I have been meaning to cover this topic for some time now. In my opinion, an exploration of the role of advanced infrastructure in sustainable design is both relevant and long overdue. Certainly, technology has changed the way we live, do business and think about the world. However, whether technology can also be leveraged to create a more sustainable society is an entirely different question. Many people, for example, might argue that we need to simplify our lives to make them more sustainable. I think this is largely true. However, I also believe strongly that we need better ways of measuring exactly how sustainable

our current practices are, so that we can tell if (and when) we need to improve or change these practices. Likewise, we need to be able to accurately measure sustainability over the lifetime of new policies, processes and products. In general, these concepts all ties back into the idea of advanced infrastructure. If you need a refresher on the topic, I wrote another post a few months back entitled Introducing the Advanced-Infrastructure Toolbox.

Before we can fully discuss the role of technology in sustainable design, it may be helpful to first define sustainability and sustainable design in terms of this discussion, and also to identify some of the specific sustainability challenges that we face today.

A Brief Overview of Sustainability and Sustainable Design

In theory, sustainability is an easy concept. To be sustainable, a system must simply find a balance of resources, so that the system’s processes or states may be continued indefinitely over time. Over the past few years, in particular, increased awareness of sustainability principles has given rise to an entirely new sub-discipline of design, known as sustainable design. The diagram below introduces the concept of the Three Spheres of Sustainability - a guiding principle of sustainable design. As the diagram illustrates, sustainability of a system is achieved when the three essential aspects of responsible design - economic, social and environmental - are adequately balanced with one another. To achieve this balance, the designer must be equally sensitive to social-environmental, environmental-economic, and economic-social issues, and must be willing and able to address difficult concerns, such as natural resource stewardship, energy efficiency, business ethics and worker’s rights.

As most designers will tell you, sustainability is easier discussed than achieved. For example, conventional design practices tend to put too much emphasis on the economic aspects of design, with too little focus placed on social and environmental concerns. Likewise, traditional social and environmental initiatives often fail to address long-term economic impacts, including the effects on businesses and the availability of future funding sources. In both cases, such efforts are inherently unsustainable.

Our Growing Sustainability Challenges

As always, our society and individual perspectives are defined by the challenges and opportunities which lie before us. Among the challenges we face today, a significant number can be considered engineering, architecture, urban planning, environmental and infrastructure-related problems. These include the following:

• Our civil infrastructure including drinking water, sanitary sewer, electricity, natural gas, and transportation systems - is forever aging and deteriorating. Much of it is already near or past the end of its service life, and yet the resources available to deal with these problems are limited, and often deficient for the task at hand.
• Particularly in urban areas around the world, populations are quickly outpacing our ability to maintain and expand the infrastructure needed to meet the demand. This fact applies not only to civil infrastructure, but to other economic, social and environmental systems on which we depend or value, including agriculture and food production, healthcare, and healthy natural ecosystems.
• Many of our industrial practices and standards, as well as our consumer habits, have a detrimental effect on our health and the environment. The practices have proven difficult to change, despite their potential to cause global warming, pollution and wasteful use of our limited resources.

These problems ultimately affect us all, and many experts believe that we face a serious global sustainability crisis, unless action is taken. Within the last few years, sustainability and sustainable design have emerged as hot topics to address this growing problem not because they represent silver bullets to solve the problem, but because they represent a common-sense paradigm-shift in thinking.

Green Design is NOT Sustainable Design - It is a Toolset

Peter Nicholson, Executive Director of Foresight Design Initiative Inc., wrote an interesting article in 2005 called Green Design vs. Sustainable Design. In this article, Nicholson wisely points out that, contrary to popular belief, green design is not simply another word for sustainable design. Rather, green design is just one of the many toolsets available to designers to help achieve sustainability.

Consider a green roof, for example. Installing a green roof on a commercial office building may, in fact, be LESS sustainable than a conventional membrane roof, unless a number of other criteria are met:

• A maintenance plan must be established to ensure that weeding, fertilizing, periodic inspection and repair are provided.
• Adequate staffing, training and funding must be provided over the long term, in order to execute the maintenance plan. These are policy-related decisions which address both the social and economic aspects of sustainable design.
• There should be some way of measuring the energy savings, water conservation or similar benefits that the green roof provides. This data is critical to providing decision-makers with the ability to evaluate the short- and long-term economic benefits, establish budgeting requirements and to ultimately decide when the roof should be replaced, for the maximum economic, social and environmental benefits.

As the green roof example illustrates, sustainability is both complex and difficult to achieve. It should not be confused with green design - which is just a toolset. With that understanding, we can finally talk about another toolset that can help us attain sustainable design - Advanced Infrastructure.

Advanced Infrastructure - The Other Sustainability Toolset

In the example above, we demonstrate how a green roof may not actually be sustainable without a maintenance plan, the available staffing and funding, and the ability to measure whether the roof is actually achieving its sustainability goals. The first two considerations are policy-related decisions that most public works departments or facility managers would readily agree with. The third consideration, however, is a much more difficult sell. After all, the benefits of installing sensors, controls and other instrumentation on a roof to monitor temperature, heat flux, storm runoff, and air quality are not intuitive and represent a significant capital investment. I would argue, however, that we cannot reasonably evaluate the performance and benefits of a green roof system, without first collecting, storing and analyzing data collected about the system. We can certainly build such a roof without these advanced infrastructure features. However, without long-term performance data, we have little way of knowing if the roof is, in fact, sustainable.

For this and related reasons, I consider advanced infrastructure to be a critical toolset for achieving sustainability - not yet as popular as green design, but equally as important and with tremendous growth potential. Consider the following:

• Over the next 5-10 years, the cost and size of wireless sensors is projected to decrease significantly, while their performance and capabilities are predicted to improve.
• Similarly, recent advances in cloud computing, online and solid-state data storage, data standardization and search capabilities mean that decision-makers have access to more data than ever before. This trend will undoubtedly continue.
• Advances in GIS, Google Earth and other similar tools has provided us with an unprecedented ability to map our data and better understand the interdependencies of data that is related spatially. Similarly, Building Information Models (BIM) provide us with specialize data management tools for better understanding spatial relationships within our data, specifically within the confines of a building.
• Not only has our ability to collect, organize and retrieve data improved significantly over the past decade, our ability to analyze such data has advanced tremendously. Machine learning and data mining research has provided us with more powerful statistical analysis capabilities, optimization and pattern recognition algorithms, simulations and visualization techniques, knowledge-based systems, and decision support tools.

Given these exciting developments in our ability to collect, manage and analyze data, it is easy to envision a future in which decision-makers are empowered with not only data, but real knowledge and wisdom about the real-time performance and continuous state of our infrastructure and facilities. It is a compelling future that will undoubtedly bring us closer to sustainability as a society, if realized to its full potential. At the same time, however, such a scenario ultimately depends on the willingness of policy-makers, designers and the community-at-large to embrace these advanced infrastructure techniques, and continue to collect, organize and inter-connect this critical data.

Towards Better Sustainability Benchmarks, Indicators, Auditing and Reporting

As illustrated above, advanced infrastructure technologies can provide the data and knowledge needed to make critical decision, manage risk more effectively, and ultimately work towards sustainable goals. However, advanced infrastructure plays one final important role in helping to create a sustainable society. Advanced infrastructure technologies allow us to continually refine and establish better metrics for sustainability, as well as help to promote accountability among stakeholders. Sustainability today is measured using a variety of indicators, benchmarks, audits, indexes, accounting and reporting systems, which can be applied on all scales from global to local. Some of these metrics, particularly the environmental ones, are already based on quantitative measurements. These include the Air Quality Index, the Environmental Vulnerability Index, and various resource-related indexes. Other metrics such as the Corruption Perception Index, the Education Index, the Happy Planet Index - are more socio-economic, in nature, and are often based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative measurements. Regardless of the type of metric used to measure sustainability, they are all based on some sort of quantitative measurements, and data analysis techniques. And, while these metrics make up the generally accepted standards for sustainability today, they tend to present a relatively coarse-grained view of the world. In other words, they help us gain a global or regional measurement of our sustainability, but do little to help us understand our sustainability, from a more local perspective. Advanced infrastructure promises to change all of that. Perhaps, in the future, it will be possible to obtain a measure of the sustainability of your neighborhood, your street, your property, or even within individual rooms of your house - rather than of just your city or state. Such a paradigm shift begs the question: "How sustainable is your lifestyle? When one considers how this question relates to individual accountability and self-reflection, this becomes a very different and far more poignant question than just asking "How sustainable is our society?"