Emphasis on Sustainability
For Benefit Collaboration: Facilitating Cross Sector Partnerships for Shared Value and Collective Impact
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Weiqi Huang, Xue Bai
Many of today’s challenges have grown at a pace and scale too great for one organization to solve on their own. While organizations increasingly recognize the need to create socially responsible economic impact, the resources and infrastructure to support meaningful collaboration is still nascent. With the emergence of benefit corporations and social enterprises, the purpose of a corporation has expanded from delivering values to shareholders, to all of their stakeholders, for the future success of company and community. Organizations can leverage for-benefit status as the engine to collaborate and drive mutually beneficial innovation, and to prepare for a sustainable future. We propose For-Benefit Collaboration (B-CollabTM) framework, which provides training and technology to facilitate cross-sector partnerships for shared value and collective impact. The B-Collab Workshop facilitates a process of exploration, co-creation, and implementation of cross-sector initiatives. The Workshop and a Workbook are framed around the 4D model with useful design tools including team charter, stakeholder map, business canvas and design brief for the co-creation process. The B-Collab NavigatorTM programs help organizations find suitable collaboration counterparts based on their shared values, complementary programs and resources. B-Collab enables collaborating partners to effectively drive innovation, collective impact and competitive advantage at once. It also helps organizations generate visibility by positioning them as leaders within their sector or industry, attract more resources to the work, and connect their customers as well as employees to a larger cause. Most importantly, it helps to justify the use of business resources toward achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Examining Traditional Buildings in Terms of Lifecycle: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Assessment of Diyarbakır Houses View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session S. Müjdem Vural, Gokce Tuna Taygun, Polat Darcin, F. Demet Aykal
The lifecycle of a building is shaped around its interaction with its surroundings. Traditional settlements and buildings produced as a result of public experience are found to respect the environment. On the other hand, many of the buildings produced recently have contributed to environmental problems. Initiatives aiming at reducing the damage caused to the environment have produced many methods to assess buildings. Among these methods, all of which are indicated to have positive and negative aspects, is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system created by USGBC. LEED for Homes 2009 v.3 is specifically created for houses’ impact on its surroundings. This study assesses three traditional Diyarbakır houses, which are indicated as being successful in terms of their relations with their environment and architectural solutions. The houses, which were expected to obtain high scores due to their environment-friendly qualities, nevertheless obtained rather low scores. The reasons for this may be listed as that the existing assessment methods are not suitable for assessing buildings that were built in the past but are still utilised, that the methods do not cover local and regional arrangements that could be considered environmentally important, and that they require certain building products as compulsory. Therefore, it is suggested that a type should be created, which would involve a rearrangement to allow the assessment of old buildings, cover different architectural solutions and assess them at suitable point weights, and question the interaction between the building and its environs under a more holistic approach.
Nature Sounds and Views as an Environmental Design Construct for Better-quality Health Care Experience: Evidence from Empirical Literature and Directions for Future Research
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrick Chukwuemeke Uwajeh, Timothy Onosahwo Iyendo
The hospital physical environment can be a stressful place for both patients and their families, along with health care providers due to the ever-increasing number of technological devices and advanced treatment procedures that trigger physiological and psychological stress, such as annoyance, pain, sleep deprivation, anxiety, and other deleterious mental health-related issues. Subsequently, research on healthcare design and planning through evidence-based design (EBD) concept have highlighted a robust relationship between several environmental design factors and wellness. It is, therefore, imperative to look in-depth into some of these design attributes and their impact on patient and staff health experience. As such, adopting a more holistic design approach that fosters engagement with the natural environment, and incorporates nature sounds and views may help prevent mechanisms of stress ultimately leading to cost-effective solutions for improving the overall healthcare experience. This study explores the role of nature sounds and views and study their impacts from a positive health-related standpoint in healthcare milieus. It also investigates the concept, components, and designs of soundscape and landscape to achieve positive health outcomes. A qualitative research method was employed, and data were retrieved through secondary sources by searching various electronic databases (Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, MEDLINE and Google). The findings suggest that sound and visual environments are beneficial for individuals’ physiological health and psychological well‐being, and therefore should be given explicit attention in planning and design decisions. Future directions into designing with online reality (VR) technologies to maximise treatment options with specific patients groups is also discussed.
Atlantic Wonder: A Platform for Dialogue between Design and Natural Sciences toward a Sustainable Transformation for Madeira Island View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elisa Bertolotti, Valentina Vezzani
Atlantic Wonder summer school was launched in 2018 on Madeira island to reflect upon the relationship between design and nature. Led by a team of design educators from the Design Department of University of Madeira, Atlantic Wonder has attracted different design investigators and professionals to meet in Madeira and dialogue with invited international experts in philosophy, art and design, and with local natural scientists. Madeira island has the potential to be a testbed for regenerative innovations toward sustainable transformations. But questions like “How to be independent from external resources on productive and energetic levels? How to reduce waste? How to shift from mass tourism to ecotourism? How to take action against the climate crisis?” will stay unresolved until the lack of dialogue between the sciences that study and deal with local challenges will be bridged. The scientific and technical information should influence and guide the local political and administrative decisions, as well encourage clear and informed social conversations. Instead, the communication of scientific and technical contents is today too complicated for non-experts to understand. Atlantic Wonder assigns to design the role of mediator and translator among the different disciplines, areas of study, and approaches that concern nature. Design can facilitate the building of a common vocabulary and rethink a set of tools for interpreting and understanding nature, that is accessible to non-experts and policy-makers. The paper describes the results from the 2018 and 2019 editions, the planning of the 2020 one, and design of tools bridging communication with natural sciences.
