Mark DeKay

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Help us solve the climate crisis by design

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A Mobile App for selecting and relating sustainable design strategies using an integral framework

Sustainable design is having an impact on climate change, but not fast enough. This is because it mostly speaks and acts from one quadrant at one level. I know this from my own disappointments of 25 years of teaching architects. In contrast, I believe that an integral approach can help use solve the climate crisis by design.

Target Population: Architecture students and professional architects are the target audience because buildings use half the world's energy and are responsible for half of greenhouse gases. Wow!, right?

The Work: Create, test, and disseminate a fun, graphic, collaborative, integrally-informed, user-friendly mobile device software application (App). Build a working model of an integral design knowledge base.

Intention: Contribute to creating a transformation in architectural education and in the practice of architecture such that designers are able to readily access concept-forming sustainable design knowledge from multiple project-relevant perspectives.

Vision: Imagine that an interdisciplinary collaborative neighborhood or building design team could access and share sustainable design ideas in the form of concrete strategies. Imagine they could select and relate these strategies for multiple goals in the domains of performance, systems, experience and culture. Image that they could navigate by a dozen routes, from performance impacts to intended experiences to generative metaphors. Now imagine that they could do this by gaming together or in solitaire on their mobile devices and share their results.

Background: The NDN App combines knowledge structures from two books Integral Sustainable Design: transformative perspectives (DeKay, 2011) and Sun, Wind & Light: architectural design strategies, 3rd ed. (DeKay & Brown, 2014).

FULL PROPOSAL with Storyboards

Mark's VITA

Mark's Faculty Web Page at the University of Tennessee