5/26 Reflection

While I think conserving before we load is the best way to tackle our problems of energy/water efficiency, the conservation must go back even further than turning off lights or shutting off the water while brushing our teeth. After seeing the short video clip today and remembering discussions from past material and lectures, the specific designs of our homes are the root of the problems. Where, direction, size, layout, and function are the core aspects in my opinion. Building smaller, fully utilized spaces in solar-friendly areas solves many of the problems with efficiency before they even have a chance to occur. If we don't have 15x15 dining and living rooms that see minimal use, we wouldn't have to heat and cool, decorate, and maintain them in the first place and would decrease the overall footprint of our indoor spaces. From there, we could design with ideas in mind of only using energy where absolutely necessary, similar to how the BIF building only heated and illuminated areas that humans occupied. That is brilliant in my opinion and has the potential to make a huge difference in energy efficiency. Loading on living machines, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. seem to be further down the road, but would be the ideal next steps after we start designing our indoor spaces conducive to sustainability from the ground up.

The main and probably most inevitable problem of indoor efficiency, is that we already have millions of spaces that were not designed with the slightest sustainability in mind. The repercussions of starting over would not only be non-ideal for occupants and astronomically costly, but wasteful in the first place considering the existing materials and embodied energy. Also, most people do not realize that their urban sprawl result of a home could be so much more sustainable inside and out, and in turn more energy/water efficient.

My thoughts have changed to wonder what we can do given the current status of our existing indoor designs and/or apply to new construction, renovation, etc. Seeing how drastically indoor spaces can be altered, granted it will be costly, we can do a lot with our current indoor design to incorporate energy efficiency. Not only can we do small things like use LED lights, water aerators, and use less energy that was pre-existing knowledge to me, but we can alter our space slightly so that it automatically consumers less water and energy without our input or continued effort. This is the kind of design we must start to look at, because regardless of how much less aerators and LED's use, they can only do so much

Rather than a question, I would like to see "outside the box" examples of subtle or large, free or expensive, alterations to indoor design that make the space extremely more efficient. These may be in the form of living machine types or energy generation, but it just seems like short of new construction, there are few examples of what can be done with a modern, existing space like the home I live in now.