Sustainability has been design’s watchword for more than 30 years, but thought leaders in sustainable design are now saying, ‘sustainability is no longer enough’. What is beyond sustainability? How do we not only survive, but thrive?
Instead of contributing to the imminent destruction of our environment, we must design and build to improve it. This is the driving idea of ‘Cradle to Cradle’ authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s 2013 book ‘Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability’. The authors envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: we don't only use or reuse and recycle resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve the natural world as we live, create, and build.
Now, as well as designing in harmony with nature, we have design AS nature, in the form of biomimicry. ‘Designing the Biorock Pavilion wasn't just about shaping space’, says Exploration Architecture project architect Adam Holloway; ‘it was about pioneering a fundamentally different way of making architecture. We're not just designing a static object, but guiding a dynamic, living process – creating architecture that integrates with, and even promotes, marine ecosystems.’
To move from keeping things as they are to arriving at a solution, we have tore-imagine design; more than sustaining life on the planet – to actually grow it. And technology is a key part of this process. ‘Biological structures often grow according to relatively simple patterns,’ says Exploration’s principal Michael Pawlyn. ‘And computational design makes it much easier for us to mimic those patterns and get close to the sort of functional basis of biological structures. That’s really the essence of biomimicry - it’s about understanding the function and mimicking that so we can achieve similar levels of material efficiency to biological structures.’
Which is where circularity and regeneration come in. The relationship between the ‘regenerative biosphere’ and the ‘circular technosphere’ is the central component of the cradle-to-cradle design philosophy. The aim is for all materials in human-made systems to be perpetually cycled and regenerated, mimicking nature's waste-free processes.
And then, in all this complexity, we turn to the simple joys of nature. China’s current crop of cultural buildings celebrates the natural world in spectacular and wonderful ways, and it is my pleasure as Design Shanghai’s Conference Director to introduce some of the very best examples. Design with nature, for nature, as nature and in nature brings us spiritual uplift – and this is how we do better than survive; we thrive.
Aidan Walker,
KOHLER · Design Shanghai Global Design Conference Director
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