The Center is a non-profit education, research, and demonstration organization specializing in life cycle planning and design.
We undertake projects based on their potential contribution to site, regional and global sustainability and human health, and actively pursue collaborations with associate organizations, businesses and professional firms.
Projects emphasize regional contexts as bases for responsible resource use relative to materials, energy, water, waste, food, and meaningful employment.
Maximizing potential is a process.
First, we frame a project into a combination of three categories: 1) prototype 2) protocol 3) policy. Depending on circumstances, one often leads to the next but, most importantly, we try to share our thinking process, a kind of record or pattern language. As a non-profit organization, this is especially important: our intention is to make sure others can duplicate, improve, and hopefully spread what works so that many can benefit from our findings.
Prototypes include a wide range of physical or mental constructs; in fact, we treat our own organization as a kind of prototype.
Protocols test whether a prototype is worth the effort: they are methods of thinking that we use to place some perspective on what a prototype means in societal, ecological and physical terms, and are constantly expanding and being improved upon depending on circumstances. We like to refer to these as “lenses” that help us see as close (direct human performance issues, medium the building or facility) or far (the state or country) from the most basic human physical capacity, to how the mind functions both collectively, and sometimes at a country scale.
And Policies create the platform to extend the benefits to all and, in some ways, marks the ultimate measure of success.
