Elemental

What I’ve been reading about:

• Ed Gillespie: Futerra (Inspiring Entrepreneurs) – Ed takes us on a whistlestop tour of Futerra, the ethical fashion (swishing) and low carbon travel.

mel starrs News communication, entrepreneurship, Sustainability

What I’ve been reading about:

• Inderpaul Johar of zer’o zer’o at the RSA – Great video interview with Indy of 3 yo company zer'o zer'o, talking about how zero carbon will only be possible through collective behavioural change. Also how architectural design now has to design around architecture, social models and business models. Innovative thinking!
• The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide – Start-up advice: "We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive."

mel starrs News advice, architects, competitors, entrepreneurship, startup, top_10

What I’ve been reading about:

• Expedition’s blog » The Call of the Wild: Structural engineers and the next 100 years – " I believe that both Glancey and the ACE are fundamentally wrong. We do not need more engineers. We need better engineers. We need quality, not quantity. We need more thinkers, more engineering designers, more people with judgment who can conjure up something magical out of a complex world and get it out there. I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but it is unintelligent to treat engineering simply as a numbers game. Engineering is much more important than that.
  Before asking, “How many engineers do we need?” we are much better to ask “What will they be doing?” To most people in the developed world at least, the dominant uncertainty of the C21st world is not what happens to structural engineers. The dominant uncertainty of our time is Survival on this planet. I challenge you to name a greater cause. In response, engineers must stand up and say “We helped get the world into this mess, and we are going to make it our mission to get it out again”."

mel starrs News blogs, Engineering, engineers, future

What I’ve been reading about:

• Home – The British Cartoon Archive – University of Kent – Fantastic social history resource. Past cartoons from most of the major British newspapers.
• Empire building – What if you built a global design business without a global headquarters? The radical new business model of the 139-year-old Adelaide building design practice Woods Bagot could provide the template on how to go global. – A former architect and academic who joined the firm seven years ago, Donaldson says that his role is not unlike the process of designing a building – every day as managing director he is designing a company. Four years ago, Woods Bagot changed its structure from a firm with 14 board members with shareholdings, to 49 principals with shareholdings.
  The change to this model, which is seen more often in law firms, is clearly working. Business is booming, with turnover tripling in the past year and exports now accounting for more than 50% of revenue.
• Cash the king for struggling property firms – Property Week – Cash generating policies include cutting dividends and asset sales, and some companies have had to renegotiate bank facilities to see them through the worst of the cycle.

mel starrs News AEC, archive, business_models, cartoons, history, humour, illustration, library, politics, recession, research, satire, UK

What I’ve been reading about:

• New Statesman – World saved . . . planet doomed – If trillions of dollars can be spent on propping up the world's banks, why cannot a similar amount be spent on shifting the world on to a greener track? Neither is a charity case: banks will eventually repay their loans and environmental investments, too, will generate a substantial return. (Indeed, US lawmakers seemed to recognise this implicitly when they attached a proviso extending clean energy subsidies to October's $700bn bank bailout.)
  In the past few weeks, green economists and campaigners have noticed the emergence of an unexpected credit-crunch dividend. As Cam eron Hepburn, senior research fellow at Oxford University's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, told me: "The economic crisis softens people up to the scale of the numbers – $700bn doesn't seem impossible any more. In fact, the incremental cost of completely greening the world's energy system is certainly less than that per annum."

mel starrs News climate, crisis, economic, Mark_Lynas

What I’ve been reading about:

• The future is bright (and it’s not greenwashed) | Tom Chance’s website – We need deep transformation on all levels, from the personal to the inter-governmental. But "deep green" messages about transformations in policy, infrastructure, values, even the basic organising principles of our economies are – to be frank – complex, uninspiring and disempowering.
  How can we sell a sustainable future in the most positive, uplifting way without lying about the solutions?
  Deep green solutions like Transition Towns won't ever complete the picture in time. They want us all to fundamentally shift our values and our way of life, and despite their best efforts I can only see a tiny minority of eco-geeks and early adopters getting involved in the next ten years.

mel starrs News greenwash, transition

What I’ve been reading about:

• Germaine Greer on Barratt’s Home for the Future – Germaine redeems herself in my eyes and writes some sense. Well said (although the Italian Renaissance reference was a little high brow for this time of an afternoon).

mel starrs News Germaine, Greer, Housing

What I’ve been reading about:

• NABERS – Home Page – NABERS is a performance-based rating system for existing buildings. NABERS rates a building on the basis of its measured operational impacts on the environment, and provides a simple indication of how well you are managing these environmental impacts compared with your peers and neighbours.
  NABERS now incorporates the Australian Building Greenhouse Rating (ABGR), which has been re-named NABERS Energy for offices.

mel starrs News ABGR, building_rating_system

I hate starting posts with apologies, but here goes. I have a list of posts I want to write and I just don’t have time to write them. Rather than let them sit in my mental inbox until I forget about them, I’m doing a quick update without fleshing out the bones so to speak.

Firstly, I’ve been to some rather excellent events hosted by wise women in London as of late, organised by the anything-but-lazy Polly who blogs over at the Lazy Environmentalist.

The three events have included a talk by Rob Hopkins of Transitions Towns and The Transition Handbook, a talk by Oliver Tickell on Kyoto2 and a fascinating evening on CSP introduced by Katherine Hamnett* and including talks on Desertec from trec UK and an intriguing proposition from Seawater Greenhouses. Polly is also heading up a campaign for Planetary Rights (like I said, anything but lazy!). I urge you to go check out the links and if you’re in London, try to get along to some of the Wise Women events.

Secondly, I’ve been to my first Sponge event. Again, check them out – great to put faces to names and to meet with some old acquaintances and ex-colleagues.

Thirdly, I was at the Sustainability and Economics event Phil blogs about here. Hilarious panel discussion, completely off topic (the phrase “spectrum of evil” was bandied around!). I have some notes and thoughts about the morning and if I ever get a chance I’ll try to blog something.

Finally, there are a few new blogs and twitterers (tweeters? twits?) to check out:

• Guy Battle at Guy’s blog (blog not associated with Battle McCarthy, but rather Planet Positive)
• Derek (a fellow CIBSE member) at Keeping ahead of the Oil Curve
• Su Butcher (twittering) of Barefoot and Gilles architects
• Shari Shapiro twittering and blogging at Green Building Law, who is just back from greenbuild, as are fellow tweeters Preston, Elaine and Pam.

Enjoy!

*I turned to my colleague and said the Katherine Hamnett to be met with a blank face – well, I was impressed and slightly starstruck…

mel starrs Diversions Katharine Hamnett, Kyoto, Oliver Tickell

What I’ve been reading about:

• Not Exactly Rocket Science : The spread of disorder – can graffiti promote littering and theft? – "Through a series of stunning real-world experiments, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen have shown that disorder breeds more disorder. The mere presence of graffiti, for example, can double the number of people who litter and steal…Keiser's idea is that seeing the breakdown of one social norm makes it easier to ignore others, by weakening our general resolve to act appropriately and strengthening our temptations to act in our own self-interest."

mel starrs News