architect)

• White paper with 10 ideas for Vancouver.
• By 2030 a tonne of carbon will cost six times what it does now.
• Vancouver is currently 6 tonnes CO2 per person/year.
• Looking at moving from sustainable buildings to whole systems (think at the community scale; district energy systems).
• Ways for buildings to feed off of the bad building beside it.
• Doing the new Van Dusen building.

Bruce Haden (architect)

• Vancouver is a little high on ourselves.
• Humanity has not demonstrated the DNA to solve social change challenges.
• Vancouver lost many aspects of the visceral necessary for the long term.

Suggestions sparked from colleagues in conversation after this panel:

Let My People Go Surfing

TEDx Vancouver - District 9

Oscar Pena – Philips Design (Senior Creative Director for Lighting)

• Oversees design initiatives; what is technologically possible with what is humanly preferable.
• How design shapes us (project ambient experience – MRI and kids; 25% need to be sedated).
• Importance of the translator (translator is one who really listens) (and I’d add one who asks great questions and then listens).
• Translators connect people with objects, ideas with business.
• Great translators shape change, often with small steps.
• Non-linear approach to innovation (three horizons approach: create viable options, build emerging business, extend and defend core business).
• Light pole that harnesses solar energy by day. (This was very cool. Check out the screen picture.)
• 1.6B people unable to connect to regular electrical supply.
• Experience cycle/possible touchpoints (done with pictures; shows happy/sad face).
• Designers have these kinds of tools – can’t hide them!
• More about the thinking; less the doing (still understand the doing).
• How can measurements connect us to the resources we use? We’ve lost connect with our size and what we consume.