Original air date - A Question of Balance :: 7:30pm 17th Apr 2018

Sustainable design part II: Nick Radford, Director of Ecoliving Design, examines the elements of good design and how design needs to become sustainable. Design is how we put together all the different elements and processes included in a plan. A house, is not just pieces of timber and roofing but also a set of processes involving different people, for example, tradespeople and owners. The finished house incorporates many different processes such as cooking and cleaning and movement and interactions between people. Designers have to think about both elements and processes but architects, for instance, don’t often include processes. The poorest people in the country live in units and state housing designed by architects who live a completely different lifestyle. Very few of such homes actually work. A better approach is iterative design where the aim is to make the design a solution to a problem. The designer must ask a lot of questions and listen to the answers to gain the information needed to understand the design problem.