Sustainability Defined

©2021 Life Positive Design - Pillars

I was born in Italy with the privilege of being regularly exposed to human-created beauty, layered in details of jewelry and paintings, in delicious food, and urban landscapes. 

Architecture was my natural choice to design beautiful spaces for humanity while expressing creatively the synthesis of function, materials, and form. In 1996 I joined Starbucks and I fell in love with retail brands. Starbucks at Disney Paris was a milestone in my career and their first LEED Platinum certified store: it opened its doors in 2009 and sealed my lifetime commitment to sustainability. 

Sustainability is a powerful word. It grounds humanity to a shared agenda of interconnected possibilities. I like to think of it first and foremost in ethical terms. Two powerful thoughts are guiding our Life Positive Design approach: “create conditions that are conducive to life”*, to all forms of life, in all ecosystems on Earth with the commitment of “being good ancestors” as my dear friend Daniel Kinzer has taught me. Within this ethical framework, endless design solutions and processes can develop, from resilient, to regenerative, ultimately to flourishing when eventually humanity poetically touches the ground lightly. This sustainability brings ethical depth to designs that continue to result from a beautiful synthesis of form, function, materials, and now belonging in place with positivity.

*quoted from the work of Dr. Dayna Baumeister and Janine Benyus, Biomimicry 3.8, and Biomimicry Institute.

Towards Life Positive Design

©2021 LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN - All Rights Reserved

The evolution of design is a history of powerful transformations. The comfort, safety, beauty of human dwellings and shared spaces have housed a multitude of expressions of cultural, economic, geographical, social, and religious significance while responding to ever-evolving human needs and dynamic interactions. The key evolutionary steps of the building design are hereby highlighted in six featured approaches that have developed throughout the course of human history.

TRADITIONAL DESIGN

The buildings of the past emerge from close connectivity with place: geography, ecology, availability of materials, a sense of local beauty, and appreciation of nature in place. Traditional designs effectively protect within climate conditions, integrate with the local ecosystem, and express social and cultural beliefs that identify a community. Artifacts are often crafted by hand, with precious details that are created and masterfully executed using simple tools and readily available materials. The abstraction of natural patterns is found across cultures worldwide as a profound strategy to create beauty. A locally attuned expression of culture, history, social relationships, and traditions creates a sense of belonging, specificity, and place-driven uniqueness. Values are conveyed and shared among the members of the community, with love and care for the surroundings. Traditional designs deliver significance, well-being, and safety, however without achieving the level of convenience and comfort that we have grown accustomed to in ubiquitous buildings.

UBIQUITOUS DESIGN

Design in the industrial era assumes a new, distinctive expression with the advancement of international architecture in the age of the machine. Connections to place weakened: buildings became more or less the same worldwide, construction times compressed, scale and size of projects greatly expanded and so did profits. Materials are shipped and available globally, construction processes and operational protocols are shared across continents. Air conditioning systems, as an example, provide controlled, processed air, further separating the occupants from the outdoors, the local climate events, and often preventing views of the outside: air is pumped into too many windowless spaces. The contemporary and aspirational lifestyle has become homogenous across nations and cultures. In the age of separation from the natural local context and of immediate planetary digital connectivity, occupants feel safe in these buildings, trading local identity for a desired global lifestyle of convenience and sameness. Connection to local culture and traditions are diluted in a global digital era of a shared ideal of comfort, progress, and “cool”. Machines build buildings that work like machines, over-using energy and hyper-wasting resources across the entire life cycle of buildings and cities, which unfortunately age fast, generating further pressure on earth.

RESOURCE-CENTERED DESIGN

The idea of green buildings gained momentum in the past 50 years. The need for a third-party certification entity to validate green performance according to pre-established, clearly defined parameters emerged. In 1993 the USGBC (US Green Building Council) was founded and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, focused on improving building performance and resource use was unveiled shortly after. Additional regional and national standards launched worldwide: Green Star, BREEAM, DGNB, CALGreen, Energy Star, Living Building Challenge (LBC) are some examples. 

LEED prescribes how buildings that work better than traditional ones can be designed, built, and operated. The focus is on using fewer resources - energy, water, materials - than in a traditional building that adheres to existing codes and requirements. Guidance to achieve indoor environmental quality and occupants' comfort is scientifically formulated. Most recently the LBC, brought forward by the International Living Building Institute (ILFI), launched a performance-based approach to green building certification. The LBC establishes clear building goals while allowing designers ample creative opportunities to identify solutions that achieve net-zero or net-positive energy or water, for example. The LBC is a powerful bridge to a renewed human-centered design approach, highlighting occupants' comfort and compellingly aspiring to beauty and happiness.

HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

When speaking about human-centered design, referencing the Design Thinking approach is a must. The attention is on the users, the recipients of a design solution that must work from their perspectives. Design Thinking practitioners understand the user’s needs with great empathy. They value the significance of rapid prototyping as the path to quickly and effectively test a design solution. Feedback loops are key in the process, and they fit well within the iterative nature of the design discipline. A design does not stand on its own: it is created within a system of disciplines working together, and most importantly enters a context of existing co-dependencies and interactions, while transforming it. Design Thinking is human-centered system-thinking in action.

Human well-being and healthy buildings are important emerging topics within the human-centered design. On average, we spend 90% of our life indoors, experiencing environmental amnesia (Peter H. Khan Jr.). A child in the US spends less than one hour a day outside, which is less than a person in prison. WELL International Building Standards launched in 2013 to further define healthy buildings in accordance with more refined technical attributes regarding air, water, light quality, and with the inclusion of compelling design guidance to enhance movement, beauty, nourishment. Occupants’ well-being is a critical area of focus of the LBC as well where comfort, beauty, and happiness are achieved via the clearly defined adoption of Biophilic Design.

NATURE-CENTERED DESIGN

A nature-centered design approach puts nature at the center of design decisions. Biophilic Design and Biomimicry offer two very important perspectives: the first of aesthetic value, with emphasis on how nature looks, feels, and is experienced. The second of functional value, seeking to learn from nature how it works, using that knowledge to create solutions that are by their own definition sustainable.

Clarifying thoughts from the creators of these design disciplines is important. ”Biophilia is the urge to affiliate with other forms of life. It is the rich, natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms." (Edward O. Wilson). “Biophilic design is the deliberate attempt to translate an understanding of the inherent  human affinity to affiliate with natural systems and processes – known as biophilia – into the design of the built environment.” (Stephen Kellert). Biophilic design brings nature into the built environment. Direct Nature, Natural Patterns, Culture and Place, offer 26 attributes to guide biophilic designers to the creation of a unique building that is the aesthetic expression of nature in the place where it exists, of the culture, and the community that it serves. Biophilic designs are specific to their place and spark beneficial emotions, reactions, and sensations of beauty and comfort in occupants and communities alike. Increased productivity, focus, creativity, and swift healing have been observed in occupants of biophilic spaces.

In Biomimicry, “the core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. The conscious emulation of life’s genius is a survival strategy for humanity and a path to a sustainable future. The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.” (Janine Benyus). When I first heard that design solutions must not harm, but “create conditions conducive to life”, I was deeply taken by this biomimicry ethos. Through re-connection with nature, I am learning how nature works. I can then consciously emulate nature’s design lessons in projects that function like nature, embodying the blueprints of life, and enhancing the need to belonging in contexts with specificity. What better definition of sustainability can we think of? 

Biophilia and Biomimicry are invitations to pursue a new and profound relationship of awe, gratitude, curiosity, love, and care of nature. Seeing nature as “other” to emulate, to celebrate, to learn from, to respect might hint at a potential human-nature dichotomy. However the exploration of the human-nature connection undoubtedly brings forward the awareness that we are nature, we are life. Can life then be at the center of all design decisions, and even more importantly do that with positivity? 

LIFE-CENTERED DESIGN 

Designs, by their own existence, carry changes to the context in which they are built. A project pro-jects something new to the world, carrying changes that can either subtract, be neutral, or add positively. A life-centered design approach, by putting life at the center of decisions, pursues positive relationships with mutualism, co-, and inter-dependency, reciprocity among all living species, human and not, within a specific context. I am deeply grateful and inspired by the work of Project Positive where “buildings and cities can contribute to ecosystem services, shifting human impact from negative to positive”. “Nature-based design solutions optimize performance while benefiting people and the planet” with a generous design that “perform as well as an existing local healthy ecosystem” (Project Positive). 

LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN 

LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN emerges as a universal design philosophy that puts the love of nature and the joyful pursuit of human well-being at the center of design decisions. It springboards from six equally important pillars: Humanity, Commerce, Circularity, Nature, Technology, and Art to deliver unique and enriching designs while nourishing the propensity of life to flourish in any specific context. A LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN is artfully communicated, functional, safe, sustainable, and beautiful to create conviviality and foster a meaningful re-connection with the place, the community, and among all living species, human and not. It recognizes that life is relational.

When applied to the retail industry, LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN expresses the uniqueness of a brand as a catalyst for human connections, synthesizing the joy of living within the beauty of nature in place, conveying it with art. This approach to retail is innovative and disruptive, and simultaneously timeless: inspiration from nature and love for all life has always been with us. It is now brought front and center while recognizing that profitability, differentiation, and operational excellence are still at the core. A LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN celebrates the joy of life-encompassing possibilities with beautiful solutions that springboard from and belong within the local, interwoven tapestry of life, while fostering flourishing prosperity that harmonizes with the context, in specificity. Revealing nature’s local significance responds to our longing for significant relationships, and projects us to a meaningful, regenerative, and profitable future of retail.

Let’s re-imagine retail, moving towards a new flourishing prosperity while offering new life-positive experiences!

HUMANITY

Finally, shops and restaurants reopen. How are customers received? How are retail spaces reimagined? 

A  clean and safe space to convene is not a sufficient prerequisite to motivate customers to come back. We seek conviviality: we look forward to reconnecting with each other in deep, meaningful, locally attuned, and community-inspired ways, in spaces that help people embrace a newly found joy of living when gathering in blissful, regenerative surroundings. 

People not only crave togetherness and community, we also seek connection with nature. A LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN creates joyful spaces by bringing the sensations of being in nature into the built environment, reversing the status quo of an outdated built experience that separates humans from nature. We recognize that the expression of a lifestyle in tune with the place, its local culture, and its environmental qualities, can lead to extraordinary designs. It upholds the urge any brand has to be unique and to deliver new significance at the pace with the times we live in. Fresh and colorful art is in tune with materials, geometric patterns, and lights in unexpected and beautiful ways, interacting with all the senses, defining an indoor atmosphere that is a stunning expression of nature and a specific culture.

The emerging positive and conscious HUMANITY is no longer in this world to frantically live a life subject to the divinization of polluting chaos. The random, omnipresent spaces, engulfed by piles of toxic materials, accumulated over the years, cause serious environmental crisis and no longer make sense. HUMANITY requires beautiful and safe environments, full of activities that are integrated into clean communities and cities, where the newly found existential freedom is irrefutably intertwined with the place where we live, find ourselves, and socialize.

A LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN approach offers new narratives of beauty and connectivity, and therefore convivial moments of joy to HUMANITY.

ROI + ROE + ROS

©2021 Life Positive Design

In retail, we gather around discussions that are too often focused on economic models and ROI - Return on Investment. Nothing wrong with that: profitability sure grants brands their right to play. 

I like to describe retail as “the art of being chosen”. For many brands, big and small, local and global, stores have been crucial to attract, connect, and engage customers. Stores thus are vital to delivering the more powerful ROE – Return on Experience. Compelling brand environments, distinctive in-store atmospheres, and brand-appropriate journeys of discoveries drive ROI with ROE.

The question I pose today is: Is ROI + ROE enough to carry retail to the re-flouring prosperity that we need in the post-pandemic Great Reset? 

At LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN we do not think so. We include ROS – Return on Sustainability as we believe that it is now time to create new narratives and futures through a mind-shift change towards new life-positive sustainability blueprints. We advocate for innovative and future experiences that respond to revisited economic models and drive profitability through brand-tailored sustainability practices.

Successful retail brands evolve to thrive. They adapt to changing customer’s interests, which are today increasingly focused on purpose-driven offerings and on positive contributions to communities, environments, and societies. Customers are more than ever before longing for conviviality, togetherness, and joy in spaces where they feel safe, connected to place and nature.

A LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN approach delivers on customers’ new interests with creative sustainability solutions that address simultaneously ROI + ROE + ROS to inform new successful narratives and futures for retail brands. New life-centered designs, products, and services craft a renewed brand reputation that is at the pace with our times, expectations, and aspirations. 

Retail is one of the biggest industries in the world: with a LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN approach, a future of prosperity and conviviality in joyful, re-flourishing civic communities worldwide can be re-imagined.

Do you wish to know more? Visit lifepositivedesign.com and stay tuned for future articles and announcements.

©2021 Flavia Bisi

Water Party, California.

Together in Conviviality. Powerful words for a fresh start and new beginnings in retail and restaurant design.

“The condor glides like drones do to heal the earth. A flight that crosses cities, landscapes, things. There is a mirror of water. There is the center of everything that is not silent, that is alive. Life is all around and within the strong and true rhythm of that flight, color, step, gallop, and in the center, multiple breaths. Around the great blue lake with its fresh and pure flavor, multitudes of backs come from all directions. Different animals. Sincere predators and sincere preys, coming together. The rabbit passes between the hooves of the mouflon who does not crush it while everyone drinks. Donkeys, snakes, horses, goats, mice. Around the water and from up there, from where it can be seen, the scene is filled with life. Denser, more different, a detailed vision of color that moves and pulsates around the center of everything, the life of everyone and for everyone. It is a water festival and they are happy to drink.” (By Alessandra Bisi)

Art is one of the six foundations of LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN. ART builds culture and significance. ART makes a brand unforgettable.

©2021 Alessandra Bisi

Il Calabrone: a pictorial digital work by Alessandra Bisi

Artists make the stories we want to tell visible, holding the power of story-telling that builds culture capacity and brand identity.  Pollination inspires Instagram moments.

While I was reflecting on coffee and nature, my mind traveled to the coffee plantations, the buzz of the pickers, the sound of life. I started to work with shapes, colors, and their relationships, to create a composition that tells a story of pollination.

I am interested in color and the theories that make color the protagonist of visual perception, and even more of nature. I like to go to the "Officina del Colore" in Milan where I find natural colors. The walls are covered with shelves and glass vials filled with powders, liquids, and mixtures, often rare, and with shades and variations of pigments that could satisfy a 16th-century artist. Among these jars, I choose my ingredients. The greens in the background of the hornet are the almost intact descendants of chromium oxide, malachite, verdigris. Browns are earth of yellow, ocher, and shade. I usually bond my colors with linseed or safflower oil, gum, and resin, however, this is a water painting. 

For this piece, I painted the background of coffee flowers and leaves on a textured, handmade paper, using natural pigments and brush strokes. I prepared my colors with interest and fun, in vaguely ritual practice to express a vision and sensation perceived from nature.

My profoundly Italian and traditional art training inspires me to include new pictorial resources and expand my expressive vocabulary. I am fascinated by the possibilities of digital that is not a substitute for painting. It is a different language with new properties. It may not achieve the emotional results of physical glazes, of hand-mixed color shades, or of textures and stratifications. These manual processes cannot be codified by programs because they are humanly unrepeatable, random, and the result of happy, unpredictable inaccuracies. Digital art however offers its own equally noble language filled with new opportunities and variations. I hence use digital art to explore technical attributes that I cannot release with manual painting

For this piece, I let the background dry, and then I acted digitally to insert the main subject : the hornet, our pollinator hero, that is more real than real, more explicit, and perhaps more striking: it is the hyper-realistic digital act of this artistic storytelling. 

This art celebrates nature visually, combining classical and contemporary pictorial beauty.

Biomimicry: our ethical spark!

Biomimicry is a cutting edge, innovative design discipline that springboards from a deep knowledge of how nature functions. Learning from nature broadens designers’ creative horizons with solutions that fit in context to create conditions that are conducive to life. Designs that work as nature does promote a meaningful, ethical relationship of respect for all forms of life, human and non-human. Most importantly, these designs are intrinsically sustainable. 

LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN’s biomimetic approach to retail expresses a brand with a joyful harmony between nature and community, nourishing the propensity of life to flourish in place. Unveiling nature’s genius complements the celebration of human life and projects to a meaningful, sustainable, and profitable future of any retail brand.

Biomimicry Essential Elements

©2013 Biomimicry 3.8 Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, Essential Elements g2

The practice of biomimicry is centered on three elements: ETHOS, RE-CONNECT, EMULATE

ETHOS

Ethos arises from a deep sense of respect, gratitude, and responsibility that humanity feels about the living world. Designers seek solutions that are inspired by nature’s knowledge, mimicking and learning from life in place. These solutions are life positive.

EMULATE

Learning from nature, and not about it, broadens designers’ creative horizons and humanity’s ethical standing. Life has 3.8 billion years of trials and errors, offering a library of powerful tested solutions that can be emulated. These design solutions, translating biological blueprints into technical products, fit positively in the context in which they operate. 

RE-CONNECT

Reconnection with nature happens when our senses are alert, and our minds are open to observe and adsorb nature with awe, curiosity, and respect.  We immerse ourselves in an ecosystem and/or a community and develop newly found relationships. We discover interdependencies and realize how much the richness of life can teach from a functional, creative, emotional, physical, and aesthetic perspective while strengthening a powerful sense of belonging. 

Designs that work like nature fit perfectly into it, and promote a meaningful, ethical relationship of respect for all forms of life, including humans’. This ethical design methodology ensures that the creation of anything new brings positivity for all living and non- living entities existing in one place or community.

BIOMIMICRY is LIFE POSITIVE DESIGN’s powerful ethical spark!