Tag: architecture

Categories
policy urban

Sustainability at scale

Thomas Bergendorff

The first step is getting the people in the room, and then you have to get something done

Thomas Bergendorff [ 1:00:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thomas Bergendorff is coordinator at Stockholm Royal Seaport Innovation. Thomas is goal is finding innovative sustainable solutions on a large scale. He does this by bringing together companies, academics and the City of Stockholm, working across sectoral boundaries to work towards delivering upon ambitious environmental and sustainability targets for a large scale sustainable urban development.

Talking points

The first step is getting the people in the room, and then you have to get something done

We have to change the world

We have to do something, we can’t just point finger and hope that someone else will fix it for us

I have got the best job in the world.

We have to keep working, knowing a miracle isn’t going to happen, we have to keep working at it bit by bit.

Transformation depends on what timescale you are looking at, incremental change looked at over a longer time scale – we can look back and realise that was a transformation.

Short term thinking is part of the problem, that’s what got us here. Thinking like little kids.

We need a transformational change, that’s a lot of incremental changes to get us there. But it’s not all linear, those incremental changes are getting us to the window of opportunity – an institutional, political, financial, right-people-at-the-right-time window. You do incremental change until you get to the window of opportunity, and then you go with a big, real transformation.

(Activist) Not really, a facilitator that enables other people to be activists, much as I would like to be an activist, because it’s much more romantic to be an activist. I’m doing the necessary work so that other people will be the activists.

I’m a generalist with a wide ranging programme. But how do I prioritse, am I doing the right thing today?

How do we do as much as possible? What are the optimal processes and tools?

My goal has to be to get as many things off the ground as possible. We need tools and processes to do that.

Don’t worry too much, just follow your heart and work hard.

Categories
architecture design

Architectural games: designing complex emergent systems

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian [ 58:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It is not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. She brings to sustainability her experience in architecture – but it’s not all about buildings. She says it is “not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?”.  In her studio she goes “beyond a complex juggling act of all the conditions” to adopt a ludic design process.

games by nature…are the way by which we push boundaries of the conditions that reality gives us, and in pushing boundaries – identity boundaries, physical boundaries – we test out alternative possibilities and they are very constructive for moving society forward.

it’s trickery, they’re designing complex adaptive systems without knowing they’re doing it at first

The four themes she consistently publishes on are:

  • emergent forms of architecture and urbanism
  • game design as a way to tool the mind to work with and design complex emergent systems
  • design and education innovation
  • architectural analysis and theory about anything that has to do with the intersection of culture, technology and the natural and built environment within a global ecology.

    • Until we have shifted from a narrative of guilt and fear to a narrative of desire it’s going to be a real hard thing to win

Ann Pendleton-Jullian was in New Zealand to give a keynote speech at HERDSA13.  The title of her talk was Upside Down and Inside Out. The Future of the University as a Design Problem.

Some of the works referenced in our conversation: