The Aesthetics of Engagement: An Empathic Approach to Resource Conservation in Buildings

a generic energy dashboard for a dorm building

Although “green” buildings are arguably becoming more and more automated, their performance on a host of metrics still depends in no small part on the decisions made by their occupants. Many buildings are installing energy dashboards in prominent public areas that make users aware of the buildings’ energy or water consumption, or small displays next to energy-generating turbines or solar panels that show off their energy production.

Ornamented cistern meant to tell the story of water recycling, design by Misha Semenov

 

While these boards may be informative to those engaged enough to stop by and decipher them, they are not always the most direct way to communicate the impact of, and actually have an effect on, individual decisions, especially when they are filled with abstracted numbers and figures. Where are the resources used in the building actually coming from? How do our choices impact not just the performance of our building but a larger social and natural ecosystem? This post explores effective approaches to empathic occupant engagement, and probes the possibilities for integrating these into architectural form itself.

The Urban Canopy: An Ecoempathic Design Interlude

**UPDATE: We won the competition and are now in the process of building this parklet in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, CT.

You can read an update on our project here: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/11/29/tree-canopy-park-wins-elm-city-prize/

The last week has found us both busy with a project that has diverted our attention from the Ecoempathy blog and to a proposal that puts some of our thinking into action. We are working on a design for a parklet that connects New Haven residents to their street trees, and are excited to share our progress with you below! Read about our intitial pitch in the New Haven Independent: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/parklets_/

Excerpts from the project description are below:

The Pedagogical Urban Landscape: Activating the Educational Potential of Green Infrastructure

 

A child plays in a canal that is designed as an interactive part of a green infrastructure water system in Augustenborg Ecocity, Malmö

As this post goes to press, communities in Florida and Texas are dealing with the damaging effects of urban flooding. In response to catastrophic rain events like Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, cities across the country are deploying green infrastructure that helps to compensate for high rates of impermeable surfaces. Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters initiative, for example, has already added over a thousand green infrastructure units in the form of bioswales, permeable pavers, and water retention wetlands. The new system of distributed solutions is expected to drastically reduce stormwater infrastructure maintenance costs while improving water quality. There is a catch, however: these forms of constructed nature require maintenance and community support to function at optimum levels. Although they are in a sense “natural” and often based on native wetland habitats, these manmade ecologies are still dependent on human inputs: regular cleaning, pruning, replanting, and everyday respect. This post explores such forms of urban nature through the lens of Social Ecology and colonization theory, ultimately proposing that urban green infrastructure, as a hybrid natural-social system, has a fundamental pedagogical role that design can help activate.

In their chapter in Social Ecology: Society-Nature Relations across Time and Space, Fischer-Kowalski and Erb lay out the concept of colonization as a key to understanding humans’ historic relationship to land, defining the term, which stems from the Latin “colonus” for farmer, as “the intended and sustained transformation of natural systems, by means of organized social interventions, for the purpose of improving their utility for society.” While the term applies most obviously to agricultural landscapes, it is certainly just as applicable to green infrastructure features like constructed wetlands. Perhaps most critically, colonized systems require “continuous monitoring and readjustment for the desired state (and the desired ‘services’ these states deliver) to be maintained.” Because society has to organize itself to maintain the colonized system, what results is a “structural coupling between the cultural or communication system(s) and particular highly colonized natural systems intimately linked to them in mutual functional interdependence.”

Ornament and Place

A couple of posts ago, we mentioned the Topophilia Hypothesis, as defined by biologist and writer, S. D. Sampson; he claims a healthy society flourishes at least in part due to its connection with nature. How to create places that are unique to their location through culture and aesthetics is a challenge that many of us looking to solve in a myriad of ways (one must reevaluate how modern cultures are defined in a globalized world, but let us put that aside for now).

To quote E. H. Gombrich, who notes the importance of ornament and order in place-making, “Take a man in the dark trying to gain information about the unseen environment. He will not grope and thrash about at random, but will use every finding to form a hypothesis…” (10). The details of our constructed surroundings are there to shine a light on the full expanse of our extraordinarily elaborate environment.

Before finding modern day examples that support this hypothesis, let us start with the past. What were the tried and true examples of ornament and detailing that successfully supported an understanding of local flora and fauna and the culture around them? Specimens of this phenomenon are present everywhere in ancient architectures as a way of demarcating unique places. In what follows, I will start with some ancient cultures and describe their relationship to nature and how they evolved. More specifically, ornament and polychromy are the protagonists of this story.

In Between: The Role of Thresholds in Integrating Nature into Cities

It is increasingly clear that dense urban living represents the most resource-efficient lifestyle for humanity, yet it is just as evident that urban dwellers require forms of nature in close proximity to where they live and work. But how does one make the transition from a dense urban environment to a more naturalized one? What is the designed object that serves as the mediator between the two? How can this object be used to make an emphatic connection between the daily lives of urban dwellers and the green spaces they depend on?

Theories of threshold and ornament may hold a key. As ornament designer and theoretician Kent Bloomer explains, 

“the classic function of ornament” is “to distribute material formations and rhythmic motifs into the spaces between things in order to heighten our sense of the world on both sides of a psychological threshold. Ornament thus performs as a sentinel or a bidirectional indicator of activity on each side of the threshold.” Because it is based on infinite repetition and temporal rhythm, ornament can fill “places of transition, or ‘gaps,’” binding two sides of a threshold into a single unity.(1)

How this intermediation works, and its level of abstraction, can vary quite a bit. At its best, the intermediary object–a gate, a fence, a paver–acts as a portal between two worlds, a kind of Rosetta stone able to speak the languages of the city and of the ecological system.In Hawaii’s Hanaumo Bay, just outside of Honolulu, visitors are not allowed to descend to the beach and snorkel until they pass through a visitor center and watch a special video about the site’s history, conservation strategies, and regulations. Could we imagine a design for an engaging park entrance and visitor center that could take over some of the work from this mandatory threshold experience? Can a natural history lesson be imparted by a designed object rather than a video?