Celebrating Our Sustainable Action by Enhancing Livability
As the thermometer jumps around between the 50 and 90 degree range, the sky fluctuates between skin frying warmth and dress drenching deluges, our minds begin to transcend our daily experiences and think forward to the summer, planning out all of the expeditions we’ll undertake. It’s at this time of year that SERA puts together our annual Sustainable Action Celebration, to both reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past year, as well as talk about our goals and aspirations for the next. Every year we gather and talk about our sustainable action through a different lens. This year’s lens is Enhancing Livability. As much of the sustainability/green design movement has focused on reducing our impact on the environment, and reducing our use of destructive energy sources, we realized that this movement has also benefited the human experience of the built environment. We thought we would take this year to develop this idea; discuss what it means, how we are doing, and where SERA and the industry can continue to grow.
As part of the celebration, we put together a set of boards to help focus the discussion. Enhancing livability was interpreted multiple ways, these ranged from:
- enhancing human heath through improved indoor environment quality, locating of our buildings to allow alternative methods transportation, focusing on enhancing living spaces
- developing metrics for our relationship to nature, and our relationship to coworkers
- improving our design process for our clients, communities and the environment
- developing processes to learn from our past projects
- volunteering pro-bono design work and actively contributing to our communities
As you can see from the boards below, many of these topics are still in development and have neither easily defined metrics for success nor general public awareness. But it is our goal at SERA to propel this discussion of livability and health forward, to create a sustainable, livable experience of the built environment.
View the boards below, or download the collection as a single PDF (4.6 MB).
Enhancing Human Health:
Relationship to Nature, People:
Integrated Design Process:
Social Sustainability:
Learning from our Projects:
And some more celebration pictures:
