Impromptu design Future Sustainability
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Brief description
The course aims to confront students with the challenges of sustainability of today and the coming decades and to give them the opportunity to proactively address them through research, analysis and own design of innovations and innovative approaches and to formulate them into coherent scenarios for the built world.
Course Description
The built world has a tremendous impact on the environment. Buildings are considered the largest consumer of material and energy resources, the largest consumer of energy, and the largest producer of waste. As designers of the built environment, we determine the performance and also the future impact of buildings on the environment. Many of these challenges have been known in science and industry for decades. However, it is no longer sufficient to act reactively against the most pressing problems that are already known. The climate and resource crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the availability of water as a resource - to name just a few - have arisen because industry and policymakers have tried to respond too late and only reactively to processes that are already irreversible in some cases. A "next" generation of sustainability and environmental challenges and looming imbalances are already emerging and are being dramatically impacted by the built world, construction activities - and processes.
The goal of this course is to expose students to these challenges now and to give them the opportunity to proactively address them via research, analysis, and their own conceptualization of innovations and innovative solutions, and to synthesize them into coherent scenarios for the built world.
An introductory lecture will introduce students to the most pressing sustainability issues and challenges of today and tomorrow (timeline +50 years). These include critical issues such as climate change, energy demand, and resource efficiency, as well as seminal issues such as mobility, rising sea levels, desertification, and global warming.
In the first part of the course, students will be introduced to the most innovative existing, as well as future-oriented new technologies and methods available for addressing sustainability challenges today and tomorrow. The focus here is not only on technologies that already exist and are ready for deployment but especially on experimental innovations that can be deployed in the coming decades.
In the second part of the course, students will develop their own scenarios for the application of these innovations and methods for addressing sustainability challenges on a case-by-case basis and conduct research on other aspects of sustainability in their context. Possible considerations include materials and buildings, as well as those at the neighbourhood level.
Requirements
This course is intended for students in the master's program.
Language
The course language is German
Location:
The class will take place in hybrid, live in the seminar room of the institute and parallelly on Zoom
Dates:
06.04.2023 – 13:00-15:00 Intro
Regular classes:
13.04.2023 – 13:00-15:00
27.04.2023 – 13:00-15:00
04.05.2023 – 13:00-15:00
18.05.2023 – 13:00-15:00
08.06.2023 – 13:00-15:00
22.06.2023 – 13:00-15:00
13.07.2023 – 13:00-15:00 final group presentations