Environmental design

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Environmental design is the process of addressing surrounding environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products. Classical prudent design may have always considered environmental factors; however, the environmental movement beginning in the 1960s has made the concept more explicit.

Environmental Design has been defined: "We live in the world by design. Creating the everyday environment in which we live involves complex systems of cultural meaning, visual communication and the use of tools, technology and materials. As a field of study, Environmental design encompasses the built, natural, and human environments and focuses on fashioning physical and social interventions informed by human behavior and environmental processes. Design asks us to find answers to the most fundamental of human questions: how should we live in the world and what should inform our actions? This complex endeavor requires an interdisciplinary approach."^{[citation needed]}

Environmental design in the old-fashioned sense develops physical environments, both interior and exterior, to meet one or more aesthetic or day-to-day functional needs, or to create a specific sort of experience - the focus being the human-designed environment. Environmental design includes such specialties as architects, acoustical scientists, engineers, environmental scientists, landscape architects, urban planning, interior designers, lighting designers, and exhibition designers. In many situations, historic preservation can be added to this list. Another recent addition to this general area might be "disability rights movement disability access".

In terms of a larger scope, environmental design has implications for the industrial design of products: innovative automobiles, wind-electricity generators, solar-electric equipment, and other kinds of equipment could serve as examples.

[edit] Examples

Examples of the environmental design process include use of roadway noise computer models in design of noise barriers and use of roadway air dispersion models in analyzing and designing urban highways. Designers consciously working within this more recent framework of philosophy and practice seek a blending of nature and technology, regarding ecology as the basis for design. Some believe that strategies of conservation, stewardship, and regeneration can be applied at all levels of scale from the individual building to the community, with benefit to the human individual and local and planetary ecosystems.

Specific examples of large scale environmental design projects include:

Boston Transportation Planning Review
BART|Bay Area Rapid Transit System Daly City Turnback project and airport extension.
Metropolitan Portland, Oregon light rail system

[edit] History

Early roots began in the late 19th Century with writer/designer William Morris, who rejected the use of industrialized materials and processes in wallpaper, fabrics and books his studio produced. He and others, such as John Ruskin felt that the industrial revolution would lead to harm done to nature and workers.

The narrative of Phil Cousineau's documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future asserts that in the decades after World War II, "The world was forced to confront the dark shadow of science and industry." From the middle of the twentieth century, thinkers like Buckminster Fuller have acted as catalysts for a broadening and deepening of the concerns of environmental designers. Nowadays, energy efficiency, appropriate technology, organic horticulture or organic agriculture, land restoration, community design, and ecologically sustainable energy and waste systems are recognized considerations or options and may each find application.