Creative Agency and the Space Race of the 21st Century: Towards a Museum of Natural Futures
Reimagining and redesigning our relationship to natural systems to improve human and environmental health, increase biodiversity, build soil, and improve air and water quality is the Space Race of the 21st Century; i.e. the most complex systems design challenge we face, and one that current and emerging interactive technologies provide the opportunity to address. This assertion is intended to reframe the discourse of contemporary environmentalism in terms of creative agency that transcend market and regulatory incentives and disambiguates from "sustainability" which in research universities internationally seem to have been institutionalized as non academic* The second, but most novel and critical assertion, is that we can design infrastructure, and specifically the built environment, data, energy, food, waste and distribution systems to IMPROVE human and environmental health, rather than lessening negative effects in efforts to reduce energy use, food miles, waste, emissions, greenhouse gasses or more conventional maintenance and labor costs. For instance, (1) the ELEVATORxPITCH project upgrades the sky line defining vertical transportation to create both cultural venue that produces views, and transforms this electric vehicle infrastructure into a building's power plant. Simultaneously the combination of sensor actuated venting and fire code upgrade can create cross season passive air circulation that removes the need for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems (typically approx. 40% of the energy use in cities is building related and most of this: HVACs)
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems