Contextual Lessons in Sustainability

Green is great. We should all be considering sustainability for ourselves, in our design practices and our everyday lives. But what happens when we're doing sustainable design for others, especially others in cultures whose lifestyle, needs and desires we may not understand? There's a cautionary tale we can look to, based on the experiences of William McDonough, one of the luminaries of the green development movement, and his development in Huangbaiyu, China.

A recent issue of U.C. Berkeley's California Magazine reports, "Huangbaiyu was about to undergo enormous change: A nonprofit called the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development was coordinating the transformation of Huangbaiyu into a modern eco-village. William McDonough, an influential green architect from Charlottesville, Virginia, would lead the design, basing it on his "cradle-to-cradle" philosophy, in which materials exist in a closed system and the concept of waste is eliminated. (As McDonough often says, "waste equals food.") The new village would have a limited carbon footprint, producing energy from the sun and using bio-gas, a clean-burning renewable fuel produced from waste."

"It was an ambitious plan, but Huangbaiyu was only the beginning for McDonough, who informed journalists that he would be designing seven entirely new cities in China, and that Beijing had made his design philosophy part of its national policy."

With the best intentions, McDonough and his designers crafted a plan for a sustainable community. Scale, materials and process were adopted from patterns that McDonough was already familiar with, patterns familiar to the developed western world but fundamentally foreign to rural Chinese villagers. The results of this disconnect between the western principles of green development and contextual understanding of the location to be "greened" was a failure of local adoption and the project at large.

"In the end, however, May believes it was the cultural disconnect between planners and residents that ultimately undermined the project. She points to one example: Cornstalks were considered agricultural waste in McDonough's sustainable-village concept—feedstock for the bio-gas plant in the cradle-to-cradle cycle. But May knew that cashmere goats were a major source of income to many families and that cornstalks were one of the main food sources for those goats. "There actually was already this nice waste-equals-food cycle going on," she explains. "But because it was Americans and urban Chinese coming in to do this project, they don't get that. They don't understand who eats what and how products are already being recycled.""

The inherent shortfall of this effort is one of hubris. One can't help but think that an assumption was made during the design process that "we know what's good for them better than they do." That could be considered what my co-worker Sean Madden calls Green Imperialism.  The assumption that there was no need to deeply understand the end-user was fatal to this project. The lesson is simple; Green is nothing without a clear understanding of context.

"As other architects design their own sustainable developments in China, May's research has gained wider relevance. "We see it as absolutely critical," says Harrison Fraker, former dean of Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, who is working on plans for a sustainable urban block in the port city of Qingdao. "It underscores that when you're designing something, you need to understand the way a family, especially these rural families, function and survive, both culturally and economically in the world. You can't assume that the narrowly described program—you know, 'They need so much space for this, so much for that'—is sufficient. Lots of times, designers, when they come from a different culture, can be blind to critical dimensions of the design problem."

further reading

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/green_dreams/
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007153.html
http://www.jetsongreen.com/2008/03/huangbaiyu-toug.html
http://www.sustainableindustries.com/sijnews/2713166.html

As frog's Executive Creative Director, Nick de la Mare leads frog’s cross-disciplinary teams in the pursuit of strategic design solutions across product, service and experience. His work focuses on the convergence of digital and physical media to create branded experiences for Nike, Chase, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, among others. His projects have been recognized by the IDSA, AIGA and others, and published widely.