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