bodies and buildings nyu itp 3 25 2013
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BODIES &�BUILDINGS NYU ITP LECTURE COURSE SPRING 2013
MARCH 25, 2013
JEN VAN DER MEER @JENVANDERMEER WWW.JENVANDERMEER.COM
ASSIGNMENT: In the same way we reviewed health apps for our first assignment, find an app, website, or some other technology service that gives an end user the ability to interact with her environmental data.
Write a review of this experience – would you use this system for your personal understanding? What kinds of feedback loops are built into the design of the system?
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BUILDINGS:
Part 2: Buildings
7. Clean Tech Failures, Clean Tech Long Term View, March 25, 2013
8. LEED and the Passive House Movement, April 1, 2013
9. Passive House + CoGen, April 8, 2013
10. Generative Architecture, Responsive Design, April 15, 2013
Part 3: Concept Development and Final Presentations
11. Concept strengthening – design thinking exercises, business case building, April 22, 2013
12. Final Presentations with guest critics, April 29, 2013
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PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM: 12. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (transport networks, population age structures)
9. Length of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goals of the system
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system – its goals, power structure, rules, its culture-arises
1. The power to transcend paradigms
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3. The goals of the system
The goal of the system is a leverage point superior to the self-organizing ability of a system.
That’s why I can’t get into arguments about whether genetic engineering is a “good” or “bad” thing. Like all technologies, it depends upon who is wielding it, with what goal.
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3. The goals of the system
Whole system goals are not what w ethingk of as goals in the human-motivational sense. They are not so much deducible from what everyone says as from what the system does. Survival, resilience, differentiation, evolution are system-level goals.
Even people within systems don’t often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving.
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3. The goals of the system
Whole system goals are not what we think of as goals in the human-motivational sense. They are not so much deducible from what everyone says as from what the system does. Survival, resilience, differentiation, evolution are system-level goals.
Even people within systems don’t often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving.
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What is the goal of this system?
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BUILDINGS: �THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT, THE SUPPLY SIDE BODIES & BUILDINGS
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ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT: SUPPLY SIDE
Most of the technological interventions in the global environment have focused on the supply side:
The availability of land (conservation)
The availability of fuel (gas crises, investment in clean tech)
The availability of greener products with greener materials (green product development/greenwashing)
In this class we focus on the demand side – making buildings so that they demand less from the earth. But to understand the context, we need to know our recent history.
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HISTORY
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1845: Thoreau Walden; or Life in the Woods
1864: Yosemite
1886: Audobon Society
1892: Sierra Club: John Muir
1910: Lakeview Gusher San Joaquin CA
1916: Nat’l Park Service
1848: Donora PA, Zinc
1962: Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
SILENT SPRING
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These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, forests, and homes- nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good” and the “bad,” to still the song of the birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”
Rachel Carson
SILENT SPRING
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There is still a very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits….
It is a public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can only do so when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
Rachel Carson
CARSON’S LEGACY
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Environmental Defense Fund (1967)
EPA (1970)
Clean Air Act (1970)
DDT Ban (1972)
Deep Ecology (1972) Arne Naess
Carson “quite self-consciously decided to write a book calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar American culture.” – Mark Hamilton Lytle, biographer
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964)
DEEP ECOLOGY
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Naess saw two different forms of environmentalism:
Long-range deep ecology movement: deep questioning, down to fundamental root causes. Involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems. Without changes in basic values and practices, we will destroy the diversity and beauty of the world, and its ability to support diverse human cultures.
Shallow ecology movement: stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of industrial economy.
LATER HISTORY
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1969: Cuyahoga River on fire
1970: Earth Day, NRDC Founded
1971: Greenpeace Founded Canada
1972: OPEC Oil embargo
1978: Love Canal
1979: Three Mile Island
1981: PETA Founded
1984: Bhopal Union Carbide
1985: Vienna Convention on Ozone
1986: Chernobyl
1987: Brundtland Commission
1989: Exxon Valdez
1992: Earth Summit Rio
2005: Katrina
2006: An Inconvenient Truth
BUILDINGS HISTORY
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1973: AIA committee on energy
1980: Sustainable Buildings Industry Council
1984: Sick Building Syndrome
1987: UN World Commision defines “sustainable development”
1988: PassiveHaus
1989: The AIA Committee on the Environment
1992: AIA Environmental Resource Guide
1992: Earth Summit
1993: USGBC
1998: LEED 1
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
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Today’s environmental leaders are addressing tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s tools: regulatory and policy fixes.
And because serious global problems like climate change and the looming water crisis have been narrowly defined as “environmental,” their equally narrow solutions are easy to marginalize and dismiss by conservatives, cynics, and other non believers.
Environmental leaders need to “take a collective step back to rethink everything.” specifically, how to reframe issues and build coalitions around big ideas and values, not specific programs, much as the conservative movement has done over the past 40 years. – 2004. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
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Today’s environmental leaders are addressing tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s tools: regulatory and policy fixes.
And because serious global problems like climate change and the looming water crisis have been narrowly defined as “environmental,” their equally narrow solutions are easy to marginalize and dismiss by conservatives, cynics, and other non believers.
Environmental leaders need to “take a collective step back to rethink everything.” specifically, how to reframe issues and build coalitions around big ideas and values, not specific programs, much as the conservative movement has done over the past 40 years. – 2004. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.
THE GREEN MOVEMENT, LATE NAUGHTS
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GREEN PRODUCT PROLIFERATION
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CRYING AT TED
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Curbing climate change : “the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century, and a moral imperative”
CLEAN TECH BOOM
In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011.
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CRUDE OIL PRICES .
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APPLIED R&D
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“WHY THE CLEAN TECH BOOM WENT BUST” There was an additional factor at work: impatience. Venture capitalists tend to work on three- to five-year horizons. As they were quickly finding out, energy companies don’t operate on those timelines. ...Of all the energy startups that received their first VC funds between 1995 and 2007, only 1.8 percent achieved what he calls “unambiguous success,” meaning an initial public offering on a major exchange. The average time from founding to IPO was 8.3 years. “If you’re signing up to build a clean-tech winner,” Nordan wrote in a blog post, “reserve a decade of your life.”
The truth is that starting a company on the supply side of the energy business requires an investment in heavy industry that the VC firms didn’t fully reckon with. The only way to find out if a new idea in this sector will work at scale is to build a factory and see what happens. Ethan Zindler, head of policy analysis for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says the VC community simply assumed that the formula for success in the Internet world would translate to the clean-tech arena. “What a lot of them didn’t bargain for, and, frankly, didn’t really understand,” he says, “is that it’s almost never going to be five guys in a garage. You need a heck of a lot of money to prove that you can do your technology at scale.”
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VERY RECENT HISTORY
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SOLAR PV .
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NATURAL GAS PRICES .
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CLEAN TECH INVESTING .
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CLEAN TECH TO MAIN TECH Worldwide, 500+ million affluent people enjoy an “energy and resource rich” lifestyle but five billion people are still striving for this prosperity. The only way to bridge this gap is innovation and increased resource efficiency.
As we like to say, new technologies that meet the “Chindia Price” – the price at which China and India will adopt a technology without subsidies – by reaching unsubsidized market competitiveness and obeying the “laws of economic gravity,” will do well if they can survive until they scale. Survival of good technologies unfortunately will not always be assured.
– Vinod Khosla in Forbes 11/27/2012
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SUPPLY SIDE TO DEMAND SIDE
For the rest of this course – we move from a supply side to a demand side view of energy, choosing the BUILDING as the place to intervene in the system.
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GLOBAL SUPPLY
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http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/EEBSummaryReportFINAL.pdf
GLOBAL SUPPLY
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GLOBAL SUPPLY
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ASSIGNMENT: �APRIL 1
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ASSIGNMENT Calculate your carbon footprint.
1. Calculate the carbon footprint of your country:
http://www.carbonfootprintofnations.com/
2. Find a personal carbon footprint calculator that you trust. Prepare a one page/slide view of your footprint. Why did you choose this particular calculator. What were the inputs. What did you learn.
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READING Understanding Citizen Science:
http://www.ukeof.org.uk/documents/understanding-citizen-science.pdf
Pages 1-23.
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LINKS AND PRESENTATION
Today’s class presentation is available
http://www.slideshare.net/bettybluegreen/bodies-and-buildings-nyu-itp-3-25-2013
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