Green ArchiTEXT

Museum 2.0 and the Art of Participatory Design

Nina Simon, executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, designs and researches participatory museum experiences. As author of The Participatory Museum, she continues to explore how Web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design through her blog, Museum 2.0. [Thanks to Dan Hellmuth of Hellmuth+Bicknese for pointing me to Nina and her amazing work!]

In "Dreaming of Perpetual Beta: Making Museums More Incremental", she writes:

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" based on Tim O'Reilly's four key elements of Web 2.0:

1. Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information.
2. Architecture of participation with network effects: each person who participates contributes something meaningful and lasting. Visitors' interactions allow them both to personalize their museum experiences and to engage with other visitors through their shared interests. The museum gets better the more people use it.
3. Perpetual beta: the museum is always in flux, incrementally releasing new versions, refining procedures, and responding to audience desires.
4. Flexible, modular support for distributed products: inviting people to plug-in their own creations, whether those be DIY audio tours, pop up events, or co-created exhibitions.

From 2006-2011, I focused almost entirely on #1 and #2, playing with ways to invite visitors to actively participate with professionals to co-create powerful experiences around museum objects.

But in the past year and a half as a museum director, I find myself increasingly interested in #3 and #4. In a lot of ways, our successful turnaround at the MAH has been driven by both embracing incremental change and opening up clear opportunities for community organizations and individuals to "plug" their cultural brilliance into our space. We're using #3 and #4 to achieve #1 and #2 in the Museum 2.0 playbook. READ MORE >>

via www.museumtwo.blogspot.com

The Collaborative City: Creating Adelaide’s Integrated Design Strategy

By Tim Horton

In an Australian first, Adelaide has decided to plan its future by working together across boundaries. No other capital city has drawn together its councils, the state government and the Australian government to work jointly. And no other capital city has found a way to involve 74 organisations like community groups and professional peak bodies. And no other has chosen to take a people-first, design-first approach.

This is what makes the Integrated Design Strategy special. It uses a design-based approach to explore issues that often get locked in win/lose arguments. But by harnessing designs capacity to ‘synthesise’ competing interests we’re developing a more inclusive and - compared to traditional planning approaches - innovative roadmap for our collective future. READ MORE >>

via www.adelaidereview.com.au

Metropolis POV: Architect Led Design Build

By Kathryn Lenehan

Singapore’s nearly complete “Gardens by the Bay” —a 110-hectare botanical garden with indoor waterfalls and a photovoltaic tree canopy—makes an important point about the state of 21^st century architecture. Today, buildings have a new level of complexity, and the integration of technology continues to redefine the way we design and build. In stark contrast to the new ways and means of architecture, our current project delivery methods, as well as the relationships between owner, architect, and contractor remain largely the same as they have been for decades. Architects deliver the same sets of drawings, using the same Uniform Drawing System standards established in the mid-1990s after the rise of AutoCAD, as well as the graphic conventions that predate the use of computers.

Well, not everyone.

Peter Gluck & Partners and Tocci Construction have developed innovative approaches to project delivery; more broadly, they have shifted the relationship between architect and contractor. Not for them is the typical separation between architect and contractor with its daily time lags, as one party communicates information to the other. It is a well-known fact in the industry that this piece-meal process ultimately creates change orders and cost overruns.

Peter Gluck & Partners’s innovative approach to project delivery, “Architect Led Design Build”, is simple: the New York City-based firm acts as both the architect and the contractor. The client gets two separate contracts with different legal entities but the same people. A typical project goes from schematic design, directly to subcontractors who estimate cost and contribute useful information on alterations or alternatives. This feedback loop of information continues through design development and construction documents, at which point the firm manages the construction themselves. READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

The Rise of the New Groupthink? (Or, When to Collaborate - and When Not to...)

Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, writes in the New York Times recently of an intriguing idea - that some people work best in isolation, that perhaps we've gone too far in our radical transformation to an open-office-environment, contstant-team-centric push within our corporate cultures (including for many architecture and engineering firms). Her opinion piece begins:

"SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature."

Further into her essay, she concludes - resoundingly:

"SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. READ MORE >>

Solid rationale...and there is a time and place for the "Wisdom of Crowds", or at least for carefully guided groupthink, especially when conducted by some of the more masterful leaders of design charrettes - people like BNIM's Bob Berkebile and others. So where then does that leave us with the powerful, proven results of the integrated design model, a case for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and other tools and techniques synonymous with sustainable design? Something to think about...alone or in a group.

DE Magazine: Commerce. Community. Skills and Credit. Where Does Collaboration Come into Design?

Nice piece from London's Design Exchange Magazine:

Open publication - Free publishing - More architect

Lumenhaus Wins Solar Decathlon Europe

Lumenhaus, a super energy-efficient, ultra modern modular house designed by a team from Virginia Tech was recently announced the winner of the first Solar Decathlon Europe competition. The New York Times is hosting an interactive multi-media tour of the project. It's definitely worth checking out. Joe Wheeler, one of three primary faculty members who worked on the project, supplies the audio, which, along with accompanying images, provides a good introduction to the home’s innovative design features (the ability to build up, and disassemble and sell off pieces of the home was particularly intriguing to me as a new concept for modular design).

via www.worldchanging.com

RMI Video: BNIM's Integrated Design Process

Case studies from RMI's (Rocky Mountain Institute) video High Performance Building: Performance by Integrated Design - featuring Bob Berkebile and Laura Lesniewski and their work on the LEED Platinum Lewis & Clark Building.

Proactively enabling sustainable design

Paul Tunstall and Brian Spires, sustainability director of HLM Architects, explain the practice's innovations to embed sustainability into the design process.

Quality design and sustainability are more intrinsically linked than ever before - numerous and ever more stringent sustainability regulations have seen to that. Architects and indeed all members of the construction team must embrace and integrate sustainability into their approach, whatever their service. At HLM, we've created a suite of tools that facilitate and encourage sustainable design. We hope that others will take the same initiative and follow suit to improve the quality of every building we, as an industry, create. READ MORE >>

via www.building4change.com

Design Thinking Made Visible Project: Reinventing Design

For those interested in the subjects of Integrative Thinking, Organizational Transformation, Reinvention of Design, Design 3.0, 4.0, Visual SenseMaking, Design Thinking....

Humantific has published the Design Thinking Made Visible Project as part of their virtual HTML book series. It provides a glimpse into Humantific’s ongoing Integrative Thinking Research Initiative underway for ten years and models how design thinking has already been reinvented to better serve as enabler of organizational and societal transformation. READ MORE >>

via thinkdesignchange.com

Co-design, not ego-design! Some Thoughts on Contemporary Design

Designers should get away from ego-design and concentrate on eco-design, or even better, on co-design as Alastair Fuad-Luke believes. Designer Gui Bonsiepe commented in his speech at ESDi School of Design in Spain last week that we need to amplify design from environmentally sustainable to socially sustainable. Can that be the way to post-crisis design? And, How do we balance industrial skills with the ability to work with other people?, is that Fuad-Luke asked. Bonsiepe stated that designers do not only need a sensibility to solve problems, but also to detect them.

via www.treehugger.com