Having missed a train-to-plane connection in Charles De Gaulle airport a couple of weeks ago I found myself with a few hours to spend near Paris. Rather than trudge around the city centre with my baggage I decided to visit Parc La Villette, which is closer to the airport and is a relaxing place to spend a sunny afternoon.

I couldn’t resist trying out the Vélib cycle hire system. The bikes are very different to the Ridgeback Element I normally use for my daily commute and my treasured Brompton I use when I want to go multimodal on the train or plane; so different that I managed to bash my shin on the locking mechanism. It took me awhile to get used to the heaviness and lack of maneuverability, made worse by putting my heavy hand baggage in the bike’s front basket.

Initially I struggled with the registration and credit card procedures, but eventually got the hang of it. I returned the bike to the same stand I hired it from, but I can see the advantage in being able to pick up and drop off at different locations across Paris.

The scheme is experiencing some problems with theft and vandalism, as noted here, but the municipality is taking steps to address these by developing a new version of the bike and is demonstrating its commitment by proposing to extend the scheme further into the suburbs, as described here.

Radical initiatives and projects to improve sustainability are certain to meet varying degrees of resistance from some (or all) sections of society. The hard part in promoting these changes is in deciding early on whether they are worth persevering with or should be abandoned. One of the best guides to making tough decisions is Seth Godin’s The Dip which advocates quitting fast and often as a strategy to avoid dead-ends.

Although The Dip is a lighthearted look at how to get through (or avoid) the hard part in bringing projects to fruition, there are lessons that can be applied to more serious types of project, such as those that will be needed to realise sustainable cities. The Vélib cycle scheme is one that requires pushing through its current dip. In sustainable development we will need lots of innovative projects, many of which will never get past the dip, but that’s okay. It’s alright to be wrong.

The students will be presenting their final work on this British Council funded project tonight, from 6.30 pm in the old NatWest Bank on Bute Street in Cardiff. From what I’ve seen of the activities, it should be an interesting evening.

I took part in the debate organised by the British Council as part of the project on Monday night in the same venue. It was a good discussion about future scenarios for cities in general and Cardiff in particular. Unfortunately, it did descend into a bit of a slanging match between architects and planners towards the end.

Before that, however, one contributor, a young female student from India who had never been outside her own country before, made us acutely aware of two differences in cultural practices that exist between India and the UK: first, she questioned why we use toilet paper instead of washing; and second, she couldn’t understand why water in plastic bottles isn’t banned. We didn’t probe the first point too deeply in the relative amounts of water used, but there was a loud cheer from the audience to accompany the second.

The overwhelming message from the audience seemed to be that we need to reuse and adapt as many existing buildings as we can rather than tear them down and build afresh. The venue itself offered a good example of a building that could serve multiple new purposes, if only someone would invest some time and care in it.

In an earlier post, I argued that the scope of ’sustainability’ extends beyond the dominant concerns of low carbon design and energy conservation and how we need to continuously commit to the core principles of sustainable development rather than allow a shallow linguistic fatigue persuade us to abandon the term, simply because we are tired of it.

This is underlined in the Top 10 Myths about Sustainability published recently in Scientific American, which also dispels the idea that sustainability means lowering our standard of living (Myth 6) and that new technology is always the answer (Myth 8).

These are all interesting correctives, though I would have preferred to see even greater emphasis on social sustainability and the importance of it to achieving widespread human happiness.

Mel Starrs has provided an excellent post on the way in which LEED and BREEAM treat biodiversity. Apparently, there is no common approach to dealing with this aspect of the environment among current assessment tools. The post highlights the main differences between two of the most frequently used methods.

Though the post draws heavily on the recently published UKGBC report, it offers some useful advice on making sure anything other than the smallest projects employs a professional ecologist.

Mark Brinkley has published a useful graph on his blog summarising the output from different types of lighting compared to the power consumption. The graph clearly shows the advances that have been made in developing more efficient forms of lighting than the incandescent bulb. What’s missing of course is any indication of the quality of the light.

One of the main criticisms levelled at compact fluorescents, for example, is that people don’t like the light they produce—the long time taken to reach full brightness is often mentioned. Similarly, the colour rendering properties of LEDs are often criticised because they are so different to incandescent light sources.

Postscript: I was in Cardiff market one day buying a starter for a fluorescent tube fitting when the man in front of me asked the stall holder for one of those “energy bulbs.”

One of my biggest regrets of 2008 was that I didn’t get to the Changing the Change conference held in Turin, last July. Apart from not being able to spend time in that wonderful city, I was disappointed to miss the opportunity to meet all those creative people who were there to talk about design research and sustainability.

The organisers have gone some way towards consoling me by making the entire proceedings available online as a free download. I know it’s not the same as being there, but at least I can read the papers. I’m looking forward to learning about what designers and design researchers of all stripes can do to advance sustainability. I will need to find plenty of time to do so because the PDF document clocks in at 1806 pages.

Sustainable design is as much about designing new ways of meeting people’s needs as it is about designing new buildings. The contributions to this conference offer ample evidence sustainable development requires an open-minded attitude to design that questions conventional disciplinary boundaries. After all, what is there to suggest that the challenges posed by sustainable development would fit neatly into the boxes we have previously constructed to build our professions? The current design professions congealed around societal needs that were current in the 19th century. We face very different challenges now.

My current preoccupation with the role of emotions in shaping people’s interactions with technology is in part driven by John McCarthy’s and Peter Wright’s book, Technology As Experience, which draws on John Dewey’s pragmatism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on aesthetics to highlight the role of emotion in everyday experience. McCarthy’s and Wright’s interests lie mainly in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and on the surface have little connection to sustainable design or architecture. However, if sustainable design is to have any chance of engaging with people and gaining widespread public acceptance it needs to offer experiences that are as attractive as they currently enjoy and so it is important that we as researchers and designers understand how these work.

Existing analyses of interactions between people and technology are derived largely from social theory and tend to neglect the individual. They miss the crucial aesthetic dimension of such interactions which provides openings for emotional involvement and the pleasure and enchantment of using technology. Occupying a low energy building needs to be pleasurable rather than a chore. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen.

It’s great to see the Design Commission for Wales organising this debate about the future of Cardiff. Cardiff is a good place to live and work but, like everywhere in these uncertain times, it has many problems to address and no clear plans about how to do this yet.

I have been invited to be on the panel, but I have to go to a meeting in London earlier in the day, so I hope my train gets back on time. I’m looking forward to it.

By chance, I came across this link to a Mister Glasses video of “What good is your modern architecture if it can’t repair a broken heart?!?”, which provides a fitting epilogue to the previous post. Okay it’s not hilarious, and the acting is more wooden than steel or concrete, but it’s got potential.

A common failing of research in the field of sustainable design (and elsewhere) is that we assume the people who will use buildings either share the same views and values as us, or believe they should change their views and values to align with ours, which we think are so obviously right. When designers conjure up an image of who they are designing for, it probably resembles themselves closely.

This attitude is prevalent in architectural design and perhaps even more so in the technical disciplines addressing environmental sustainability in the built environment. We want occupants and operators of buildings to behave responsibly, according to our definition and to operate the building and its systems in a ‘logical’ manner, along the lines we intend. If we have learned anything from previous limited studies of people’s behaviour in buildings it is that they usually have a good reason for behaving the way they do and it is perfectly ‘logical’ to them.

Another uncomfortable truth is that most decisions are driven by emotion, even for those who claim to be the most rational—they are probably the most emotive because of their strong feelings about ‘rationality.’ Sustainable design, if it is to work, must recognise that the built environment is populated by living people with feelings and emotions and that those play a significant part in their behaviour.