Sustainability, environmental impact, green design, urban sprawl -- all buzzwords we have become familiar with in the ongoing dialogue about climate change and global warming. This book presents student work that explores these issues and exemplifies the application of Ezio Manzini's theories of "enabling solutions". Students from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Environmental Design worked together to identify some of the challenges of suburbia with respect to sustainable design. Exploring such issues as the local quality of life, community cohesiveness, and environmental impacts of suburban areas, the workshop participants presented posters, tables, matrices, and other graphic materials that illustrate key concepts, the resources required, and the main players involved in their implementation. In addition to the student work showcased here, "Enabling Solutions" also includes essays by Manzini, Walker, and Wylant that contextualise the key issues and elaborate on the theoretical basis for the student workshop.

This report considers the potential of marine biotechnology to contribute to economic and social prosperity by making use of recent advances in science and technology.

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

Sustainability, environmental impact, green design, urban sprawl - all terms that have, in recent years, become part of the collective consciousness in the ongoing dialogue about climate change and global warming. Enabling Solutions for Sustainable Living presents student work that explores these issues and exemplifies the application of "enabling solutions." Here, members of a new generation of designers - students from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Environmental Design - come together to identify some of the sustainability challenges of contemporary suburban living. Exploring such issues as quality of life, community cohesiveness, and environmental impacts of city living, workshop participants present their research graphically, illustrating key concepts, the resources required, and the desired outcomes. In addition to the student work showcased here, Enabling Solutions includes essays by Ezio Manzini, Stuart Walker, and Barry Wylant that contextualize the central ideas and elaborate on the theoretical basis for the workshop.

Design for Sustainable Change explores how design thinking and design-led entrepreneurship can address the issue of sustainability. It discusses the ways in which design thinking is evolving and being applied to a much wider spectrum of social and environmental issues, beyond its traditional professional territory. The result is designers themselves evolving, and developing greater design mindfulness in relation to what they do and how they do it. This book looks at design thinking as a methodology which, by its nature, considers issues of sustainability, but which does not necessarily seek to define itself in those terms. It explores the gradual extension of this methodology into the larger marketplace and the commercial and social implications of such an extension.

The book is current and interdisciplinary, engaging with recent developments around this topic and including perspectives from sciences, arts, and humanities. It will be a welcome contribution to studies of the Anthropocene as well as studies of research methods and practices. —Sam Mickey, University of S. Francisco Educational institutions play an instrumental role in social and political change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their institutional practices. The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment. The volume further calls attention to the geographical, financial, legal and political barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional modes of scholarly conversation. As such, Right Research is a bold invitation to the academic community to rigorous self-reflection on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a three-part structure that bridges conceptual and practical concerns: the first section challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defined, measured and practiced; the second section showcases artist-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third section investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. This timely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats, spanning academic articles, creative acts, personal reflections and dialogues. Right Research will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communication formats in the face of the current climate crisis.

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.