Interview with Mike Lin, by Corina Yen, October 2005

The Green Dorm Project is working to design and build a sustainable dormitory at Stanford University. The goal of the project is to create a residence considering environmental sustainability and to also foster continued education, interest and research into sustainable technologies.

Courses at Stanford over the past two years have generated student research about technologies, ideas and designs for the dorm. After completion, the project plans for the dorm to continue generating interest and research by housing, in addition to living spaces, a laboratory to study building systems technologies and a public education and demonstration space.

The project recently hired EHDD Architects, whose past projects include the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Stanford’s Carnegie Building, to complete a feasibility study. The architects will be utilizing the student research that has been completed and considering their recommendations.

Student interest and initiative have been a driving force in the project. Mike Lin, a master’s student in mechanical engineering, is a student representative of the project. He is also teaching a research class, CEE 124/224 Sustainable Development Studio, where students form small groups and do projects that pertain to the Green Dorm.

Corina: What is the Green Dorm project?

Mike: The Green Dorm is a project that started as an idea in 2003. It began as a hallway conversation between faculty in the civil engineering department who look at buildings and also renewable energy and water systems. And they were all talking and had different classes and thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could bundle all our classes together and run little research projects and build a living laboratory. Then, Dick Luthy, chair of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), was at a meeting of all the department chairs, and the Provost [John Etchemendy] was like “how is that green dorm going?” and at that point it was still in a “just wouldn’t it be cool” phase. That kick started the project to “can we really get this done?”

Gil Masters, an emeritus professor, teaches a class on energy efficient building design and renewable energy technology. He led the first courses that were basically small student projects looking into what kind of energy technologies could we have in this building. Two years ago a green architecture class started, and I took the class in the winter of last year, and that was how I first got involved with the dorm specifically. And the material that the students generated was used by Dick Luthy and Gil Masters to present to the University and that is where they got support, so the materials were pivotal to going to the next stage.

Corina: What are some of the goals of the project?

Mike: We don’t want to say this is a green dorm; we want to say this is the best dorm. Also, the goal is to make it completely reasonable to build. We want it to be a showcase of “this is a really great way to build a dorm.” The challenge is to design a dorm and not a museum. The green dorm should be the most desirable place to live on campus because of its design: location, layout chosen, material used, the community the building fosters, academic environment and research it can support and the actual health of the building.

Corina: What makes this project significant?

Mike: I think it is significant because it is the first strong show of commitment. Also, because it has so many students, faculty and other people in the University involved. This project is showing a lot of foresight by having incorporated all these different groups into the process early on, and I think this is a recipe that should be written down, documented and then spread around that this is how good buildings can be made. It is a fantastic experiment that the University is going to get a lot of benefit out of.

There is lot of academic value coming out of it, the University is going to get a lot of good press out of it, the students are going to get a sweet dorm, an amazing place to live, the greater community is going to get a process out of it that we will hopefully can outline a good way to do decision making and provide a transparent way how to build a building and evaluate which technologies to use and have a discourse about design elements.

Corina: How is the design of the Green Dorm being documented?

Mike: Documentation is taking place on a wiki website. We are still working with architects and consultants to make sure all the stuff they do is transparent. We want to very clearly document their design criteria and their decision making process and want to have listed, the technologies, features and processes considered and basically build a big matrix that shows we considered these things and they cost this much and have this much educational value and this much efficiency. All the student research and recommendations leading up to now is also on the web. It is basically the background for the architects and consultants. Developing a project that is open source and viewable to anyone, what we do here is reaching far beyond the boundaries of the campus.

Corina: How did you become interested in green design?

Mike: I first started getting interested about green design five years ago, when Karin Carter, a Product Design graduate student, gave a talk in Dave Beech’s Good Products, Bad Products class, a class more focused on product perception as opposed to actual features…. Karin came and talked about an additional level of products, paying attention to sustainability. Her particular research looked into plastic bags, how do we eliminate them, for example using reusable canvas, or if we have all of them, what can we do with them.

She was able to weave them into long strands of rope and use them as a dog leash. So you could unravel one bag at a time and pick up dog poop. Green design does not have to be hippy or earth-toned or lower in quality. All of her things had a cool spin on first designing a good product that was appealing and then had value added to it by being a well designed product that had this environmental consideration.

ME 222, Beyond Green Theory, was really my first formal introduction to green design. Slowly all of these different sporadic elements, one book, one lecture, started drawing me to green design, until that class really made it come together.

Corina: What does the term "green design" mean to you? What makes a design green?

Mike: I don’t think green design is particularly special. In my work, I would prefer not to consider it green design, but how design should be done. In some ways, the fact there is a green design course means there is a failure in the curriculum as a whole. There shouldn’t be a course devoted to it because green design is a way of thinking about design and solving problems on a holistic level. When you design a car, the goal is to move people and do it safely and somehow the environmental impact is not considered and also the social impact.

Green design is a way to take into consideration as many things as you can account for. The cool thing is you pick up new considerations as time gone one. It is not static design, it is dynamic design, always taking into consideration the next new design hurdle. At this point in time, the design hurdle is we are buying more and more stuff and have been doing this since the industrial revolution and the problem at hand is we are making more and more garbage. Spawning from that, there are all sorts of technology and methods to address those problems.

Unfortunately the most apparent way to see green design is material choice but that is not the only solution. A t-shirt can be labeled organic because it is made of organic cotton and vegetable dyes, but what about the way it was transported, who made it, the packaging? The question is how well it addresses existing in the entire system. You can call is whole system design, but it needs a new name, it needs some branding. Green design is a working name right now. Sustainability is on its way out because it is being overused and misused. 

Corina:  So there is no such thing as green design, just design with different considerations?

Mike: Eventually the goal would be every designer would be thinking about environmental impact and social considerations. Eventually green design should not exist as a term, it should just be design. That’s why I don’t like saying I study sustainable product design, I am just studying how to make stuff.

There is the question do you want to focus on green design as something different because it is at this point and you can market it best that way. The [Toyota] Prius has done this in an extremely effective way… The commercial and advertising campaigns have been stressing the importance of more miles per gallon but not “save the planet one car at a time.” It has been focusing on selling the environmentalism and not in a hippy-dippy, crunchy-granola sort of way… Compare this to the Honda Civic, which looks just like any other Civic but is a hybrid. In some senses it is too advance, it is at the next step. In this stage of the game, the Prius approach is better because you need to illustrate that this mode of thinking is possible and can be done successfully in order for people to recognize it.

A kind of unconventional approach and playfulness and having appealing and smart design, where the benefits are more than just being a green, but a good product, is how green design is going to be successful and adopted. Making hemp handbags is good, but making bags out of Capri Sun juice boxes or something that has a design element that makes it appealing in that fashion, more than just being sustainable, is better. I think the people working on the Green Dorm recognize that. First and foremost is the goal of making it the most desirable place on campus, and for that reason it is going to be green.

Corina: Considering the various challenges facing sustainability being a ubiquitous consideration in design, which challenge is the largest?

Mike: It is definitely kind of chicken and egg thing. If companies are not asking for it, then the designers won’t do it. But if designers do it and clients aren’t willing to accept it, it won’t happen either. And if clients ask for it but there is no one teaching it than the designers won’t know what to do.

Client, education, designers, it needs to start somewhere. I see the push coming from the designers, designers who get a spark of this question and then go out and seek it. But it is the universities’ responsibility to begin to support this, to start teaching it, and they are to a certain extent but not seriously. And you can see that because I am teaching a green design class and I don’t even have my master’s. Shouldn’t there be someone for them to hire? And to a certain extent, no, there are no professionals in this.

Corina: Can you explain the educational challenge more?

Mike: If students weren’t taught calculus and they go out and are engineers and only have elementary math, they could get pretty close and could guess solutions, but they would not have the benefit of having this tool set. Green design needs to be taught, not necessarily the specific solution like using a hybrid generative system, but the questions that should be asked, and the type of questions so you can ask the new ones when they come up. How we are making these things, what is it made of, who is making it, where is it going to go at the end of the life cycle, what are the impacts, questions central to green design that don’t come up in other design classes.

Corina: Do you see a difference in how you design before and after you began considering sustainability more?

Mike: I continued to use the same things I learned in classes and visual thinking and brainstorming, and they became even more important, because to find solutions to tough questions, you need the traditional design tools…The result of my process is different but the tools I use are the same. Overall the focus is asking more questions and finding those answers. So it is more work, a lot harder to achieve it. And there is no threshold, like if I’ve done all these things then it is a green product. Green design is really intimidating because there are so many things to take into account. With each project I do, it does not get any easier and oftentimes you get extremely discouraged.

Copyright 2005 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.