Mwamko Development, Nairobi, Kenya (Consultancy with Commonwealth
Housing Trust, 2012) Designed 26-unit mixed-use community Co-operative on 2-acre plot, using sustainable methods; Residents had been saving for years in an effort to move from Korugocho slum to the East Nairobi site.
Kuvuna Block Homes, Kasagau, Kenya (Consultancy with Malewa Trust, 2012) Designed 4-stage home to be built of ISSBs (interlocking stabilized soil blocks), made from soil excavated on site. Malewa Trust developed methods to produce ISSBs as an alternative to fired clay blocks, as a means of conserving trees in the arid climate.
This essay explores the idea of Perpetual Design, a design paradigm that calls for looped-cycled solutions. A looped-cycled system is one that would absorb its own waste and harness its own energy, thriving on its own consumption and production. This solution would anticipate the life cycle of the system in question and design with the intention that its future life cycles would have no loss of energy from generation to generation. The metabolism of the system would then resemble an engine of nature, allowing the users a symbiotic relationship with both the manufactured environment and the natural world. Designers must enable solutions to continually solve problems, not create them.
One has only to demonstrate an inspired closed-looped design that is easier and more profitable than the current industry standard, and the market will change itself. Designers must internally negotiate a sweet spot between stability and adaptation: retain those attributes which are crucial while providing an abundance of inspired variation in those that are not. There needs to be an evolution to the design process itself.
There exists a fear of innovation; industries are kept alive by the security of their standards. Innovation must be encouraged. Reorganize man-made systems, consider the sinks of production, as well as the flows, on all scales within our interconnected community, and align them with the fecund systems of nature to insure our adaptation and survival. It is time for architects, engineers and designers to match the higher degree of complexity with which nature designs.
