| 1. |
- Avila, Martin, et al.
(author)
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3Ecologies: Visualizing sustainability factors and futures
- 2010. - 9
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- ‘3Ecologies’ makes visible factors affecting the sustainability of consumer products. Within engineering and economics, there are a variety of models for analyzing and ‘predicting’ the environmental factors such as energy, emissions and waste involved during production, consumption and disposal. We develop an expanded model, which emphasizes human impact and choices as well as potential consequences and futures. Psychological, sociological and environmental factors are mapped over time – throughout the lifespan (production, purchase, use, and disposal) and the extended lifecycle(s) of products. Case studies of familiar products in everyday life are developed to demonstrate the conceptual model, and three applications are proposed to reach designers, consumers and the general public. 3Ecologies uses diagrams and narratives to visualize the history and possible futures of products, including natural disintegration, active recycling and unexpected adaptations – an alternative view upon the ‘life’ of things that we might ordinarily take for granted.
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| 2. |
- Mazé, Ramia
(author)
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Design Practices and the Micropolitics of Sustainability
- 2013
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In: Proceedings of Architecture in Effect. Rethinking The Social in Architecture.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Sustainable development involves multiple discourses and practices at multiple levels in society, in which there are competing and conflicting formulations of what constitutes ‘sustainability.’ Sustainability involves struggles around definitions and priorities, among those maintaining or gaining influence, struggles set within a pluricentric society in which interests are often in competition at a time of rapid globalization, conflicts over diminishing resources, and rising risk factors. These struggles trickle down into policies, regulations, taxes – and designs – which embody particular discourses, ideals and priorities, implying profound changes to how we live and how we live together. Sustainable development, on a variety of levels, is and essentially, a matter of the political. Design is increasingly taking on roles in sustainable development – and, thus, in its politics. At the macropolitical level, design may be commissioned for the UN Environment Program, a Green Party, or grassroots political action; by companies implementing corporate social responsibility, product developers applying environmental certification standards, or cities implementing Rio Local Agenda programs. Micropolitical roles of design, the focus here, involve instituting discourses and practices of sustainability deeply in the everyday life of consumers and citizens. Embedded in the intimate spaces and embodied routines of everyday life, design mediates access to and control over resources, and it shapes how people identify and comply with particular ideals and ways of living. Here, I evoke two general areas in which the design role is growing – ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘sustainable communities’. In these roles, design is engaged in mediating how and by whom resources are accessed and controlled, and which or whose interests are made visible in sustainable development. In reducing domestic energy consumption and steering sustainable processes in communities, profound changes to the social organization of everyday life are at stake. Just as sustainable development is a political matter, so is design.
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| 3. |
- Mazé, Ramia
(author)
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Socio-Ecological Innovation : Cases of sustainable urban development and design
- 2013
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In: Proceedings of the ERSCP-EMSU Conference (Istanbul, Turkey, Jun)..
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Recent decades have seen a significant shift in how profound and intractable problems such as poverty, disease, violence or environmental deterioration are handled. While such problems have traditionally been handled through national social and spatial policies in European welfare states such as Sweden, there has been a substantial redistribution to the market, regions and communities. This is embodied in the term ‘social innovation’, which marks a critical shift in how, where, and by whom societal problems are handled. Practices of social innovation involve a reconfiguration of relations between the state and citizens, relations that are may be (co-)produced in ways that are regionally, socially, and spatially specific. This paper (in the short form of ‘preliminary findings’) explores the ‘how’ of social innovation through three case studies concerning urban resources issues such as food, water, waste and land use. Building on arguments that design has become central to the (co-)production of social innovation, I examine the role of designers and design artifacts in framing and staging (co-)production within households, neighborhoods and civic arenas. Locating social innovation as the reconfiguration of society from within, I discuss these as examples through which wider social practices and systems, beliefs and authority, may be profoundly altered.
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