History
O2 ("Oxygen") was founded in 1988 in Milan by Danish designer Niels Peter Flint, encouraged by his enthusiasm O2 Groups in Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden, Austria and the United Kingdom quickly followed. These groups were established by Thierry Kazazian [ fr ] (FR), Jorgi Scheicher (AT), Yorick Benjamin, Ned Phillips, Matt Sindell, Lawrence Dunmore (UK), Michele Barro, Gert Koster (IT) and others. In those early days, there were around twenty active designers who met in London, Copenhagen, Lake Como and Paris and developed projects with the likes of IKEA and Italian Polymers company Montedipe. Karen Blincoe joined O2 UK in 1990 and developed the magazine O2 Pages that provided an outlet for O2 ideas and emergent philosophies. Four years later (5 July 1994), Iris van de Graaf and Willem Hanhart founded the O2 Global Network foundation, or in short, the O2 Global Network. O2GN, as it became to be known, was set up as an independent organization. Its first home page appeared in November that year, and by August 1995, the network had hosted their first web broadcast, live from Rotterdam.
Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting human development goals while simultaneously sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depends . The desired result is a state of society where living conditions and resources are used to continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural system. Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
An ecovillage is a traditional or intentional community with the goal of becoming more socially, culturally, economically, and/or ecologically sustainable. An ecovillage strives to produce the least possible negative impact on the natural environment through intentional physical design and resident behavior choices. It is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes to regenerate and restore its social and natural environments. Most range from a population of 50 to 250 individuals, although some are smaller, and traditional ecovillages are often much larger. Larger ecovillages often exist as networks of smaller sub-communities. Some ecovillages have grown through like-minded individuals, families, or other small groups—who are not members, at least at the outset—settling on the ecovillage's periphery and participating de facto in the community.
Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". Innovation is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. Such innovation takes place through the provision of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, or business models that are made available to markets, governments and society. An innovation is something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society. Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention, as innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention to make a meaningful impact in the market or society, and not all innovations require an invention. Innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process, when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation.
Participatory design is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning, and even medicine as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. It is one approach to placemaking.
The open-design movement involves the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. This includes the making of both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware. The process is generally facilitated by the Internet and often performed without monetary compensation. The goals and philosophy of the movement are identical to that of the open-source movement, but are implemented for the development of physical products rather than software. Open design is a form of co-creation, where the final product is designed by the users, rather than an external stakeholder such as a private company.
A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.
Sustainable cities, urban sustainability, or eco-city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. These cities are inhabited by people whom are dedicated towards minimizing required inputs of energy, water, food, waste, output of heat, air pollution - CO
2, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register first coined the term "ecocity" in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, where he offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere. Other leading figures who envisioned the sustainable city are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.
Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products with special consideration for the environmental impacts of the product during its whole lifecycle. It was defined by Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design is an integrative ecologically responsible design discipline. Ecological design can also be posited as the process within design and development of integration environmental consideration into product design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.
The idea of technology brokering is to span multiple, otherwise disconnected industries, to see how existing technologies could be used to create breakthrough innovations in other markets. Technology brokering requires companies to be strong in two areas. As Andrew Hargadon, technology brokering’s founder, summarized: "Firstly, the company must have the ability to bridge distant communities, usually when a company can move easily across a range of different markets they have a better view of how technologies can be used in new ways. Secondly, technology brokering involves creating new markets and industries from innovative combinations of existing technology. These two strengths are difficult to have simultaneously because the strong ties the companies have with customers and supplies in one industry prevent the company from moving easily into other markets and experimenting with new ideas." Yet, when a company is able to combine these two strengths it can result in being the first to experience technological advances.
BEST Education Network (BEST-EN), headquartered at James Cook University, Australia is an international, inclusive and collaborative network, focusing on the creation and dissemination of knowledge to support education and practice in the field of sustainable tourism.
The Asia-Pacific Telecentre Network (APTN) is a collaborative initiative of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) and telecentre.org. The APTN Secretariat is hosted at ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA). APTN is dedicated to promote innovation and knowledge sharing amongst telecentres in the Asia-Pacific region where telecentres are growing exponentially each year. APTN is working towards creating a platform of networks of telecentres, to share experiences on issues of their interest and to cooperate on the development of solutions for common problems of the telecentres themselves in order to empower poor and disadvantaged communities with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Asia Pacific Region. In other words, APTN will serve as the focal network or the knowledge hub for communication and information technology in the Asia Pacific region.
Environmentally Sustainable design is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment, and services to comply with the principles of ecological sustainability.
A sustainability organization is (1) an organized group of people that aims to advance sustainability and/or (2) those actions of organizing something sustainably. Unlike many business organizations, sustainability organizations are not limited to implementing sustainability strategies which provide them with economic and cultural benefits attained through environmental responsibility. For sustainability organizations, sustainability can also be an end in itself without further justifications.
Green urbanism has been defined as the practice of creating communities beneficial to human and the environment. According to Timothy Beatley, it is an attempt to shape more sustainable places, communities and lifestyles, and consume less of the world’s resources. Green urbanism is interdisciplinary, combining the collaboration of landscape architects, engineers, urban planners, ecologists, transport planners, physicists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and other specialists in addition to architects and urban designers.
Open sustainability innovation is the use of open innovation in the development of sustainable products, services and initiatives. This is an approach to marketing for companies may prove to be advantageous as it is not point of sale based, but rather offers consumers information they have previously never been exposed to. Creating a basis for more long term conversational relationships. As a result of this conversational relationship between companies and consumers ideas about the importance of sustainability and how people relate to this through consumption can arise. By offering an open communication way of marketing to consumers, companies may ultimately gain a competitive advantage based on trust and disclosure. Thus not only will open sustainability innovations promote the use of sustainable products and services, it will actually create a snowballing effect to other companies who will have to adopt new sustainability practices in order to remain on the market.
Systems-oriented design (S.O.D.) uses system thinking in order to capture the complexity of systems addressed in design practice. The main mission of S.O.D. is to build the designers' own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking. S.O.D. aims at enabling systems thinking to fully benefit from design thinking and practice, and design thinking and practice to fully benefit from systems thinking. S.O.D. addresses design for human activity systems, and can be applied to any kind of design problem ranging from product design and interaction design, through architecture to decision making processes and policy design.
Eco-socialism, green socialism or socialist ecology is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.
Systemic design integrates systems thinking and human-centered design, with the intention of helping designers cope with complex design projects. The recent challenges to design coming from the increased complexity caused by globalization, migration, sustainability render traditional design methods insufficient. Designers need better ways to design responsibly and to avoid unintended side-effects. Systemic design intends to develop methodologies and approaches that help to integrate systems thinking with design towards sustainability at environmental, social and economic level. It is a pluralistic initiative where many different approaches are encouraged to thrive and where dialogue and organic development of new practices is central.
Open manufacturing, also known as open production, maker manufacturing, and with the slogan "Design Global, Manufacture Local" is a new model of socioeconomic production in which physical objects are produced in an open, collaborative and distributed manner and based on open design and open source principles.
Cosmopolitan localism is a social innovation approach to community development that seeks to link local and global communities through resilient infrastructures that bring production and consumption closer together, building on distributed systems..
