99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-12- 99% Guilt Free

Episode Date: December 3, 2010

“Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the negative impact to the natural environment.” -Jason F. McLennan, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design I like McLennan’s definition of … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Sustainability is sustainability. Well, I think for a lot of people, sustainability is sustainability is an abstract thing.

And as such, it's hard to sort of engage on the emotional level. It's really needed to push things forward. We want to inspire people rather than creating guilt trips or making them look at numbers. Sustainability is something that can be powerful and experiential and impact your life. My name is Anton Willis, I'm a designer and part of the studio called Civil Twilight. Civil Twilight's flagship project is lunar resident street lights. These are street lights that sense and respond to ambient moonlight.

So they dim and brighten in response to the lunar cycle. When the moon is full, they dim down to save energy. It's both the way of saving energy and creating a new urban connection to the cycle of the moon. The project won the 2007 Metropolis next-generation design competition partly because it took this huge design challenge of trying to curb energy used and added a bit of the poetic design that saves energy but also inspires and reconnects urban dwellers with one of the fundamental cycles of nature. In most cities today the level of light pollution is so high that we're really not aware of

the stars or moonlight at all. No one knows what phase of the moon it is on any given day. So we're looking for a way to really reconnect people to those kinds of cycles. Each individual light has a very sensitive photo sensor that picks up moonlight, cloud cover, atmospheric conditions. So on the scale of a city, you could actually

have really interesting phenomenon. If a cloud passed over the moon, you could sort of see a shimmering across the city, reflecting the kind of cloud shadow. We see it as a pretty amazing way to make cities as a whole more more responsive and sort of more dynamic and more alive. It turns out that in the early years of street lighting both gas and electric gas and electricity was really expensive so they only turned them on when

they needed to and they typically would not turn them on on full moon late nights when it was clear out. People just had the understanding that that was enough, like, to see by in cities and it was a waste of energy to light on top of that. And that really changed with the national grid electrification in the 1930s. When they actually needed a way to burn off excess energy at night when known was using electricity in their homes and the street light grid actually began as a way to do that as much as the way to eliminate cities. And since then almost every city has to be illuminated very brightly 24 hours a day.

The standards for lighting that are in place come out of that period. So this is an effort to make a beautiful energy efficient version of a thing designed and used historically to burn energy on purpose. I think we've gotten used to talking about sustainability in terms of a lot of metrics and numbers and less about people's direct experience of it. So we're looking at ways to really bring it to a tangible personal experiential level. We see ourselves as part of a stronger direction that the whole sustainability movement will go, we believe, in the coming years. So where's my friendly neighborhood moon responsive street light? Well so far it only exists as a

prototype so far. MIT labs are also prototyping a similar in spirit indoor adaptive lighting system as a massive energy saving technology but also as a way to make our working environments more comfortable, productive and pleasing through using more natural and responsive light. I think a lot of the current design discussion is about how to make design more relevant, how to make it part of these processes that really shape the world, the economics, the government, all of the sort of processes that we don't think of being designed or having a relationship to design. Climate change is a design problem. You know, the national debt is a design problem.

All of these things are design problems in different ways. If you expand the scope of how you think about it a little bit, our challenge as designers is really to expand that scope and to become part of bigger discussions. Sustainability. Sustainability. Sustainability. Sustainability. It's a project of K-A-L-W-D American Institute of Architects San Francisco in the Center for Architecture and Design.

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