Abstract

The challenge of design-for-sustainability is to balance the need to educate about design process as an intelligent discipline while using the content of social, economic and environmental factors as the space of design decision-making.

The legacy of studio education as a tutorial enterprise has for decades built upon the service delivery sequences used in professional practice; pre-design, programming, site selection and analysis, schematic design, design development, construction documentation, construction observation; with only occasional post occupancy evaluation.

Design-for-sustainability, however, must operate on a less sequential delivery model; employing instead a “breathing in and breathing out” functionality of parallel processing unique to the trial and error nature of the design process itself.

Fundamentally, design is an inefficient iterative process, an aspirational enterprise, and a willfully integrative act. But that integration must have multiple moorings.

Moreover, we must abandon the charrette model in favor of "building the curve" of inclusion, integrating the multiplicities within the design-decision space over time by using a rhythmic sequencing of exploration and reflection; namely, the Blue Dot technique of scripting/scheduling the activity of design exploration, introduction and application; wherein every design project becomes a form of adaptive reuse.

This presentation will share student work developed over a decade of application of the Blue Dot methodology to show highly integrative design-for-sustainability projects; as products of the intelligent balance of process and content education.