8 Reasons You Need a Sustainable Designer

About the MA Program

As Director of MCAD’s MA in Sustainable Design, I can’t help but be biased about our amazing program, our incredible faculty, and our fantastic students.  So instead of reading my thoughts on why you might need a Sustainable Designer to help you solve your biggest challenges — as well as help all of us address the biggest challenges facing the earth — consider these quotes:

Too many consider environmental issues to be an obstacle for development. But the conflict between financial growth and ecological sustainability is nothing but a mental construction.
~Carl Folke

Environmental problems are a mis-calibration between human intentions and ecological results — which is to say they are a kind of design failure.
~ David Orr

We’ve yet to invent a device that can do what a blade of grass can do.
~ Thomas Edison (paraphrased)

Puzzles can be solved; they have answers. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries.
~ Gregory F. Treverton

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.
~ Sir Ken Robinson

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try to change the problematic model.  You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Conventional wisdom says you’d better think like a man because it’s a man’s world.  Natural wisdom tells us we’d better think like nature because it’s her world.
~ Lindsay James

So breaking things back down and delivering smartly, elegantly, sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing, everything, all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life, we can start to actually find really innovative solutions.
~ Leyla Acaroglu

 

If you’re interested in finding people who can look at whole systems and life cycles, identify critical factors, re-think paradigms, look to nature for effective and elegant functional strategies, imagine what really good looks like and then help you get there?  Look at our STUDENTS and ALUMNI on the tabs in this blog!

 

[Image courtesy of Marisa04 on Pixabay]