The following story is about 1500 words long.
In 1996-7, a number of consultancies raised distinct
yet related problems that drew the EcoDesign Foundation's attention to
need for the notion of 'sustainments'. The first
was developing 'eco-assessment criteria' for some annual product design
awards. The second
was designing a building with a second life. The third
was curriculum development work for a university department whose learning
outcomes from their ecodesign courses were not 'sticking'.
1
The first job involved drawing up 'eco-assessment
criteria' in some annual product design awards. The clients had initially
approached the EcoDesign Foundation to develop assessment guidelines for
a new 'Environmental Category' of their awards.
In initial meetings, the Foundation successfully convinced the clients that a separate 'Environmental' award was counter-productive: it allowed products nominated for all the other awards to be exempted from explicit consideration of ecological impacts; and it risked creating 'icons' of ecodesign, setting a type-form for 'environmentally responsible design'. The brief for the job then become to develop environmental criteria across all the existing categories of product design award.
Some difficulties occurred however when the EcoDesign Foundation tried to convince the clients that it was not enough to merely assess the extent to which a particular design of a product minimised the ecological impacts associated with its production. At first the clients thought that all we were recommending was a name change: from 'environmental' to 'sustainability' assessment criteria. They acknowledged that reducing the ecological impacts of manufacturing did not make a product sustainable. They were prepared to assess the whole of a product's designed life cycle — how much energy the product consumed in use, whether the product had been designed to be recycled, etc.
But the sticking point came when the EcoDesign Foundation suggested that the judges take account of the context of the product's use and the ecological impacts that would arise in that context. The scenario we presented was a product, that whilst being designed for a very low impacting life cycle, nonetheless serviced a high impacting activity or context: an efficient and recyclable chainsaw for example, or a solar-powered golf buggy. Our clients did not want the awards to appear to be making 'value judgements' about certain activities and did not agree with us that giving an award to a particular designed product was already an endorsement of the values associated with the activities for which the product was designed.
We realised from this experience that making the world more sustainable meant not just making everything less ecologically impacting, but choosing which aspects of the world deserved to be made less impacting because only they were inherently sustainable. If the term 'sustainability' meant a non-value-judgment assessment of anything, then we needed to devise a new term that would be more selective about what it could be applied to.
2
The second job in this period which made
us think about the idea of 'sustainments' involved work on an innovative
building for the Olympics in Sydney. The building needed to be built rapidly,
operate for 3 years and then be removed. It was intended to house multi-media
exhibitions and offices. The ambition in terms of energy performance was
also very high, precluding the use of active heating and air conditioning
systems. A purely lightweight temporary structure was not appropriate
either for the projected use-life of the building or to handle the thermal
performance of its intended use in purely passive, naturally ventilated
ways. The innovative design was therefore for a building of high thermal
mass that could be disassembled at the end of three years and reassembled
elsewhere.
The proposal was feasible in every way, except legally. The client was intent on acting as a conventional property developer, funding the construction of the building and then selling the lot. Aware that the whole rationale behind the sustainability of this building would be undermined if it could not be assured that the building would indeed be correctly disassembled, relocated and reassembled, the design team insisted that contractual arrangements for the building bind the owner to taking responsibility for the building's second life. This was too innovative for the client's legal and financial team however and the building never eventuated.
What we learnt from the project however was that a sustainable development is not a product but a process. What is projected as being sustainable about a development needs to be actively sustained if that development is to continue to be sustainable. Sustainable initiatives cannot be one-offs and are not inherently self-sustaining. There is always the on-going task of making sure that sustainable developments keep on being sources of sustainability.
Many people were already calling existing things sustainable, even though something's sustainability should really only be assessed after many year's of operation. We realised that we needed to develop a new term to describe the sorts of initiatives that have active programs ensuring on-going and even improving sustainability.
3
The job that brought these three moments
together occurred when a couple of friends of the EcoDesign Foundation
came to see us. They had been teaching sustainable design in architecture
departments in different universities, but had both discovered, on meeting
some of their old students, now practicing architects, that what they
had been teaching had not 'stuck'. While the students had loved the subjects
these lecturers taught, and seemed to get a lot out of them, it appeared
that what the students had learnt had not been able to survive into their
professional practice. The lecturers came to us to initiate a seminar
exploring this situation.
Discussions quickly identified that one of the problems was that 'sustainability subjects' had to compete with more conventional vocational subjects in architectural education curricula. Far from being neutral with respect to sustainability, such subjects, precisely because they claimed to be teaching things which had nothing to do with sustainability, actively undermined the relational agenda of sustainability. Bolting a few green subjects onto a conventional architecture program failed to recognize that all actions have consequences and that sustainability was holistic or it was nothing.
However, some other less obvious points emerged from the discussions. The teachers discovered that their practically oriented subjects disguised the fact that there was no consensus understanding about what the term 'sustainability' meant. They realised that not interrogating this fundamental idea closely rendered what they were teaching thin and weak. Sound practice needed careful theorisation and every sustainable development should also be the development of the idea of sustainability.
In this context, we told them about what had happened with the awards job, and they realised that they also had been separating form and content, imagining that any building could be made sustainable with the right techniques. They came to see that the idea of sustainability required judgements about what was worth sustaining. Just as sustainability needed to knock some subjects out of architectural curricula, so sustainability required refusing certain briefs. The teachers went away preparing courses on "Assessing Project Sustain-ability", in which students would learn how to make decisions about which projects had the ability to be sources of more sustainable ways of living and working.
When we met with them some time later they shared with us two further insights. The new course they had prepared had met with initial resistance, because they involved 'value-judgements' and not just 'client servicing'. They had overcome this opposition by arguing firstly that whilst they were teaching students to make critical assessments, they were also teaching them to make their decisions revisable: what has been deemed sustainable may not always be so. The lecturers had realised, as we had through the second-life building project, that sustainability was an on-going process. The students were being taught to maintain responsibility for the buildings they designed long after their completion, in order to make sure that their initial decisions proved correct.
Secondly, the lecturers had successfully showed their colleagues that the entrepreneurship acquired by their discerning students more than made up for number of briefs they learnt to refuse.
The teachers suggested that a term was needed that could capture the thoughtful and critical, yet revisable and entrepreneurial nature of what they were now teaching better than the pluralistic and instrumental term, sustainability.
For all that emerged from these 3 experiences, the EcoDesign Foundation appropriated the term 'sustainment'. A sustainment was the name we gave to a tangible and significant contribution to the development of more sustainable ways of living and working. No sustainment per se could be called sustainable, both because sustainability was an ideal, something to be pursued in many, innovative and changing ways, and because the sustainability of any sustainment was something that only emerged over time.
Sustainments are processes, ways of actively promoting and sustaining what is more sustainable about a project. They are designings that take account of what is being sustained, directly and indirectly, and not only just how it is being sustained. They are entrepreneurial and the source of on-going learning.