Dr David Hawkins is Associate Dean (research & innovation), School of Art and Design at University College Falmouth. David talks to Sustainable Lens about the Smart Cornwall initiative.

Life at the intersection of science and policy. During her career in management and governance, Dr Maggie Lawton has help lead New Zealand’s organisations down the road of a sustainable future. She describes her work as “Strategic Sustainable Design”. Not considering herself an activist but as a change agent, Maggie sees her role as [...]

Six Silberman. Wow. This is an insight packed interview. Currently based in New York, Six works at the intersection of art, economics, design, computing, business, sociology (this list goes on). He has come around to describing himself as a systems analyst. This extended interview traverses full cost accounting for the life cycle, our fetish [...]

Stefan Kreitmayer is from both the Open University’s Centre for Research in Computing and University College London’s Interaction Centre. Stefan has a varied background developing interactive and reactive computer graphics for live performances and installations in collaboration with composers, directors, designers, and choreographers. Earlier activities included film music and sound design. Stefan tells us [...]

Nicola Bould describes both design and sustainability as verbs – as processes. Design, she says is about finding creative ways to solve complex problems. Thinking bigger and wider she says is key to work at the start of the pipe – thinking in strategically and in systems – not to try to retrofit sustainability [...]

Instead of limiting the numbers of people who have access to the wilderness could we have a goal to maximise the impact – the more people the better it is? Editor of a new book Wild Heart: The possibility of wilderness in New Zealand, Dr Mick Abbott has strong views about the wilderness. For [...]

Our own Dr Samuel Mann from Otago Polytechnic sat in the guest chair this week. We talked about his new book “Sustainable Lens: a visual guide“. We trace the development of sustainability through its representation in diagrams. The book presents a model for seeing the world through a sustainability-driven perspective. Shane’s number of the [...]

Brian Burns asks “if we were to ride into ‘Ecoville’ late one night – how would we recognise it, and would he like to live there?”.   Brian describes his experiences when he set his University of  Carleton Industrial Design students off to explore Ecoville. Shane’s number of the week: 3,000,000,000    The contribution [...]

Mark Miller is the General Manager, Applied Design Research Centre. Shane’s number of the week: 1972 – the year when we were warned that the reactors used in Fukushima were reported as having a dangerous design flaw… and the warning was promptly ignored. Sam’s Joined-up-thinking: As ground based beings we are good at thinking [...]