Design Solutions

Type and Token

Scott Stowell — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:02:48 PDT

New typefaces are created for aesthetic, commercial, or simply practical reasons. And sometimes-when one gets appropriated by a brand or movement-they can take on a life of their own.

For the print version of GOOD 006 we picked the following notable fonts.

Futura Black Stencil (by Paul Renner, 1929), a product of the Bauhaus movement, is best known today as Au Bon Pain's logo type.

Arnold Bröcklin (by Otto Weisert, 1904) is an Art Nouveau typeface that was later appropriated by the hippie movement.

Handel Gothic (by Ronald Trogram, 1980) was used on New Order's Republic and in the opening credits for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Matrix (by Zuzana Licko, 1986) was specifically designed to reproduce well on early laser printers.

Sauna (by Underware, 2002) is named after the warm and comfortable feeling it suggests.

Frankfurter (by Alan Meeks, 1970) was named after America's favorite sausage.

Design Solutions

GOOD — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:24:18 PDT

Over the past century, the word design has slowly assumed the role of a proper noun. Stores sell Design. Companies market luxurious lifestyles filled with Design. But the word is much more potent and exciting as a verb, the act of tackling real problems and finding elegant solutions.

Design will offer innovative responses to the world's crises, but only if we can nurture its growth from noun to verb. Beyond improving the living rooms of those for whom Design is already within reach, design will improve the lives of every person on Earth. This is not to say we should disregard beauty. Rather, beauty must be put to use. Remember the words of Buckminster Fuller, the revolutionary designer and thinker, who said, "I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

In this issue you'll discover that design is a tool with vast utility. There are problems everywhere. It's time to design solutions.

Design Solutions Features

Better-Than-It-Has-to-Be Design

The words "good" and "design" share a complicated history, but sometimes the goodness of design is measured by the very fact that it isn't noticed at all.

Education by Design

Affordable and community-driven, the green-school movement stands to change the world in which children learn. So what's the holdup?

Real World Studio

The design students of Project M bring high concept to high impact.

Better-Than-It-Has-to-Be Design

Alice Twemlow — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:13:08 PDT

The words "good" and "design" share a complicated history. Since the Museum of Modern Art's "Good Design" exhibitions and initiatives of the early 1950s, the two words have often been used to promote the values, philosophy, and aesthetic associated with modernism-a movement that can be roughly described as endorsing pared-down functionality and frowning upon extraneous ornament.

For Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., the director of MoMA's industrial-design department and the instigator of those exhibitions, goodness in design was an objective quality that manufacturers could be trained to produce and consumers could be trained to recognize. To help consumers to identify good design once they were beyond the museum's clean white walls, MoMA and the exhibitions' co-sponsor, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, created an orange-and-black Good Design tag that was attached to objects that were deemed to possess this quality: Eames chairs, Nelson clocks, Noguchi coffee tables, and other objects in the store that clearly expressed their purpose, structure, and materials as well as fulfilling, as Kaufmann put it, "the practical needs of modern life."

The problem is that "good design" didn't look much beyond the object itself. An AK-47 rifle, for example, makes use of sound and appropriate materials and it demonstrates other criteria of good design, such as solid workmanship, efficiency, and suitability of purpose-the gun was designed so that nothing, from sand to ice, could get in and prevent it from firing. Plus, its robust and "honest" appearance is pleasing. For many, the AK-47 is a classic in the annals of good design (it also happens to be most popular firearm in the world). But the question then is: good for what and for whom?

There are other ways of looking at design that seem more relevant to the challenges confronting 21st-century society. In the face of catastrophes such as global warming, good design as a cause in itself appears less important than the application of design and design-based thinking to good causes. In recent years, there has been a groundswell of design initiatives with an altruistic mission at their core, in which design is not just good, but good for something: Architecture for Humanity is rallying designers around projects aimed at alleviating a range of humanitarian crises; Worldchanging is sharing tools and approaches to solving global problems; and "Design for the Other 90%," an exhibition at New York's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, is showcasing attempts by designers to increase access to food and water, energy, education, health care, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation.

These enterprises are noble and necessary. But as the examples of design on these pages demonstrate, goodness in design also operates at the more mundane level of improving the day-to-day existence of regular human beings. It need not create dramatic resolutions to global crises. Rather, it can often be small and quiet, but cumulatively powerful, a response to the anticipated everyday needs of people who wish to communicate, travel, learn, and flourish with efficiency and grace.

Quote:

For many, the AK-47 is a classic in the annals of good design. But good for what and for whom?

Sometimes the goodness of design is measured by the very fact that it isn't noticed at all. When you find your way to your destination without mishap, for example, you rarely stop to consider how and why that happened. In fact, behind that journey lies the thoughtful design of specific fonts, signage, a house-numbering system, a road surface, tire treads, perhaps a map or a GPS device. The often-anonymous designers of these everyday things seem compelled by an internal calling to enrich someone else's day, even if only for a fleeting moment. They are probably not very well rewarded for their work-in fact, they may have had to buck the system to get some small improvement implemented.

But good invites you to notice and celebrate the seemingly ordinary moments in your day that become extraordinary when you appreciate the extent to which they have been thought through on your behalf-a selection of pieces that might be classified as better-than-it-has-to-be design.

See design solutions to the following problems:

How Do We Know What's Up?

How Do We Make Our Mark?

How Do We Understand Each Other?

How Do We Work with the Machines?

How Do We Stay Safe?

How Do We Not Trash the Place?

Rachel Abrams — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:39:52 PDT

Rapid innovation has sometimes come at the expense of long-term sustainability, so we now must find creative solutions to our past mistakes, and doubly creative ways of avoiding future problems.

When great ideas strike the next generation, the lightbulb that illuminates their heads will mostly likely be a compact fluorescent.

The incandescent light bulb has been a symbol of modernity ever since Thomas Edison filed for a patent in 1879. Its iconic shape is synonymous with industry and progress, but ironically, rampant and unchecked industrial progress is what has necessitated the carbon-saving redesign. With compact fluorescents emerging as the leading sustainable lighting technology, the question becomes: Why do they look so funny? That twisty tube is filled with a gas that emits UV radiation when you flip the switch. A phosphorous compound that coats the inside of the tube then converts the radiation into visible light. The spiral simply allows for more tube in a smaller space.

The soon-to-be-iconic spiral of a CFL is necessitated by the design of its glowing tubes.

CFLs now produce pleasant and more efficient lighting than traditional bulbs. As industries and retailers continue to push for their adoption, CFLs will become commonplace and familiar, until eventually incandescent bulbs start to look antiquated. If you can't abide the luminous squiggle and insist on miring your aesthetic preference in the past, you can now buy a capsule CFL bulb: The same spiral technology, but encased in a modesty bubble that looks as elegant as the old, unrecyclable, energy-guzzling classic.

-RACHEL ABRAMS

rethink

Design isn't limited to objects: Complex systems like major cities benefit from smart design too, especially in pursuit of becoming cleaner and more energy efficient. Last May, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, announced that all vehicles in the city's taxi fleet would be hybrids by 2012. In this, the hundredth year of New York's yellow cab, there are already more than 300 hybrid cabs in service. These advanced Ford and Toyota SUVs and sedans signal the end of the ubiquitous yellow Crown Victoria. But new emissions and mileage standards for the city's yellow cabs are part of the city's goal to halve cab emissions within the next 10 years.

cooperate

Urban bike sharing is part of a crop of design innovations predicated on sharing rather than keeping ideas and resources to ourselves. Bike-share operations that rely on a range of technologies-from smart card readers to collect payment to customized Google mapping applications that report the real-time availability of bikes for hire-are already proliferating in Europe. Climbing on the two-wheeled bandwagon, New York's Forum for Urban Design has just partnered with the Storefront for Art and Architecture to run a five-day exploration of options for introducing similar bike-sharing schemes to New York. The outcomes are documented at nybikeshare.org.

upcycle

The Heineken World Bottle was a noble (but failed) attempt at designing for a more sustainable future. Conceived in 1960, the square bottles were easily stackable, like bricks, so that 1,000 empty beers could build a 10-foot-by-10-foot shack. Sadly, the idea never made it into production.

Holly's pick:

When we realize our dependence on petroleum raises the waters in Bangladesh, we reframe our sense of the space we occupy; When we consider the effect of plastics on our great grandkids, we shift our sense of time. The Home Joule, which monitors your house's energy consumption in real time, is part of a growing trend in elective accountability, where we're invited to modulate our consumption in response to something deeper than our own lifespan.

-HOLLY KRETSCHMAR

How Do We Stay Safe?

Zach Frechette — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:19:27 PDT

One of the clearest examples of the potential of design is when the medium transcends aesthetics. Good design helps keep us safe, and can even save lives.

In the United States we have more than 160,000 miles of interlocking highways that can quickly become a hazardous maze when traveled at 65 miles per hour. But thanks to the clever work of typographers, the system is eminently navigable. The original Federal Highway Administration fonts (Highway Gothic, informally) went into service in the mid-1950s, the result of research by the California Department of Transportation into making road signs legible at speed, from as great a distance as possible. The font family has been tweaked several times through the years, most notably in the form of Interstate, a 1993 redrawing by the legendary type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.

Noting a growing number of older American drivers, in 1994 the FHWA considered a new, larger font that would have required drastic increases in the size of highway signs. Instead, designers Donald Meeker and James Montalbano created a typeface called Clearview, which was more legible than Interstate though it used similar-sized letters. Clearview boasts a 20-percent increase in the distance at which it can be read, which means a driver can react to information on the sign two seconds faster (that's almost 100 feet at highway speeds). It can be seen on signs in Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere, and is expected to replace most FHWA fonts in the coming decades.

-ZACH FRECHETTE

adapt

Camouflage-a military staple since the late 19th century-has only recently started to take advantage of smarter design through science. Favorites like the desert battle dress uniform ("chocolate-chip camouflage," in Army parlance) are gradually being replaced with MultiCam, a camouflage that functions equally well in any terrain. Through sophisticated digital modeling and pattern printing, MultiCam is designed so that our minds smooth out the subtle anomalies of shape and color by blending them into the existing background.

Since nonintuitive controls posed a distraction to motorists who felt it necessary to adjust their chairs while driving, Mercedes developed seat controls that mimicked the shape of the seat itself, in profile. Like most of its safety advances, Mercedes opted out of a patent, hoping instead that this important innovation would catch on industry-wide. Indeed, it's hard to find a car without this feature today.

respond

The cardboard sleeve protecting your fingers from that hot coffee cup was created in 1991 by a realtor named Jay Sorensen after he dropped his scalding java on his lap. All the major coffee purveyors quickly followed suit. Rightly so-the sleeve is both better for the environment and more effective at protecting from heat than double-cupping.

Tucker's pick:

At New York's City & Country School, kids learn by doing. They build with big blocks, paint, and play on the "climber," a five-foot-tall U-shaped bridge with a slide-a shiny piece of wood with no side rails. Kids can see that if they're not careful they'll fall off. To grow, we need to take chances. Progress is littered with mistakes and accidents. Designers try to make things that are safer to use. But why live in a world where no one ever gets hurt?

-TUCKER VIEMEISTER

How Do We Work with the Machines?

Brian Fichtner — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:00:21 PDT

Now that nearly every household object employs complex electrical inner workings concealed by a decorative skin, the importance of simplified interfaces is paramount. This new age of consumer electronics can be readily understood as one of the first moments in history in which invention and design were truly married, aligning function with experience.

For better or worse, some products that have shaped our world have resulted not from designing for man's best interest, but from simple necessity. Take the layout of the English keyboard, commonly referred to as QWERTY. Long before the advent of the user interface, Christopher Sholes (who invented the modern typewriter in the 1860s) had a problem; as he perfected his invention, he noticed that with an alphabetical arrangement of the keys, neighboring key bars activated in rapid succession were becoming entangled with one another. To mitigate the problem, he rearranged the keys so as to separate the most common letter pairings. The redesign proved successful and the typewriter hammered itself into history.

But it turns out that the QWERTY keyboard is rather inefficient. Nearly 70 years later, Dr. August Dvorak, having methodically studied the physiology of typists, came up with an alternative arrangement aimed at alleviating fatigue and increasing productivity. The new keyboard setup, dubbed the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, has been recognized in many circles as superior, yet QWERTY lingers to this day, largely because of the logistical and financial nightmare of replacing the world's keyboards.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to prevent typewriters from jamming when common letter pairings were struck in rapid succession.

Eventually, computing will conceal mechanics entirely. Indeed, user interfaces now deal largely with the virtual. While Apple's new iPhone evinces little change in form from the conventional cell phone, its interactive software represents a radical leap forward. Then again, some conventions just can't be shaken-the iPhone's keypad uses a QWERTY layout, after all.

-BRIAN FICHTNER

simplify

The grandfather of modern product design is Dieter Rams, a legendary figure who led the design department at Braun electronics for more than 40 years. Credited with making the home stereo a decorative object of desire, his puritanical approach to design was evident in a rational, standardized program in which early products were offered in only white or gray, and all buttons and switches were tightly organized and color-coded only when necessary. The language was so precise that, even today, looking at his SK4 series of record players, or the regie 308 control unit, a user can intuit its controls.

Recent decades have introduced computing into nearly every object we touch, creating entirely new systems of thought and symbol-based languages. Champions of Rams's design tenet-"less but better"-have met these challenges with admirable results.

minimize

Jasper Morrison's designs for Rowenta and Olivetti appear to have evolved directly from the Braun legacy. His Linea office printer deploys mere lines and curves to describe the interface, also reducing visual clutter in a chaotic office environment.

play

Naoto Fukasawa's products are examples of how reductive forms can produce an instinctive user experience. His wall-mounted CD player for Muji plays upon our collective memory; pull on the hanging cord (as you would a ceiling fan) and the CD starts playing through the integrated speaker.

reinvent

Jonathan Ive's tenure at Apple has brought consumers the most celebrated objects of our time. The iPod series represents a significant advancement in mobile media, but this iconic design may owe part of its success to a lesser-known predecessor; it would not be fallacious to note its similarities to the Braun model T3 pocket radio from 1958.

Petter's pick:

Like other rushed New Yorkers, I've stared down the tunnel looking for the beams of light or listening for that tick in the rail announcing an upcoming train. The scurrying rats are also a telltale sign that something is coming down the tracks. Thanks to the new LED screens displaying the arrival time of the next two trains on the platform of the L train to and from Brooklyn, I now know before the rodents do. That's progress.

-PETTER RINGBOM

How Do We Understand Each Other?

Steven Heller — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:16:40 PDT

Navigating the world's linguistic babble has been one of the great feats of modern graphic design. Since early in the 20th century, when it became clear that visual signs could be used as detours around countless linguistic roadblocks, progressive designers have developed accessible graphic icons-mini-logos-to identify everything from restrooms to minefields.

The first universal symbols, introduced in 1936 and called Isotypes-an acronym for "International System of Typographic Picture Education"-were invented by the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath and the artist Gerd Arntz. They aimed to communicate essential information (like the location of a hospital or a police station) to people-rich and poor, literate and illiterate-in an unfettered way. Their invention was the starting point for this age of modern pictograms.

Airport signs employ a universal design language that doesn't require specific knowledge of any dialect or culture.

Other symbols-based in part on Isotype designs-were often used in public venues and at international events like the Olympics, but, noting the lack of an international norm, a committee of designers from the American Institute of Graphic Arts evaluated the various styles, and integrated them into a final symbolic Esperanto for indicating services and events (AIGA has made them available copyright-free). In 1979, these images were standardized when the AIGA and the U.S. Department of Transportation produced 50 "symbol signs" designated for airports and other transportation hubs.

-STEVEN HELLER

translate

Symbol signs are closely related to commercial, social, and political marks. The peace sign, for example, designed in 1958 by an English designer named Gerald Holtom (inspired by an idea of the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell), was based on the semaphore signals for "N" and "D" (for "nuclear disarmament") and has an unmistakable message and clear purpose (although a similar upside-down "crow's foot" was used by the Nazis to commemorate death).

distill

Corporate logos, like Rob Janoff's rainbow Apple, Carolyn Davidson's Nike swoosh, and Saul Bass's AT&T bell, each iconic in their own right, are simplifications that immediately telegraph either the positive or negative connotations of the respective product or institution.

transpose

With the computer age came an icons blitz. First came the simple symbols found on computer desktops-the pointing finger, the file folder, and the unhappy face noting that the computer has broken down. Then came the icon as art form, with websites like Pictoplasma devoted to tiny character studies--or avatars-that serve to direct, locate, and identify.

Brian's pick:

Logos get their impact from what they represent, not the other way around. At best, they are visually reductive and narratively neutral-vessels for a wide range of possible meanings. BP's logo is an exception. The first oil company to publicly talk about global warming, BP adopted the helios design in 2001. It is a symbol to inspire the company to move "beyond petroleum"-and a promise to the world that it is willing to be held accountable to such

an ambition.

-BRIAN COLLINS

How Do We Make Our Mark?

Steven Heller — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:28:21 PDT

Penmanship has long been the essence of personal expression. Although good penmanship has atrophied in our computer age, methods and styles have routinely been subject to the vicissitudes of technology, even before the digital revolution.

Take the ballpoint pen, invented in 1938 by a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro, who had observed that newspaper ink dried faster than the ink in fountain pens, keeping the paper smudge-free. He created a pen using printer's ink and changed the manner and look of written expression. The British government bought the licensing rights to Biro's invention during World War II because the Royal Air Force needed a pen that would not leak at higher altitudes. The basic concept of the ballpoint has remained fairly consistent, though styles have changed. The Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy designed a famous Parker Pen, one of the most popular of the genre, but perhaps the most popular of all ballpoints is the Bic Crystal, introduced by Marcel Bich in 1950, the first inexpensive, disposable pen. The digital pen is on the horizon, but the ballpoint will always be the sina qua non.

-STEVEN HELLER

revise

Expression comes in many fonts, colored inks, and paper hues. But one of the most important ancillary inventions for scribblers was Liquid Paper, more commonly known as white-out. Originally called "mistake out," it was invented by a wannabe artist and former Dallas secretary, Bette Nesmith Graham (the mother of former Monkee Mike Nesmith). Seeking a better typewriter correction ribbon, she made a brew of white tempera and pigment that resulted in the most functional liquid since water.

enable

Another boon to expression was loose-leaf paper, blue-lined with a pink margin and three holes so that it can sit in a loose-leaf binder (U.S. patent #4904103). Who actually designed the paper is something of a mystery, but the concept dates back to the 1850s.

digitize

The most popular precursor to the PDA was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's Apple Newton MessagePad, released in 1993 and named after Sir Isaac Newton. It was a lot clunkier than the new organizers, but nonetheless had many of the writing functions-including handwriting recognition software, like inventor Jeff Hawkins's smart Palm Pilot-that are so ubiquitous today.

Jessica's pick:

I resist the notion that a machine can draw as well as a person, but recently I saw something that made me think differently. Scriptographer is a plug-in to Adobe Illustrator that lets you draw, and then completes the gesture-so a random line becomes an arabesque, or a spiral, or a tree branch. It is captivating precisely because it's so collaborative; a kind of improvisational dialogue that opens your eyes to an entirely new kind of expression.

-JESSICA HELFAND

How Do We Know What's Up?

Brian Fichtner — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:02:19 PDT

Never before have so many channels competed for our waning attention. The world is coming to us in print, on television, on the internet, and in countless other ways. Staying current is simply a matter of fact-the only question we face is, How?

Take a look at the front page of The New York Times. Chances are, like most people you're viewing it above the fold from having just picked it off the stand. Very likely your eyes will scan the main image, positioned several inches from the top, then dart over the headline (if it has one) before settling a moment on the authoritative logo. Notice how the tail of the "Y" drops below the baseline, its thick curve finishing in a point directly above the edition date. Have you got your bearings? All of this takes place in a matter of seconds; before you have even opened the spread to reveal the bottom half, you have been apprised of no less than three stories.

The front page of a newspaper communicates information hierarchy through subtle psychological cues that direct your eyes around the page.

Modern newspaper design (the front page especially) is a calculated mix of graphic artistry, mathematics, and psychology wherein images, modular layouts, and headlines are orchestrated to convey the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of time. It wasn't always this way, though. As recently as the mid-20th century, newspapers such as the Times employed rather verbose headlines underneath which trailed a thicket of articles, eight columns wide. Expedience was not the mot du jour.

Though not specifically responsible for the evolutionary redesign of the Times, the recently deceased Edmund Arnold is widely recognized as the father of modern newspaper design, having introduced the notion of horizontal layout, graphic elements (such as white space between articles), and key focal areas (ever notice how a lead story is generally in the upper right section?).

-BRIAN FICHTNER

condense

In the ongoing battle to maintain an overstimulated audience bent on multitasking, even TV newscasters are being supplemented with a constant stream of factoids running along their imaginary waistlines. ESPN was one of the first networks to permanently adopt the news ticker, originally employed for severe weather warnings and school closures, for quick reporting of scores. In a matter of years, the "crawl" has become a given on every network, sometimes superseding the newscaster, as Saturday Night Live once parodied in a skit featuring Darrell Hammond as Wolf Blitzer. While you can't download your own personal reporter, news providers such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC now offer ticker applications for the computer desktop, presumably to our hyper-connected benefit.

compile

Awash with information, we are all in need of the tools to distill and parse our stimuli. For the moment, there have been few developments in the service sector toward meeting this need. While many large financial corporations subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional service-a real-time financial-information network that employs a split-screen interface dubbed the Bloomberg Terminal-there are a host of people and industries that could benefit from advanced filtration of their news.

refine

Paying to have our news filtered for us is a slippery slope. Perhaps what we really need is a news diet, a more balanced consumption marrying the principles of economy and excellence. European papers seem to have this in spades. The recently redesigned, Berliner-sized French monthly Le Monde diplomatique merges the graphic qualities of a magazine with the authoritative typography of a revered institution. The result is a newspaper designed for brevity, but never lacking in thoroughness-diplomatic indeed.

Luke's pick:

Last year's relaunch of the Guardian newspaper in the U. K. is a masterpiece of editorial design-bright and engaging, but also appropriately serious. Despite its magazine-like bravado, the design manages to step aside, giving content center stage. The daily treat is its poster-sized, double-page centerfold photograph, printed in high resolution. It's one of the experiences a website can't provide. If newspapers have a future, they'll probably look like this.

-LUKE HAYMAN

Education by Design

Eva Steele-Saccio — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:04:33 PDT

Affordable and community-driven, the green-school movement stands to change the world in which children learn. So what's the holdup?

Ten years ago, if an architect said he was designing a green school, most people would have assumed he had decided to paint the façade a pleasant shade of sage. But now it's 2007, and "green schools" are part of a growing movement that is changing the environments in which students learn-and has parents clamoring to get their children on waiting lists. This is the business of sustainable school design; building high-performance facilities that are both better for the planet and for the children who learn in them.

Since the beginning of the century, architects, environmental groups, and educators have launched a convincing, if somewhat disjointed, campaign to get new school building and renovation projects to adopt the tenets of high-performance design. And it's been quite successful. School districts across the country have jumped on the bandwagon, hiring some of the best architects in the business to construct sustainable facilities across the country, from Hawaii to Texas to New Jersey.

At their core, green schools are about helping the environment. They are built from recycled materials and use renewable energy systems that maximize efficiency in electricity, water usage, heating, and cooling. On average, they use 30 percent less energy and 30 to 50 percent less water than conventional school buildings, and they reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent. But beyond the obvious environmental concerns, green schools are about saving money. The lower energy use results in savings of more than $100,000 annually per school. That's enough to hire two new teachers, buy 150 new computers, or purchase 5,000 new textbooks. Even more eye-opening: If all new school and renovation construction starting in 2007 followed these guidelines, the energy savings would amount to $20 billion over the next 10 years.

Quote:

Beyond their sustainability, green schools are better learning environments.

Then there is the most important factor in designing a school: education. Green schools create a healthy atmosphere for learning that has measurable results. The combination of natural light, fresh air, open plans, and multi-use facilities that encourage community involvement has helped student test scores rise by 20 percent and reduced asthma rates by 39 percent. In green schools, teacher retention increases and missed school days decrease. The bottom line is that beyond their sustainability, green schools are simply better learning environments: Students and teachers are happier and get a lot more done in the classroom.

Still, the green-school movement faces some formidable obstacles. "The irony here is that the greatest barrier is education," says Bob Kobet, a sustainable-architecture consultant. "There is still the misconception that green buildings cost more, that they are too complicated and take too long to build." In a 2005 survey of executives working in the construction business, three-quarters of those polled said that higher cost was a major obstacle to sustainable building. School districts' small budgets exacerbate the problem; it's difficult to justify the extra up-front cost when you barely have enough money to replace textbooks and hire new teachers.

But the reality is that green schools cost only 2 percent more to build and the potential long-term savings are in the billions of dollars nationally. This becomes an even more meaningful statistic when you consider the lifespan of schools. "If you blow it, you blow it for 35 years," says Kobet. If you consider that school buildings make up the largest sector of nonresidential construction projects in the U.S.-a projected $80 billion from 2006 to 2008-and that each of the country's more than 55 million students attends school for an average of 1,300 hours annually, the small investment makes a lot of sense. Add in all the potential savings, both monetary and physical, and it quickly becomes clear how crucial and timely the green-school movement is.

Interdistrict used local, renewable wheat board in the furnishings, water-based paints and finishes, and recycled tile in the bathrooms.

In 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council established the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System, which certifies and grades new building projects according to their level of sustainability. Last spring, the USGBC officially launched LEED for Schools, which was tailored to meet the specific needs of K through 12 classrooms and to provide a barometer for better building performance. Right now, 300 schools are on the waiting list for certification-a telling measure of the movement's rapid growth.

The movement began on a small scale, with only a few schools willing to take a chance on a new vision: investing in education by paying attention to its physical infrastructure. Drawing on a tradition of sustainable design that dates back to the 1980s, architecture firms started reshaping school planning, one campus at a time.

Clackamas also has an energy-monitoring-and-control system that measures outdoor and indoor temperatures and CO2 levels to determine which rooms to heat and cool.

On the West Coast, Boora Architects, which is based in Portland, Oregon, paved the way with the first LEED-certified, K through 12 project, a high school in the Portland suburb of Clackamas. It rigged an innovative lighting system to provide natural daylight to 90 percent of the school. To control the distribution of light, the principal architect, Heinz Rudolf, explains, "We used light scoops to collect sunlight through translucent windows and skylights in upper areas of classroom wings. The daylight is then transferred to adjacent spaces via clerestory windows" and to lower floors via mirrored tubes that move light down from the roof. This substantially reduced the need for artificial lighting. "In turn," Rudolf says, "it decreases the heat load and energy costs of electric lights." Clackamas also has an energy-monitoring-and-control system that measures outdoor and indoor temperatures and CO2 levels to determine which rooms to heat or cool. In all, the planning has saved the school an average of $70,000 per year in energy costs.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Cuningham Group was making impressive breakthroughs with the city's Interdistrict Downtown School. The architects used local, renewable wheat board in the furnishings, water-based paints and finishes, and recycled tile in the bathrooms, then integrated a solar heating "wall" that warms fresh air as it enters the school, reducing the energy needed to heat the building during the brutal Minnesota winters. Cuningham also capitalized on existing community resources-an important tenet of high-performance design. "Creating great schools is about creating great places to learn, places rooted in the culture of the people they serve," explains Cuningham's president, Tim Dufault. "For a school to truly be sustainable, it has to grow from its community." And this school certainly did grow. Cuningham used the district's steam system as the primary heat source for the facility, eliminating the need for an additional boiler. The firm also helped the school establish partnerships with downtown organizations, including the YMCA (which provided gym space), the main public library (books), local theaters (performance space), and a private music school (band and orchestra programs). "By creating these partnerships," says Dufault, "we didn't need to invest resources in facilities that were already available." The school positioned itself firmly within the community, and the community embraced the energy students gave back.

Kobet, who chaired the committee that drafted LEED, agrees: "Schools used to be the fabric of community. We can't avoid returning to that." High-performance schools will reconnect us to that idea, Kobet says. "They are a catalyst for bringing back the concept of lifelong learning-sharing the swimming pool, getting adults back onto campus." That means building facilities that not only depend on their community's resources but also create new ones. Kobet recently advised the Olympic planning committee in Beijing on a mixed-use building that will serve athletes during the 2008 summer games; afterward, it will become a community center that houses a school. "It will be central to the community," says Kobet, "an essential part of the entirely green village."

Interdistrict integrates into the community and takes advantage of local resources by partnering with the YMCA (gym space), the main public library (books), local theaters (performance space), and a private music school (band and orchestra programs).

Boora Architects sees a similar future for the United States. "The buildings we are planning will serve students well into the next century," says Rudolf. "They will be flexible and change, staying open 24 hours a day. Schools will serve as community centers with overlapping functions: they'll have teleconferencing centers where the elderly can also learn to check their email."

The logic is that understanding one's place in the larger community-learning how to both provide and use local resources in a responsible way-helps students see that their individual actions have a far-reaching impact. This is further enforced by fostering an awareness of one's immediate surroundings through a curriculum tied directly to school buildings. "Environmental education has always been about the natural world," says Kobet. When you learn about the environment, you learn about the outdoors-wildlife, weather, the life cycle of a tree. But, oddly, little connection is made to the man-made world, which often affects the environment in much more lasting ways than the changing seasons. In a country where buildings alone account for 48 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, human influence becomes a crucial factor to integrate into an understanding of the "natural" world. The issue becomes how to best teach about this overlap.

Quote:

Schools used to be the fabric of community. We can't avoid returning to that.

Luckily, explains Kobet, "Modern education is gesturing toward an effective environmental curriculum in which we can use our educational facilities to much more effectively teach children what they need to know to be more competent citizens." Students interact directly with the facilities they use; they take real-time data (energy use, humidity level, temperature changes) from central servers and incorporate it into daily math and science assignments. For example, a high school junior can calculate energy consumption by pulling up numbers on how much light the football team used at night practice versus how much artificial light was used during the school day. They might then compare these numbers to energy use at a conventional facility and calculate the percent change, gaining a more immediate awareness of how sustainable architecture affects use of resources. "They learn from everything they've done within their ecological footprint," says Kobet.

In a particularly potent example of synergy, at Clackamas, the students themselves were enlisted to develop the plan for the new high school. The shop class built a full-scale plywood mock-up of a classroom on the building site, helping the firm test the natural ventilation and lighting systems.

When the school was finished, the same students experienced the effects of their labor firsthand; they now learn in classrooms filled with fresh air and sunlight instead of in stuffy, dark spaces. Says Rudolf, "We wanted to make the building teacher in itself." Consider this the mark of a quintessential green school.

Real World Studio

Alissa Walker — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:56:55 PDT

Main Street in Greensboro, Alabama, feels abandoned. Not just empty-it's as though half the shopkeepers up and left at the end of a business day, and never came back. On this mid-June afternoon, it's not hard to see why. Even the locals agree it's way too hot, and the governor has issued a drought warning, making it a particularly unusual time for the small town of 2,700 to have big-city visitors.

Convened here nonetheless is an unlikely group-eight students and recent graduates from across the country with a month to accomplish something meaningful; something that they hope will make a difference for the people of Greensboro and the surrounding Hale County. By day 18 of their stay, however, that "something" is yet to be determined. In a county where 34 percent of children live below the poverty line, a quarter of the residents don't have access to clean drinking water, and the biggest employer is a catfish-processing plant that is rumored to be closing, the team has lots of issues to choose from. The scope of problems here is immense, but a consensus over which to address is nowhere in sight. Further complicating the task is the fact that these students are not budding teachers or architects-they are graphic designers.

The Rural Studio's Community Center at Mason's Bend in Hale County, Alabama.

Operating out of the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization headquarters-which doubles as an internet café and is one of Main Street's few bustling storefronts-the students are part of an annual summer program, created six years ago by a designer named John Bielenberg. Tall and tan, with white hair, Bielenberg runs Project M for young designers, charging them to bridge the gap between design for design's sake and its ability to change lives. "Graphic designers can get too intoxicated by the craft of design-the magic of the artifact or the smoothness of typography or the beauty of the photography," says Bielenberg. "They're not so interested in how it lives in the world or how it changes someone's feelings or how it makes something happen." Project M's goal is to inspire designers by proving that their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Or, in this case, on Hale County.

Project M was modeled after the Rural Studio, a program founded in Hale County in 1993 by the architect Samuel Mockbee so that architecture students from nearby Auburn University could design and build innovative houses in poor rural areas. After hearing Mockbee speak in 2000, Bielenberg got the idea to create something like it for designers. "Design uses communication to solve problems," he says, "so I wanted to be able to apply what I knew how to do toward solving a problem I cared about." Later that year, he moved his family to Maine to start Project M, which runs out of a converted farmhouse in Belfast. (The "M" refers to its origin, location, and intent: Mockbee, Maine, and messages.) He now commutes from Belfast to C2, a San Francisco design firm, for work.

A resident of Mason's Bend

Each year, Project M tackles a new cause: books for a rainforest preserve in Costa Rica, a green space in East Baltimore, gathering and distributing design supplies for displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors. This year, Bielenberg brought the project back to the home of the Rural Studio, giving the group a one-month full immersion in Hale County.

On that morning of day 18, the Project M design-ers are thinking about creating a manifesto on the concept of designing for a greater good. Ben Barry, Tim Belonax, Laura Prelle, and Dana Steffe had trekked to Birmingham earlier this morning to buy silk-screening materials, while Ellen Sitkin, Wendy Smith, Sagarika Sundaram, and Nate Turner pored over printouts of various other groups' statements. But by the time the group reunites around a picnic table for a family-style spaghetti dinner and some NASCAR-branded Budweisers, the manifesto idea is losing steam. Barry, a recent graduate of the University of North Texas who raised more than $2,000 in donations to fund his trip to Greensboro by selling limited-edition posters, is more blunt than the others. "I didn't come here to write a stupid manifesto," he yells. "I came here to help people!"

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Graphic designers can get too intoxicated by the craft of design.

Two days later, at Project M's studio, a schoolhouse behind the HERO's office, the designers scribble quotes from local residents across massive sheets of white paper. There is a list of people they want to reach with their project ("Influencers: Oprah") and another list of potential projects they could take on to help Greensboro. Project M's team already has a skill; now all they need is a client. After agreeing that it would be best to focus their energy on helping the single most inspiring person they have come across, they know exactly who to call.

Greensboro, Alabama, appears abandoned on a hot summer afternoon.

With her outdoor-adventure wardrobe and can-do attitude, Pam Dorr could easily be mistaken for a Project M participant. In fact, she came to Hale County from San Francisco with the Rural Studio three years ago and never left. As the director of HERO's housing resource center, she counsels hundreds of the poorest people in the county, and is also an advocate for residents' access to clean water. "Families here don't believe that there is help available," she says. "The most important thing I do is bring faith." Dorr's second project, it turns out, was what the team feels needs them most.

Residents will tell you that the man who installed the water system in the 1970s later admitted he was drunk while he did it. The pipes are made of a cheap, low-grade plastic that breaks easily, and contaminants-fertilizer runoff and coliform bacteria, which can indicate the presence of E. coli-creep in through leaks. From time to time, the contamination is so bad that the city issues an order to boil the water before drinking it.

Project M founder John Bielenberg (bottom right) and his students lived and work together off Main Street in Greensboro.

As unreliable as it can be, city water is better than the alternative. One quarter of Hale County's residents are not connected to the municipal water supply, and many have access to the water but can't afford the set-up fees, to say nothing of the bills that will come later. They drink from shallow wells that are almost certainly contaminated by their septic systems. The very poorest families don't even have septic systems and are leaching sewage directly into their own wells.

Dorr says she knows of families whose shallow wells have dried up completely. Right now, during one of the worst droughts in Alabama history, some families have been walking to the nearest gas station to fill up buckets and bottles with water for drinking, cooking, and bathing from the station's overtaxed and possibly tainted well. "It was one of those things Pam [Dorr] mentioned pretty early on in our trip, and we were very surprised by it," says Wendy Smith. "But it seemed like a very complicated issue. How can you really help people who have access but can't afford it? It seemed too much for us to take on."

The front page of Project M's water meter pamphlet

Little more than a cluster of trailers at the end of a red dust road, the town of Mason's Bend has been immortalized in glossy architecture books because of work done there by the Rural Studio. The town's water is almost certainly tainted. Though they have no alternatives to the shallow wells their families have used for generations, the Mason's Bend residents have been told not to drink the water. A few Project M students head out to find out if they do anyway.

Jackie Green welcomes them in. Living off Social Security, she says she receives between $500 and $700 a month to support her family, making it impossible for her to afford to connect to the municipal water supply. Even if she could afford the set-up fee, she might still be priced out of a monthly bill-because Hale County is so rural, the cost of water there is one of the highest in the nation.

The Project M students collate their project by hand.

"We were all united by our shock over the hard truth that in America [clean] water is not a right," says Ellen Sitkin. "That people here living in run-down trailers have large-screen TVs with access to satellite cable, but they don't have clean water." At the office of the city water board, right across the street from Project M's temporary home, the designers discover the missing link: a $23 water meter. With labor and installation, the total cost to bring water to a home in Hale County is $425. This meter-an antique-looking piece of hardware with a huge gauge-becomes the symbol for their message. Everyone we know has a water meter, they think. Oprah, they joke, definitely has one.

And then an idea is born: They will pair striking images they've come across in Hale County with the names of celebrities who no doubt have their own water meters. "We felt it was a more unique approach than just showing pictures of impoverished families or shocking statistics. People tend to tune those out," says Ben Barry. "The juxtaposition of the names with images was to keep people guessing about what all of these people had in common."

Images from the water meter project.

Newsprint, which had intrigued them as a medium since they started, carries the message. "By the time you've read the piece, your hands are dirty," says Smith. "It's not polished, it's not slick, it will get wet and ruined and fall apart. It's raw. If we wanted to create a message about [Hale County], then it had to look like [Hale County]."

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The process has resulted in unique products that merge high design with handicraft.

A flurry of production follows, as they design the newspaper-sized piece and create buyameter.org, where people can buy a water meter for a Hale County resident with one click (After determining a criteria for need, HERO will give credit and budget counseling to those who have demonstrated they can pay for their water bill; They will only get a meter if they do this). Three days later, 2,000 copies of Project M's 24-page piece spin off the Goss Community press and the designers collate them until their hands turn black. They then package shipments to Project M's vast network of alumni, advisers, and "influencers." Indeed, Oprah is among them.

In the final hours before the Project M designers scatter, they silk-screen shirts reading "425" to take with them, to garner a little more interest in the project. But how many meters will it take to know if Project M actually works?

The water meter in question.

"If enough money is raised to help one family buy a meter, the project will be a success," says Dorr. "We can make the change one family at a time."