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Creative Agency and the Space Race of the 21st Century: Towards a Museum of Natural Futures

Published:04 June 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

Reimagining and redesigning our relationship to natural systems to improve human and environmental health, increase biodiversity, build soil, and improve air and water quality is the Space Race of the 21st Century; i.e. the most complex systems design challenge we face, and one that current and emerging interactive technologies provide the opportunity to address. This assertion is intended to reframe the discourse of contemporary environmentalism in terms of creative agency that transcend market and regulatory incentives and disambiguates from "sustainability" which in research universities internationally seem to have been institutionalized as non-academic*. The second, but most novel and critical assertion, is that we can design infrastructure, and specifically the built environment, data, energy, food, waste and distribution systems to IMPROVE human and environmental health, rather than lessening negative effects in efforts to reduce energy use, food miles, waste, emissions, greenhouse gasses or more conventional maintenance and labor costs. For instance, (1) the ELEVATORxPITCH project upgrades the sky-line-defining vertical transportation to create both cultural venue that produces views, and transforms this electric vehicle infrastructure into a building's power plant. Simultaneously the combination of sensor-actuated venting and fire-code upgrade can create cross-season passive air circulation that removes the need for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems (typically approx. 40% of the energy use in cities is building related and most of this: HVACs).

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  1. Creative Agency and the Space Race of the 21st Century: Towards a Museum of Natural Futures

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      DIS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
      June 2016
      1374 pages
      ISBN:9781450340311
      DOI:10.1145/2901790

      Copyright © 2016 Owner/Author

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 4 June 2016

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      DIS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate107of418submissions,26%Overall Acceptance Rate1,158of4,684submissions,25%

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