Eva Ng Design

Overview:

Vancouver aimed to be the Greenest City globally by 2020 in 2011, including carbon emissions reduction by 33%. Vancouver failed to do so and had a climate emergency plan in 2019 to:

1. • Reduce carbon pollution from buildings by 50% from 2007 levels; and
2. • Reduce embodied emissions from new construction by 40% from 2018 levels (City of Vancouver, 2020)

Regenerative architecture would:

1. • Creating environments where local flora and fauna can flourish instead of disturbing the natural habitat
2. • Building with carbon sequestering materials instead of those high in embodied carbon
3. • Contributing renewable energy to the grid instead of consuming it
4. • Replenishing local aquifers instead of degrading them
5. • Connecting people with nature instead of disconnecting them

In a group project, we used a systemic approach to understand the systems related to regenerative architecture and how these might be applied in Vancouver to help the city reach its climate emergency targets.

Leadership and experience:

I lead the team by ensuring we are researching related and doable arenas focusing on municipality (our agreed scope) and the end goals of the government's climate emergency plan. I also do design education in educating team members on the purpose of different Systemic Design tools and how to use them per our desk research, learning, and the project's design and collaboration needs, such as hosting collaborative or discussion workshops. I hosted a collaborative workshop with facilitation, but the team's maturity leans toward independent work, duplicating work, and crossing out each other's work. I mitigate them through setting up strategy/direction (ex. we have to look into a particular area of the topic and use the Systemic Design tools in this way and for these purposes) and providing research findings in digestible point-form format to create shared understandings. This is leading with OKRs (key results) instead of project management or employee's success planning.

Condensed Case Study

We explored with desk research on emergences, institutions' influences on actualizing green and or regenerative architectures, economic (funding) and reward structures as barriers or incentives, green and architectural practices including supply chain and building code, and cultures (mindset, tendency, or attitudes) toward climate positive future.

We also looked into the function, structure, process, and purpose of regenerative architecture strategies, policy framework, VanDusen's business model as a regenerative architecture. With all the understanding and time constraints, we settled our system Actors and System Boundary as:

We also explored the issues with causalities:

I joined another project later on, but with my contribution in leading and setting up the groundwork and providing the social system in regenerative practice - how regenerative is also social (ex. urbanization or modernization) and community/neighborhood work. The succeeding work had exhibited at the RSD10 Symposium hosted by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The design process work of a few Systemic Design tools that I lead in this project is also being asked to include in the professor's book:

* another project of mine is also exhibited at RSD10 Symposium: The Future of Work-Life Balance in the Tech Sector

* Full case study includes the research details, influencing forces (Influence Map) and system strutures (Systemigram).