Last evening, we visited with Susan Szenasy, the editor and chief of metropolis magazine. When Larry asked Susan when she first encountered sustainability, she said it was always a part of her life. Susan told us about her childhood during the cold war and escape to the United States. As she spoke, I wondered if my fellow classmates and other sustainability advocates had similar experiences. Do we value sustainability because of an experience in our life that made sustainability inherent to us? The generations to come have been said to be more sustainably minded. I wonder what makes the coming generations more likely to be concerned, is it simply a raised awareness or has there been common experiences that would shape this reaction.
We have been thinking all semester about how human behavior is the cause and hopefully the solution to our sustainability issues. Like Design, I don’t think there is one solution for sustainability. As Paul Hawken notes in ‘Blessed Unrest’, the sustainable movement is powerful because there is no one mission statement or one authority. There cannot be one solution for all these wicked problems.
As the first semester in my master’s studies in ‘Interior Sustainable Environments’ comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about our process and journey thus far. I believe we have all gone through quite a few phases and feelings of ‘anger’ and ‘depression’ and ‘desperation’. Although insanely stressed about the workload I have to accomplish this next week, I am happy to report that last night I think I reached a feeling of ‘content’. Like every generation and society before us and every one that follows, we will have challenges but design gives us a real chance to address this really important challenge of sustainability. Susan was right last night when she said design is powerful. She was also right when she said that a seemingly impossible challenge is an amazing opportunity for a new way of thinking.
Now I guess I am moving on to trying to prove the connection of how design can impact sustainable actions. But for now, I leave you with two quotes from Susan’s speech “What Happened? Where Do We Go From Here?” :
“So the growing impact of these two sister movements, sustainability and accessibility, lead me to think that the English historian Arnold Toynbee might have been correct when he wrote that “The 20th century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technological inventions but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”
The time is coming for building that road to a design that no longer needs to call itself “sustainable” or “universal”—just good, need-oriented, environmentally sensitive design. Just design. Design with justice at its core.”
