By Judy Arginteanu

When the University of Minnesota regents announced the Greening of the Campus initiative in 2004, few questioned its ambition. The initiative set forth a large and diffuse mandate, on a large and diffuse campus, embodying a large and diffuse concept.

The College of Design (CDes), in the business of envisioning and creating what is both workable and beautiful, has been in the vanguard of efforts to integrate and focus initiatives on campus and beyond for what can be a sprawling idea--sustainability. Sustainability covers all the areas CDes addresses, pointed out Dean Thomas Fisher: "the built environment, what we use and wear and package. So there's a feeling in the college that we can do something to make a difference," he said.

But just asking the fundamental question--what is sustainability?--shows how elusive the concept can be.

"There's the official definition of protecting and managing the earth's resources for our use and for future generations," said landscape architecture department head John Koepke. "For me, it's really being wise and efficient with what we have available to support ourselves and the other beings on the planet." It also requires an attitude shift. The availability of cheap oil, Koepke said, has allowed those in the industrialized world to "throw one great big party. Now we're realizing that party has had global consequences. What we're trying to do is back off and set some limits on ourselves."

Faculty across the college stress that sustainability does not entail sacrificing traditional ideas of good design. Indeed, sustainability is an integral part of good design.

Just because a building is beautiful, doesn't necessarily mean it meets the occupant's needs. And just because it meets the needs of occupants doesn't mean it's sustainable, said Caren Martin, assistant professor of interior design and a certified interior designer. "It all has to work together or it is simply not a successful solution."

Environment, economy, equity

The College of Design has already made concrete strides to bring sustainable practices to its operations. The college received one of 10 Service and Process Improvement Fund grants from the University this year. The dean's column on page 3 describes the long-term impacts of the Greening the College initiative. Research and curriculum form key components of the sustainability initiatives, which are diverse and ongoing, with many in the works or on the drawing board.

The Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) has been at the forefront of the issue for a decade. Director John Carmody views its mission broadly, incorporating issues as diverse as land use and affordable housing. "It's the big picture," he said, noting that sustainability embraces the three E's--environment, economy, equity, sometimes expressed as the three P's--people, planet and prosperity. "It's recognizing that we're all part of an interconnected system."

CSBR has been chosen to help lead sustainability efforts across the University and is currently conducting an institution-wide sustainability inventory. It will list and detail all sustainable or sustainability-related initiatives in facilities use, research, and teaching--across the entire campus. "We're in the inventory stage right now," said Carmody, "but we're hoping that as we move forward, it can be used to help the University reach its goals and take more concrete measures."

CSBR also creates tools for the larger world, like its efficientwindows.org Web site used by the U.S. Department of Energy. It helped develop the Minnesota Sustainable Design Guidelines, which offer a wealth of information to design and building professionals, students, and the public.

In the works is research that will help architects get a handle on the life cycle, emissions, and environmental impact of materials. "We've always been in this business of translating technology and research information into usable forms," Carmody said.

CDes's InformeDesign Web site, launched in January 2003, is proving to be another nationwide and global sustainability resource. The site, created by Martin and Denise Guerin, professors of interior design, unites the research and practice of design and human behavior, and transforms scholarly writing into Research Summaries for practitioners. The InformeDesign site is used around the world (China was the biggest user outside the United States in August, Martin noted), and it has become such a resource for objective research that it has been cited in the influential and widely used textbook Sustainable Design for Interior Environments by Susan Winchip. The U.S. Green Building Council, which developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, has linked to it on their Web site.

At the Metropolitan Design Center, interim director Lance Neckar has made sustainability this year's focus. Case studies by graduate research students will include measurements from sustainable urban and metropolitan design projects.

Educating tomorrow's professionals

Sustainability in the classroom may have the most far-reaching effects, as the principles and ethos of sustainability become second nature for today's students, who become tomorrow's design professionals.

To that end, last year the college launched one of the nation's first MS degrees in sustainable design, in the School of Architecture. In the works for five years, the research-focused degree has far-reaching implications. While it brings a theoretical specialization to the practice, it is also geared to giving students practical, hands-on training.

"The idea is obviously to influence practice," said Mary Guzowksi, associate professor of architecture, who helped develop the program. "It's definitely about connecting to urgent problems, real issues." The program forces students to come face to face with the fundamental issues of what sustainability means, she added.

"That's the black hole--there are thousands of definitions and that's part of the story right now, trying to figure this out; some are very pragmatic, some are about values, even spirituality. We don't want frozen notions; it's a collaborative process, and it can be messy--and interesting."

Students in the MS program will be integrating work on shrinking the size of the college's ecological footprint and will be leading the University's Earth Day activities. The program is also seeking ways to integrate CSBR's University-wide sustainability inventory into the curriculum. They are forming links with the Minnesota Zero Energy Design Protocol (developed by Guzowski and Carmody and CSBR senior research fellow Richard Strong), which is formulating strategies, guidelines, and a calculator to support carbon-neutral design.

Sustainability is an integral theme in the interior design program as well, said Martin. It's a requirement for the senior design thesis; the goal is to make it almost automatic, like remembering to put restrooms in a building, she explained. Students begin focusing on the issue in their sophomore year, with classes on lighting and energy use and product selection. But they also look at the big picture, researching the change agents of sustainability and learning about LEED certification and the Minnesota Sustainable Design Guidelines created by CSBR.

Similarly, in the Department of Landscape Architecture, "Sustainability is not an add-on," said Koepke. "It's right at the core." Currently, Koepke is leading students in an initiative to examine climate change and how the design professions are adapting and responding.

Students enthusiastic

CDes students have been among the most active and enthusiastic participants in the college's sustainability efforts. Under the direction of CSBR senior research fellow Virajita Singh, architecture students last year conducted an audit of the waste materials they generated in Rapson Hall. Using that baseline, they are building a prototype studio-recycling station. (The audit showed that the size and location of recycling bins weren't working.) Students have also instituted a green room for exchanging materials. Students can drop off unused materials they don't need or pick up materials they do need. "It's been working great," said Singh.

Singh is faculty adviser to the CDes student group Greenlight, which focuses on University sustainability efforts. Projects include awareness initiatives, organizing a green vendor fair for University purchasing departments, a charette to work with Hennepin County on possible energy-capturing changes to the garbage incinerator near the new Twins stadium site, and a sustainability report for the college, which they hope will become the first of an annual series. As part of that report, they will develop a carbon footprint for CDes using an online carbon calculator, based on information gathered by CSBR.

Singh, who is also the college facilities and sustainability coordinator, cites the new studio desks at Rapson Hall as a sustainability success story. (See back page for details.)

PuLLing it all together: Knowledge mapping

Pulling together all these efforts, tangible and otherwise, is the work of an innovative new project that falls under the rubric of knowledge mapping. Coprincipal investigators Janet Abrams, director of the Design Institute, and Singh, lead the project, which will develop an interactive multi-touch-screen table. The touch-screen table will show the various sustainability efforts under way at the University. Department of Art MFA student Christopher Baker is creating the design for both the physical table and the user interface. Architecture and urban studies student Jack Cochran is working on the huge task of inventorying these efforts for its underlying database. A prototype of the table is scheduled to be completed by the end of fall semester 2007.

Organized around three concepts--people, places, and ideas--the knowledge-mapping project's mission is to provide information (some of it gathered from the CSBR inventory) in an interactive, graphic format. Placing the completed touch-screen table in a public area such as Coffman Union will allow a community of people to gather around and make connections between the University's diverse and diffuse sustainability efforts.

"The very act of mapping changes the terrain being mapped--whether that's physical or conceptual terrain," Abrams said. "So simply by mapping sustainability, we are bringing it to a different level of awareness."

And presenting this information via an interactive table that several people can use at one time, will encourage people to see their actions within a collective context and think about how individual behavior adds up in terms of sustainability.

Which may, in a sense, be the ultimate goal. "The initial idea was that this project would simply log progress toward the regents' goals on sustainability," said Abrams. "But it will be interesting to see if that knowledge changes behavior. It should--otherwise why do it?"

Judy Arginteanu is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. Her articles have appeared in the Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Metro magazine, MinnPost, ArtNews, and Utne Reader.