FINAL+PROJECT

=Education for sustainability =

To watch our video go to this link!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234226/Final%20Project%20English%204.%20Sustainable%20Design.avi

If we considered the limitations of the Earth we could say that the reduction of human impact is the most important challenge that current generations and future ones have to face. This means that designers, architects and engineers have to learn how to create waste free buildings, technologies and communities, and also they should learn how to make an intelligent use of natural resources. Nature is always evolving and for this reason all the designs should study its immediate context and must be adapt in it. The designs can be compared with nature if considering them as ecosystems in which there is an output, a treatment of the residues, an use of energy in an efficient way, and there is no waste because everything is recycled. The first step for make this possible is the education; knowledge is power, if there is a right education we should be capable of doing better buildings using less contaminants materials, with better designs for ventilation, insulation, water treatment, recycle systems and so on. Right now in Stockholm, Sweden, there is a program name “The Fun Theory”, it is an initiative that basically says that fun can change people behavior for the best; they modify some things in the city to try to change the way that people act, making basics things, like walking, funnier. “Piano stairs” is one of the projects in which the stair of a subway station were converted into a piano so when people walk thru, every step sounds different, doing that people start to prefer the regular stairs instead of the mechanical ones. This helps because mechanical stairs needs extra energy that the regular ones doesn’t, so if people use the regular ones, they can save some energy there. Another project is the “Deepest bin” that consists in a garbage bin with a movement sensor so when people throw anything it sounds like if something is falling into a very deep hole in the ground. Since this started, people began to pick up garbage of the floor and throw it out into the bin just to make it sound. Also there is a special bottle bank in the city. In this project they make a game out of a bottle bank to recycle glass. The game consists on lights that when turned on, indicate where to put the bottle; the more bottles you put in the correct hole, the more points you get. Now people collect these bottles so they can go to this bank and play a little while. The education for sustainable design is an essential tool for achieving sustainable development, and it is necessary to explore some important areas in the education system like the quality of basic education, the reorientation of education programs to address sustainable design, the development of public awareness and understanding of the situation of global warming, as well as start some trainings of sustainable activities in school, universities and communities. For this sustainable education, every body has to be involved: governments and intergovernmental bodies, mass media, civil society and non governmental organizations, the private sector, formal education institutions. All these sectors can be further divided into sub-groups to allow fuller engagement of a wider range of people. Also it is important to develop partnerships so people can learn from it.

One person cannot repair the entire world by his own, but if we join all the individual contributions we might fix everything we have destroyed.

Mariangela Calatrava Steffi Camatón Ana Capriles