Discovering the obvious

[Music]

hello everyone

i’m a designer

and i see design as the first signal of

human intention

what do we intend designers solve

problems but they also create beauty

sometimes you do at the same time

sometimes separate

but when i look at design today i see a

lot of things that are

real design problems because we can not

only provide solutions we can design

problems and so i would like to talk

about nature because nature doesn’t seem

to have

a design problem people do

when i was a child and i would go to the

beach if i picked up pebbles or

seashells

i would say aren’t they beautiful all of

them were

every pebble i couldn’t find ugly

anywhere

and yet if i go to a gravel quarry and i

find sharp rocks

i say oh you know they don’t look like

fun to walk

on they don’t look like fun to collect

so the idea that nature has this beauty

inherent in it is really something

important for designers

and as we look at the whole world of

design

we realized as carl sagan said if you

want to bake a pie

from scratch first you have to create

the universe

so if we want to design things that are

fresh and wonderful first we have to

look at the planet we’re on

and ask is this what we really want is

this what the planet needs is this

what people really need writ large so

very small things very big things so

people talk about

thinking globally and acting locally and

i think that’s really important but i

also think we should act

you know in a way that’s molecular so

let’s think galactically and

act molecularly so the scale is really

huge but it’s all one thing

nature doesn’t have a design problem

people do

so when i was

a lot younger i decided

that i’d become an architect and i

wanted to design buildings like trees

here i am in college and i’d see a fire

burning in our fireplace we were in new

hampshire

and i would look at it and think wait a

minute that’s entropy

everything going to chaos not to return

we learned about that in physics

and then i thought well what would the

opposite of the entropy be

what would order out of chaos look like

so

i realized it really wasn’t in the

physics library

per se it was in the biology library

it was the log itself was order

out of solar flux that was

that was coming from the from the sun

entropy and it was carbon from the

atmosphere

and it was rocks and minerals and

water on the earth’s surface and it all

came together to form

life and that was order out of all that

the order of living things and that

becomes humus

in the soil version it becomes kelp in

the ocean and so on

but an algae but you think about that

it’s really

order out of chaos and we’re part of it

the word human

is derived from the same root as humus

so we’re the soil

people so then i thought well if i’m

going to be an architect i’m going to

design buildings like trees

why not nature does it what if we did it

so what if i could make buildings that

could actually accrue

energy from the sun and give it to the

neighbors

what if a building could purify water

provide habitat for hundreds of species

change colors for the seasons

and so on wouldn’t that be amazing so

that’s what i was thinking about as a

young designer

wondering about that and then when i

went to

to yale architecture school 1973

we had the energy crisis so all of a

sudden everybody’s like

starting to worry as we can imagine this

is a real serious concern economically

and

physically so all of a sudden i thought

well now is the time to design a

building that’s powered by the sun

obviously so i started working on a

solar powered house

for ireland since my ancestors had come

from there i thought i’ll go to ireland

and build a solar house experiment so

that’s what i did

and it was hard you know these when

you’re young and you’ve never built

before and you’re learning

and you’ve got solar energy you want to

do i had some help from nasa

and other architects and it was really

quite something

but i had a broken back and i’m learning

how to lay block and

bend metal and lay slates on a roof and

it was really

an amazing experience but that’s what

you do

and i made some mistakes but i remember

esther dyson

with her famous quote always make new

mistakes

so this is what we do when we innovate

and failure is not failure unless you

quit

so persistence and grit is essential to

this you just

hang on keep going until you get there

and if you can’t well fine you tried so

that’s what i was doing it was really

quite a wonderful experience

so then when i was at yale working on

this design

a very famous architect came was

teaching there and he came over to me he

said what are you doing and i said i’m

designing a solar-powered house

for ireland and he goes young man

solar energy has nothing to do with

architecture

he did very famous fancy buildings and

it was like really

i thought vitruvius said all buildings

have to be located in the sunshine

to make them livable and beneficial

and warm up in the morning and watch out

for hot sun in the afternoon and

so so forth and and it was like humph

it walked off and i thought i got to

keep going because there’s something i

have to learn here

so then i decided i would work this way

as well

as try and design beautiful buildings

and then in 1989

years later when i was in my own

practice i won an international

competition

for a skyscraper in poland right before

the fall of the communist government

and i designed this tower and it won the

competition and i said but you have to

plant ten square miles of trees to go

with this building

five square miles of trees to offset the

coal burning

that went into making the building and

five square miles to offset the

operations of the building which would

be powered by coal-fired plants

and everybody said this is odd it ended

up in the wall street journal

and what was exciting for me was just

the idea is so important and yet when we

priced it

then it was it was less than 10 of the

advertising budget

can you imagine so all of a sudden we

realized we’re still talking about that

here

this year we’re talking about planting

trees again

but this is 33 years ago

so it was clear this is a way to think

and let’s figure out how to get this

stuff done

so after that i won a competition for a

daycare center in germany in frankfurt

and i thought also sign a daycare center

can be operated by children

and they can move shutters and open

windows and they can manage the sun and

the

temperatures and the humidity and all

the elements

themselves very simple windows shutters

these are not complicated things

and they can be fun cranks and and they

can play with it

and the engineers came and the teachers

and i were meeting and they said you

can’t have a building operated by

children

i said well that’s okay we have regular

systems but we’re going to make it so

they could open windows and move

shutters and run the building

and the the engineer said no no no

children shouldn’t be operating a

building

and the teacher said excuse me the

hardest thing we have to do with these

kids

is find things for them to do so if they

wake up in the morning and they can make

the building up in the morning they can

put the building to bed at night and

they can watch out for hot sun in the

summer and

and shade and let it in the winter to

warm them up this is a great thing for

these children

to understand where they are we can have

a solar powered laundry for the parents

while they’re waiting for the kids we’re

gonna have gardening on the roof they

can grow food

one thing afternoon a building that

creates order out of chaos

what fun so after that

i went and started thinking this way for

all of our projects and

and so i got to design a space station

on earth with nasa if you can imagine

a building renewable power that can

produce more than it needs for the

neighbors

it has you know solar collectors on it

it’s connected to the ground

and all kinds of things like that

recently

we had a building opening in bogota

which is the university building

where the students will be studying the

circular economy and cradle to cradle

and there are 18 000 students already

this is a very exciting time

for so many people who want to go into

business and do it this way

so this is a building you know it’s like

a festival

when you see it it’s like gift wrapped

and it’s

shaded and it uses the the energy of the

day

actually draws the air through the

window it’s such a beautiful climate

it’s your filters so it’s quiet but it

has fresh air everywhere

and filtered and it’s powered by the sun

so buildings like trees

the idea though of looking at materials

became fundamental too

because in designing that day care

center i saw that the children were all

had their mouths on everything so i

wondered what was in those materials and

so i met with

ecological toxicologists two years later

michael browngard

who had been working on in greenpeace

and developed some

phenomenal ways of thinking about

biological materials technical materials

and safe and healthy and so together we

created cradle to cradle

and wrote the book created the cradle

remaking the way we make things

and this idea of seeing things is ready

to go back to biology

or ready to go back to technology and

cycles became fundamental

to cradle to cradle and then evolved

into

also the circular economy because we’re

looking at the idea of eliminating the

concept of waste

so first safe and healthy in biological

and technical systems

products of consumption products as a

service

and that can move to the circular

economy where we use things over and

over again because they’re designed to

be used

over and over again so we design not for

the end of life we design for the end of

use

which means then you design for next

years once you do that you’re in the

circular economy

so we have the circular economy and i

had the privilege of representing the

united states and the china u.s center

for sustainable development

in the 90s with my co-chair in china

madame dungnon

doug jumping’s daughter and we were

looking at cradle cradle

the circular economy in the search for

ecological civilization

you can imagine so that has manifested

as we see in various ways

and the chinese government had a 12

five-year plan

called circular economy and the 13th

called

implement circular economy and so that’s

been quite exciting to watch it’s been

taken up

by the world economic forum it’s taken

up by groups in europe like the all

macarthur foundation it’s taken up by

the eu

as a strategy it’s really quite

wonderful so

the circular economy but then i was

asked to look at carbon because i had

written an article

on this thinking about it just i know i

was doing renewable power buildings and

and i knew that i was designing at this

molecular level

but the idea of coming together and

saying what’s the role of

carbon in the circular economy and you

realize that carbon is both a material

and a fuel amazing so

because of that we have carbon in the

biological cycles which is cycling with

the atmosphere

on a 25-year cycle roughly trees fall

die

release carbon absorb carbon so on and a

crew is

as soil and marine

berger and so on and then we have the

technical

materials but they’re powered by carbon

from the ground

right to the atmosphere because we burn

it so all of a sudden we started to look

and say

there’s one thing in a circular economy

to reuse everything but there’s another

thing

which we want to remove and that turns

out to be

carbon in the atmosphere so let’s look

at carbon as a living thing

and a durable thing and a fugitive thing

and let’s put it back into the circular

economy and imagine

that we have a regenerative biosphere

it’s regenerating and taking carbon back

and using it to make more life

but in the technosphere we need to do

massive energy efficiency

to stop releasing the existing carbon in

the system

we have to do massive renewable power

now that is cost effective it’s quite

astonishing when you see what’s possible

we have to encourage nature-based

solutions for carbon capture

like plant mangroves do regenerative

agriculture all those things

but we also have to look at the

technological world and figure out how

we’re going to recycle things

as durable carbon make new materials

using the carbon

so we can make it durable on earth we’re

going to be wanting to sequester carbon

put some of it back where we’ve got it

and other things like that so it’s time

for a technological moment

where we actually bring our technology

to this question in a new way

and for a lot of people it’s tough to

imagine mechanical capture of carbon

from the atmosphere

but it’s an essential thing for us to

think about an essential thing for us to

perhaps

innovate into and as recently as a few

weeks ago

elon musk announced a 100 million dollar

x prize

for carbon capture at the uh

the scale that’s going to be needed to

really imagine we can start to do this

so

our innovators are thinking this way

will we have it right away

no will we have to make test rockets

that go up and come down

yep well well we have to fail to succeed

probably but this is something we can

all do together and we must do together

is to take on the climate issue because

nature doesn’t have a design problem

people do and people may have created

the problem and so if the problem was

created by people in our designs we need

a new design

and when we say it’s not our plan

to to heat up the planet this way

and dislocate so many people if it’s not

our plan it’s become our de facto plan

it’s the thing that’s happening because

we have no other plan

so all i can say as a designer it’s time

for a new plan

and i guess that if we follow the laws

of nature the odds of it being beautiful

are a lot better thank you

you