Sustainable Spaces
Banking Energy Savings: New Models for Educational and Workforce Training Opportunities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristin Hughes
Latham Street Commons (LSC) is a place where the community creates models for economic development by using the built environment and its relationship with the community. LSC focuses its efforts on five main areas: underrepresented communities that experience economic disparity, climate and energy, human health, and the development of urban farming ecosystems. Across these five areas, a strategic approach to engaging communities in designing and implementing practical solutions is a hallmark of the organization’s work. Our first social enterprise within LSC is called the Night Owl Bakers (NOB). The concept behind NOB came out of research showing that underrepresented communities in Pittsburgh, PA experience greater degrees of disparity due to structural barriers between them and economic opportunities. Our goal is to offer novel learning conditions where young adults—often left at the margins of educational/workforce training opportunities— can develop self-confidence, while learning 21st century skills. Key to our revenue model is selling bread and baked goods. Our oven will run off a combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) system which will allow us to sell bread at market-value while “banking” energy savings to share with participants and reinvest back into programming.
Located Making Principles and Practices : A Guide for Applying Design for Sustainability in Small Maker Enterprises
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stuart Walker, Martyn Evans, Louise Mullagh
This paper presents findings from a UK Research Council funded project entitled Living Design: The effective use of design for sustainability in maker enterprises. The project examines enterprises that, for various reasons, are deeply rooted in the place and culture in which they operate. These kinds of long-established practices often sustain important traditions but, today, they are in severe decline all over the world. This decline is occurring at the very time that there is renewed interest in such practices, which are associated with heritage, provenance, authenticity, and cultural identity. For example, UNESCO established its international convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, in the UK the Heritage Crafts Association (HCA) was established in 2010, London’s New Craftsmen gallery was opened in 2012, Hole and Corner magazine for heritage crafts was launched in 2013, and the Radcliffe Red List of Endangered Crafts was published in 2017. The paper presents a Guide for Applying Design for Sustainability in Small Maker Enterprises, which aims to a) identify factors that may help – or hinder – such enterprises in their longer term sustainability; b) identify areas where design can make a constructive contribution towards ensuring enterprise resilience commensurate with design for sustainability; and c) determine strategic steps for implementing design-led innovations. This guide will be of use to researchers, regional enterprise and policy developers, makers and associations such as the HCA, third sector organizations such as UNESCO and all those involved in cultural sustainability, cultural tourism, and heritage development.
Organisational Value Creation: A Critical Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Louise van Dyk
Organisations have long been sites of everyday congregation entrenched in society, but corporations in South Africa are more often sites of colonization than spaces of lived value. In this paper, I explore value creation as framed in corporate literature, and critically contextualize for whom and for what purpose of the pursuit for value maximisation as a manifestation, appropriation, and reproduction of managerial dominance. As a hopeful departure from the managerialist epistemology, I search for practices and narratives of value creation in non-corporate organisations in South Africa that could shape a more democratic, reciprocal, and less disastrous creation of meaning, identity, and experience of organisational value.
