Project Description
I heard a possibly apocryphal story once at Lawrence Berkeley Lab; there was an engineer who claimed that he could design a building, which would work perfectly, "if it weren't for all the people." I used my keynote to argue against that treating your building occupants as 'urban pests' with tongue firmly in cheek. Takeaways include:
- Analyze past outcomes in terms of your successes and failures
- Use historiography to assess the mechanics underpinning your outcomes
- Decide what approach you want to take – are you a top-down or a bottom-up?
- Is your method working for you, or should you adapt it?
- Small changes can have large impacts.
- Piggyback culture change onto technological innovations.
- Empower local and indigenous solutions.
- Use ritual and lore to encode information. Invent traditions.
- Go beyond the visual-verbal; incorporate embodied learning for kinesthetic learners (doers)
- Pace your lessons.
Project Details
Date: May 2012
Client: National Conference on Building Commissioning
Location: Nashville, TN