Lenses for a Maximum Potential Future

One of several planning protocols, Area • Point • Network utilizes land resources, people resources, and location flow resources (“Area,” “Point,” “Network” resources) as the foundation for community organizing and planning. Area Resources are organized with suitability maps, Point Resources target regional human experience, and Network Resources are measured through four flows: information, currency, energy, materials.

Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (Austin, TX) • City Over A City (Galveston, TX) • Girl Scout Headquarters (Carrizo Springs, TX) • Indigenous building system for the Miskito Indians (Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua) • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Mosquito Larvae to Fish Food System • Solar Water Heater Program (Crystal City, TX) • sPOD Disaster Relief Building System

BaselineGreen uses national data sets and peer-reviewed methods to produce an input-output, life cycle assessment, GIS-based standard for material specifications. Its companion protocol, GreenBalance, advances these principles to affect an input|output balance in projects, ranging from furniture design to large building complexes and eco-industrial planning.

Carbon Balanced Foundation (Austin, TX) • City of Seattle Green Building Program (Seattle, WA) • Greening the Pentagon (Arlington, VA) • Seattle Justice Center (Seattle, WA) • UT-Houston School of Nursing (Houston, TX)

While the limits of Nature’s capacity as a global ecosystem are contemplated, the potential of the human brain sees no boundary. The Conceptual Space Race describes this quandary: will the carrying capacity of Earth be exceeded before we can realize a state of convergence between the biosphere and the noosphere? Our approach recognizes this critical gap and utilizes important brain space-time behavior as well as the human capacity to reinvent the future to resolve it.

City Over A City (Galveston, TX) • Multimodal Transportation System • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco) • sPOD Disaster Relief Building System • Urban Azolla Tower

EcoBalance is a design and planning tool which seeks equilibrium between the human and natural environments by identifying and quantifying key life support systems (Air, Water, Food, Energy, Materials) and Life Cycle Principles (Source, Process, Use, Re-Source). EcoBalance underscores the criticality that a circular economy and life cycle behavior have to green design.

2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon • Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (Austin, TX) • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Peaceable Kingdom Master Plan (Washington-on-the-Brazos, TX) • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco)

Paralleling the thinking behind Ross Ashby’s “Design for a Brain,” Feedback City demonstrates how recognizing feedback loops within a city’s structure and business community can become a model for sustainable urban/rural well-being. This protocol is also represented by the “development ladder” of evolution within the city/region as systems are incorporated from micro (human to human) to macro (satellite) feedback. The diagram for how such a city needs to operate was printed in the 1992 UN’s Earth Summit Award given to the City of Austin and CMPBS recognizing local government environmental initiatives.

City of Austin Green Building Program (Austin, TX) • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco) • sPOD Disaster Relief Building System

Educating for a green world must be both data-rich and participatory. Capitalizing on the pretext that the best way to learn is to play, we promote a protocol for gaming environments of varying scales, employing four primary methods – virtual/real scale simulation, role playing, crowdsourcing, community game boarding – to produce informative results and simulate new conceptual possibilities.

2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon • Camp Fire Kids of Texas Master Plan • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • sPOD Disaster Relief Building System

Four principles across the health spectrum are necessary to cultivate a community of health awareness: fundamental principles of precaution, transparency, disclosure and recognition of chemical hazards, cycles of life. Together, these advance health promotion and disease prevention, and guide designs to support healthy people and healthy communities.

2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon • Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (Austin, TX) • Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas (Austin, TX) • Green Guide for Health Care • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Mosquito Larvae to Fish Food System • Solar Water Heater Program (Crystal City, TX) • Sustainable Healthcare Architecture

The future of green design includes interventions that have global repercussions. Meta Max provides global-scale systems thinking – as illustrated by our entries into the Global Dream Lab, including: constructing a desert city based on saline water; an agrihood based on duckweed as food thus reducing food footprint 35 fold); a prototype coastal campus landscape as salt water treating wetland; a means to rid vector disease by cycling larvae into food chain for humans versus restructuring DNA or using toxic pesticides.

City Over A City (Galveston, TX) • Coal City (Longju, China) • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Living Bridge Proposal for Baltimore Harbor • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco) • Wetland Campus (Baja California, Mexico)

Appropriate and intermediate technologies are critical to global efforts to connect basic, people-oriented life support processes to those in need and to demonstrate how ambitious thinking / simple living can occur worldwide. Mini Max is a protocol for engaging efficiency and integration between human power and nature power to support basic needs and potentials.

2002 UT-Austin Solar Decathlon • Girl Scout Headquarters (Carrizo Springs, TX) • Hill Country Youth Ranch (Ingram, TX) • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Solar Water Heater Program (Crystal City, TX) • Wetland Campus (Baja California, Mexico)

Prototyping is an essential process for researching and advancing replicable models and methods. ProtoScope is a means of organizing how prototypes are conceived. Beginning at a global (“protoMetric”) scale, ProtoScope identifies databases, patterns, partners, and site information to affect a full-scope prototype design process. The following projects, both constructed and ‘on the boards,’ engender a global understanding of their importance. Some of the 26 entries in our Global Dream Lab are based on this protocol lens.

Agrihood: A Future Food Community (Austin, TX) • City Over A City (Galveston, TX) • Coal City (Longju, China) • Floating Reef Town (Belize) • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco) • Wetland Campus (Baja California, Mexico)

Whole building system approaches with constructed prototypes are foundational to advance how buildings are conceived. Our building systems protocols are based on eight low-impact methods: Design with Climate, Design for (dis)Assembly, Design for Manufacturing, Design with Nature, Design for Reuse, Design for Open Building, Embodied Carbon Balance, Evidence-Based Economics.

2002 UT-Austin Solar Decathlon • 2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon • Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (Austin, TX) • Carpenter Residence (Manor, TX) • City Over A City (Galveston, TX) • GreenForms (Austin, TX) • Laredo Demonstration Farm (Laredo, TX) • Living Bridge Proposal for Baltimore Harbor • Peaceable Kingdom Master Plan (Washington-on-the Brazos, TX) • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco)

Sharing information is key to creating a green world. Visible Green is a visualization protocol that exposes articulated (“visible”) green strategies and promotes inferred (“invisible”) green concepts. Visible Green functions at three scales – person, home and community – and through four primary techniques: discovery (through feedback), interpretation (using codification), attraction (via design), and participation (learn by doing).

2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon • Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (Austin, TX) • Girl Scout Headquarters (Carrizo Springs, TX) • Living Bridge Proposal for Baltimore Harbor • Plenitude: A Desert City (Morocco) • Solar Water Heater Program (Crystal City, TX) • sPOD Disaster Relief Building System