PrintClosing Remarks
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
In the first three weeks of this course, we may think of ourselves as the architect surveying the site. Our goal is to understand the sustainability landscape, its functions, and as much nuance as possible at this point. By closely examining the sustainability landscape as it exists today, we may only begin to find interesting areas and niches upon which to build our initiatives. As we explore sustainability further, participate in discourse and discussion, and examine research techniques, the goal is to provide the tools by which you can identify specific opportunities and placements for the foundations of innovation. From there, we begin to understand, quite literally, the architecture of innovation and how to design.
Recapping, our goals for this lesson are to:
- discern Planet-centric metrics and initiatives within a Corporate Sustainability Report;
- evaluate an organization's approach to Planet issues through the lens of their stated Vision, Mission and Values;
- compare established and emerging environmental standards and initiatives;
- appraise how sustainability may reduce the environmental risk profile of an organization;
- discern "badge proliferation" and marketing from meaningful third-party certifications.
In service of deepening these goals, our case this week is applying our learning through the examination of two leading international outdoor brands, each with its own unique context and approach to sustainability. Again like the architect, our early cases are a type of 'guided design study' so that we may evaluate finished designs to better understand how–and why–they may have been constructed.