CELEBRATE EARTH DAY! Science-Based Approach for Selecting Green Products

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

I am following up on Scott's post last week about Sustainability to let other museum professionals and designers know about new online software called BEES that helps you select green products. I'm asked all the time if there is a 'certified' green products list and the truth is, there is none. There are lots of different lists and standards, as well as just plain old marketing claims. But this software tool, developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology can help.

Years ago, one of our first clients was the California Energy Commission who first told us about the BEES software. At the time, it was in Beta testing and only for Windows users. It was not user friendly at all. Now, this version is for Mac platforms too and it's FREE!

BEES uses a science-based approach to evaluate environmentally-preferred building products including performance data and cost factors. It uses a life-cycle assessment approach and all stages are analyzed: raw material acquisition, manufacture, transportation, installation, use, and recycling and waste management.

Economic performance is measured using ASTM http://www.astm.org/ standard life-cycle cost method, which covers initial investment, replacement, operation, maintenance and repair, and disposal. The software then combines environmental and economic performance into an overall score. Here is the link to BEES software http://www.nist.gov/el/economics/BEESSoftware.cfm

So the next time you are evaluating so-called 'green products' for your museum project, you might want to check this out. ENJOY THE EARTH EVERY DAY!

More about Green Design in Tempe

By Scott Moulton, LEED® AP

[This is a follow up on a previous post on Tempe Historical Museum.]

Beyond the material specifications, another key sustainable strategy we used for Tempe Historical was to design a system for displaying artifacts and telling stories that was easily reconfigurable. The limitations of a single purpose exhibit often lead to a short life span and staff being constrained by whatever assumptions the designers were working with.

For this client we came up a modular design let the museum re theme their exhibits and adapt over time. One design is a system of platforms that support interchangeable graphic stands, artifact displays, and flip books which include visitor's stories. The platforms ties all the modular parts together into a cohesive exhibit and become an organizing element for the museum.

One challenge for this modular approach is creating the appropriate level of interchangeability. A system can become burdened by it's own flexability at a certain point taking on too many features that may never be used. For Tempe we worked hard to insure they had a framework to support the change but the primary goal was to present the artifacts and local history in a compelling way.

Green Fridays: Building Supplies

Maeryta Medrano just sent me this link to Green Depot. Think the 'Home Depot' of green building:

"Green Depot is a leading supplier of environmentally friendly and sustainable building products, services and home solutions. Our primary goal is to facilitate green living and building in communities so that it is easy, affordable and gratifying."

They offer solutions that could be applied to any built environment- commercial or residential. I really like their "primary" goal. Sounds museum-y.

Museum + LEED Friday: a better green?

Hi, Scott posting... I'm looking for a better way to describe "green design" specifically for museum exhibits. My problem with "green" is in part due to the way it seems to be flung around with such recklessly abandon. It is a adjective, it is a verb, it will make all your dreams come true. It has become a loose buzz word to describe something that I think could benefit from some specificity. "Sustainable Design" is a great description because it actually means something - to design objects and environments that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs. (this is my attempt to paraphrase a slightly convoluted wikipedia definition) One of the greatest powers of this concept is the way it is applicable to divergent industries and disciplines. Architects, economists and biologists now have a shared set of values and language which is going to be critical in creating the type of change we need. The only shortcoming I have with "Sustainable Design" its that is tends to focus on what is being designed and it's environmental impact and ignores the way it will be experienced. Museum exhibit design is especially powerful because it includes both the visitor's experience and the object or environment. "Environmental Design" may come closer to describing this approach that includes what we design, how it is experienced, and our impact on nature. In my version of "Environmental Design" I am going to let the word environment slide in scale from the immediate all the way out to the global environment. The experience of our immediate environment is a complex overlap of our senses, culture, previous experience, and context. As exhibit designers, we work with these factors to try to create rich experiences. If you slide out in scale, the environment becomes the social space of a museum. Within this environment, the designer can be working with the factors that shape your immediate environment as well as social patterns and group dynamics to create the social experiences that distinguish a trip to the museum from something you can do at home. Finally, a designer is working in and impacting things at the scale of the natural environment. At this scale a designer has a personal impact by designing sustainably as well as a secondary impact when you consider the ways that museums provide experiences that can lead to insights that can lead to changes. This brings content into the conversation and connects back to the immediate environment of the visitor's experience. In this model the visitor's experience and sustainable design are driven by the same objectives: putting people at the center, focusing on their experience and making decisions mutually beneficial to them, the social environment, and the broader natural environment. Now to tell you the truth, "Environmental Design" doesn't work very well to describe all that. While it is helpful that I am able to distort "environment" to fit my meaning, it also means the word lacks the clarity needed. And "Environmental Design" does nothing to conjure the convoluted thought path I just went down. Do you have a good alternative to "green"? Or even a good defense of it? I'd love to hear all about it.

Gyroscope staff achieves LEED accreditation

Congratulations to Principal Maeryta Medrano and Designer Scott Moulton on our staff! They recently passed their LEED Professional Accreditation exam. This is the culmination of many late nights and long weekends of study. What is it? Read on from the USGBC/GBCI:

"LEED Accredited Professionals (LEED APs) are building industry professionals who have demonstrated a thorough understanding of green building and the LEED® Green Building Rating System™. The LEED AP credential indicates that the professional has the knowledge and skills to facilitate the LEED certification process."

What does this mean for you? If you are working on a museum project and are looking to achieve LEED credits, we'll be able to provide in-depth info and resources on green building as it applies to musuems. We'll continue to post relevant info here on a weekly basis. We'll also continue to focus on current thinking and experiementation in the area of museums, the visitor experience, and planning. A lot to look forward to in 2009.

Happy Birthday, Green Building Council

Ok, Ok, this isn't my finest photoshop effort- I'm under a deadline. Just didn't want to let this pass without a post. The USGBC recently turned 15. I'm beginning to believe that this may not just be a fad. In honor of their accomplishments, the USGBC posted a series of 8 short documentaries on YouTube. What was of particular interest was the letter from S. Rick Fedrizzi, CEO. It talked about the founding of the Council, which struck me to be a lot like getting a new museum off the ground:

"I also wanted to take a moment to share my own story of how I became a green builder. Back in 1991..." [he goes on to talk about first jobs in this area, working for Clinton's White House, learning from the Godfathers of Green: Hawken, Lovins, Browning, and Picard] "...It wasn't very long before I got a cold call from a guy named David Gottfried who wanted to talk about this idea he had for a green building council. When he said it could change the world. I thought he was crazy. But I was already hooked, and so agreed to be USGBC's Founding Chairman. We were little and struggling for the first seven years, and there were many times when we weren't sure we'd make it. But David was right. We can change the world. And here we are proving it each and every day."

Seven years of struggling. Wow- but they are doing well, and it's taking hold- in our industry and others. Thank you, USGBC, and good luck.

Museums Now: Museum + LEED Friday: making sense of certifications [Part 2]

[Hi, Scott posting again] To follow up on the material certification topic I started last week, this week I will be talking about Cradle to Cradle certification. "Cradle to Cradle" is a term coined by William Mcdonough and Michael Braungart to describe a pretty radical way of thinking about the life cycle of a product. Cradle to Cradle is about creating products that are designed for closed loop systems that create value and are healthy and safe. Often as a product moves through it's life cycle it goes through a dramatic degradation process and it's value becomes trapped in useless waste or worse yet it harms other natural systems as it is used. The bigger goal here is to design products that beneficial when they are used. He makes the point that growth in nature or a child is a good thing and so why can't growth related to development also be positive? This thinking turns the minimizing approach of sustainability it's head says that consuming product should play a positive role in our environment and society. The funny thing is that while this will require a radical reworking of the way we think about making and using products, it allows our consumptive urges to continue to run wild. For me, this is both the most promising aspect and the biggest danger. Our consumptive desire has been a tough one to shake (if not impossible) and while the bright future of good products sound great, in the short term we will have to do less. Anyway William McDonough along with Michael Braungart have written a really good book covering this approach and have followed that up with a certification program that evaluated products against their criteria. Mc Donough's website has videos and writings that are worth spending some time on. One interesting development with the LEED certification is that the next version (New Construction V2009) it will contain life cycle assessment as part of it's criteria. I will be interested to see if they start embracing ideas similar to Cradle to Cradle and then I wonder how such a potentially wide reaching idea will impact their other criteria.

Museum + LEED Friday: making sense of certifications [Part 1]

[Hi Scott Moulton posting.] With all the focus on "green materials" I thought it would be useful to talk about a few of the certifications that relate to materials . I'll start this week with certification for wood. Ok first I'd like to make a pitch for solid wood. It is a beautiful, durable, natural material that can be sustainably produced and will biodegrade. After building furniture with it for about 10 years I am still totally enamored with solid wood. (plywood is another matter) So if you are like me and want to use wood and wood that is sustainably forested you will be seeing the logos of FSC and SCS and trying to make sense out of what they mean. The Forest Stewardship Council is an independent, non-governmental, not for profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. They are the ones who set the most widely accepted standard as to what it means to call something sustainably forested. They have established 10 Principles and 57 criteria that address legal issues, indigenous rights, labor rights, multiple benefits, and environmental impacts surrounding forest management. I've always been impressed by their commitment to a rather broad interpretation of what sustainable forestry means. A lot of the exotic woods come from some troubled regions of the world so along with ecological concerns come some even more serious issues around the impact this trade has on the local people. SCS stands for Scientific Certification Systems and they provide independent third party certification for everything from coffee to flowers. You can see a wood product with both the FSC and SCS logos or only one which has always been a bit confusing to me. The thing to remember is that SCS is primarily a company that verifies environmental claims and performance based certification. So SCS verifies that a forestry practice adheres to the guidelines set out by FSC. Now things get messy because SCS also has their own competing guidelines which they will then verify and you can have the SCS logo show up. In addition, they offer Chain of Custody Certification, Life Cycle Assessment (I'll get into this next week) and single attribute certification for terms like salvaged recycled recovered and so on. All of this points to the interesting fact that while FSC certainly has established itself as the standard, there are differing views on what "certified wood" can or should mean. It is worth investigating the SCS website. I'm still trying to get my head around the extent of everything they are involved in and it raises interesting questions. Is it ok that these "independent third party" folks are also helping Starbucks and Home Depot set up eco guidelines that they will then use as marketing? While it may not be the purist path, I think this work with huge corporations is a really promising development. As ecological concerns become mainstream they will become part of our broad economy the commitment to verification and standards is critical to preserving some meaning behind terms like of "eco, sustainable, or green".

Museum + LEED Fridays: A Wordle Review

As promised, I've taken all of the LEED and green-related posts thus far and plugged them into Wordle. Probably not a shocking result, but overall "systemic" comes to mind as I look at this. Which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense. It's less about the silver bullet and all about the holistic, multi-tiered approach.

Museums + LEED Friday: green materials palette

As a follow-on to my post earlier this week about natural environments and children, I thought I would post a palette swatch we have used (and some we are about to use) in our projects. We'll dive into the particulars in future posts. While I haven't included the brightest of brights, they do exist. The nice thing about using these materials in your museum (beyond the obvious) is that it has the effect of inspiring visitors to use the materials themselves. When they see a Vetrazzo countertop, for instance, they say "I can use that in my house"- while at the same time you are walking the walk.

Museums + LEED Fridays: Green Exhibits?

[Note: Scott Mouton recently posted this note on the ASTC Listserv in response to a discussion about "green" exhibits. I thought it was an excellent discussion of what LEED credits mean in this context. -Maria]

On a basic level LEED is a way to quantifiably measure a building's performance in relation to the criteria set out by the USGBC. Buildings are LEED certified but not products, materials or people. This is not to say LEED has no bearing on exhibits. There are ways that exhibits can contribute towards points and the credit intents are a great way to inform a sustainable strategy for exhibits.

One thing that often gets confused is that materials can contribute towards a credit but
they are not in and of themselves certified. This might seem nit picky but it actually brings up an important aspect of LEED. The system evaluates the entire project based on a set of criteria that is a bit complex and often times contradictory. This complexity within their system is necessary and good.

As soon as you try to say something like "plyboo is a green material" things get complicated. It is a rapidly renewable resource but it also comes from China so it requires a great deal of energy to ship. At almost every turn you can find more questions than answers when trying to find something that is unequivocally "green". Instead of focusing on absolutes, LEED established a clear intent for each credit and then the sum of the credits gives an indication of the overall performance with regard to the environment.

For instance LEED has a credit for using rapidly renewable resources for 2.5% of all the construction materials (plyboo applies here) and it also has a credit for using regional materials for 10% of construction materials.

As the conversation about what make an exhibit "green" evolves, I hope it will broaden beyond material choices and focus overall sustainable strategies. As was raised in an earlier note, there are so many ways to look at this issue. Focusing on the entire life cycle of an exhibit will give you a different set of criteria (and thus end result) than if you were focused on carbon footprint. How do we establish this criteria and then what does it say about us? What are we willing to overlook, what tradeoffs are we willing to make?

So far the discussion has focused on the built object, but there is also the content of an environmentally focused exhibit to think about and how to engage the visitor in these issues. The social space of the museum could also offer unique ways for visitors to experience the aggregated impact of their decisions and sense community that can come from acting collectively.

Oh, and my choices for countertops typically *marketed* as green are:

• sustainably forested wood (if it is an appropriate application)
• Colorlith (recycled pulp in concrete)
• Recycled glass (if you can afford it)

-Scott

Museums + LEED at ASTC

While I wasn't able to attend the "green" sessions at ASTC, I did take a snap shot of the notes posted on the "Graffiti Wall", and have transposed them below. It was a little hard to decipher some of the handwriting, so let me know if I missed something. "MOSI in Tampa is:

• Designing and building an Energy Center
• Exhibits will be3 on Historical-Current-Future discoveries, uses, relative costs in dollars and environmental costs
• Demonstration Power Plants using alternative renewable sources

1. Solar photovoltaic (13,000 sq. ft. 440kv)
2. Solar thermal (400 sq. ft. 440kv)
3. Methane from landfill demo house
4. Hydrogen Fuel Cell demo
5. Yard waste wood "gassification"

• CO2 + H2O recapture
• Algae/Tilapia production
• Carbon Negative"

Under the suggestions for ASTC, but not cited:

1. Use pitchers/insulated coolers for all milk products, no more cups
2. Only real plates and flatware- no more plastic
3. Institute a "Members Area" and "Educators Area" where they can log in to check for newsletters vs. mailing them out
4. Use Razors Edge for email blasts

Another un-cited (but laudable) quote:

"Developed a green exhibit certification process like the LEED certification for buildilngs and we are applying it to our exhibit design and fabrication."

...and of course Museums Now posts on LEED and Museums on Fridays.

Museum + LEED Fridays: part 4

Hi, Scott Moulton posting, and this week I'm looking at the commissioning process, and why it's a good thing. This is a requirement for LEED that is new to me and it seems to hold a lot of promise for improving projects. According to the USGBC

"The commissioning process is a quality control process that involves the owner, users, occupants, operations and maintenance staff, design professionals and contractors."

In lay terms, it requires that you write up a set of requirements for the building which the project team pays attention to it through the process and then you assess how well the final building met the goals you set out. The process is led by an experienced Commissioning Agent who is close to the project but will not have a conflict of interest when assessing the final project. For me the most exciting step in this process is the first one. In it, the owner, Commissioning Agent and project team write up a document called the Owner's Requirement Document which spells out the owner's expectations for the building in terms of use and performance. This is intended to happen early in the project and is a really great opportunity for the owner to think in detail about how they will live in the building and what they expect from it. The design team also writes up a document which aligns with the Owner's Requirement Document and is written into the the construction documents that the contractor will build from. This aim of all this writing is to make sure the owner, design team and contractor are all on the same page and then allows a verification and final report to see if the owner was given what they asked for. While the commissioning agent is not given any power beyond providing the information, the process encourages a close collaboration, clear communication of expectations and gives the owner something to stand on should there be problems. I think it is a good example of how the the requirements of LEED will dramatically shape the process of building for the better.

Museums + LEED Fridays: part 3

Hi, Scott Moulton again. As I eluded to in my previous post on LEED, the mere decision to follow the path towards certifying your building will shape the process dramatically. In order to meet the design challenges posed by LEED, document the credits and then verify the completion it will require a highly collaborative and integrated approach to the project. The diagram above is an attempt to illustrate the way that the disciplines will all be working together. In the initial phases of a strategic plan we talk about the need to start with everything and this applies to the LEED process as well. There are so many interconnected interests and agendas that will only work when they work together. One example of this was when working on the Leonardo we had an initial LEED design charette and the mechanical engineer (a brilliantly creative guy) suggested using a cooling tower which would work to lower energy costs, serve as a way of interpreting the sustainable strategies in the building and offer a naming opportunity to a donor who was dedicated to sustainability. This type of thinking ties together Public relations, fund raising, mechanical engineering, exhibit design, and just about everyone else on the design team. Another interesting aspect of LEED is that they require you to go through a commissioning process. I'll be explaining that and how it will affect your project in a future post.

Museums + LEED Fridays

We've decided to make our posts from Scott Moulton on LEED and Museums a weekly event. So check back on Fridays to see the latest info!

LEEDership in museums: part 2

Hi, Scott Moulton guest blogging-- I'm an Exhibit Designer here at Gyroscope. I am in the process of studying for a test to become a LEED Accredited Professional and thought it might be useful to make a couple postings on the LEED certification process. As mentioned in Maria's introductory post, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a building rating system developed by the US Green Building Council in 1998. Who are these kings and queens of green you might ask? They are a group of organizations from the building industry that came together to create a set of quantifiable measures to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings. They have developed rating systems that address 5 types of construction:

• Homes
• Commercial Interiors
• Core and Shell
• New Construction
• Schools / Healthcare / Retail

Within each of these categories a project is awarded points based on its ability to meet specific criteria. Once the points have been totaled, the project is given a rating of certified, bronze, gold, or platinum. Having your building LEED certified is a great opportunity for your organization. It greatly shapes the design and construction process by forcing people to think about the far-reaching implications of building and should give the project a real sense of ambition. From a public relations perspective, it clearly demonstrates your commitment to the environment and gives you a nice talking point when describing your project. Sounds good right? Everyone wants to do the right thing and a museum has a special opportunity for leadership on this issue. Your museum is going to be platinum isn't it? The great thing about this system is that it is extremely demanding. Several years ago I was working at an architect's office and there was a project in the office with a green roof, solar panels, and was built on a brownfield [a former industrial site that may have some contamination]. This project used an innovative onsite sewage treatment system and rainwater collection and only hit gold. This is not meant to be a discouragement, just know that it is a very demanding standard. Next time you see a building that is promoting it's bronze award, know that they went to great lengths to achieve that. I'll be giving you updates from time to time on how this applies to museums. Check back often, or subscribe to an RSS Feed on this blog to be notified. Here are a few museums that have achieved LEED ratings: California Academy of Science Children's Discovery Museum, Normal, IL Grand Rapids Art Museum Water + Life Museum Brooklyn Children's Museum

Museums + LEED certification: a series

Have you been wondering what LEED stands for? It's: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Next week, we'll begin a series of posts about LEED certification and museums. It will be guest blogged by Scott Moulton, Gyroscope Exhibit Designer. Scott has a degree in architecture from Berkeley, and co-founded Union Studio. His work has been featured in the SFMOMA permanent collection, and in magazines such as Interior Design, Abitare, Metropolitan Home, Dwell and the SF Examiner Magazine. By the way, I've already been corrected, so I'll save you the trouble- it's LEED not LEEDs.