Inspired by Ian Bogost’s article in the Atlantic, I’ve made a choice to leave social media in an effort to reclaim the time/energy it takes up. I have found it spirals into hours that I could be spending reflecting, writing, journaling and even just meditating. It will not be easy- even just making this post had me falling off the wagon to see the results of my instagram poll. I’m surprised so few people asked for hand-written letters. Here’s to a more inspiring, energizing and rejuvenating 2023.
ASK for Happiness: Striving to Live Life to the Fullest
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” - ARISTOTLE
Abacus Data created the Happiness Monitor, which was recently brought to our attention by an email from Ken Chapman and Reboot Alberta. Essentially, it shows how happier people seem to make the world better. “Happiness is also an important driver for behaviours. Happy parents are better parents. Happy people give more to charity and to others. Happy people are more generous. Happy people get more exercise, eat more healthily and live longer. Happy people are more resilient,” suggest the writers Richard Jenkins and Oksana Kishchuk, and back it up with their research and data. Below are some great stats that reveal how Canadians are feeling.
Mark Anielski also studies and writes about happiness and well-being and how it has economic impacts. Check out his blog post about a financial mechanism to help solve the climate emergency- by eliminating debt money.
Perhaps we need to reflect on what brings us happiness. How do we live life to the fullest potential? How do we change the state of the world so we feel we are progressing in a positive, regenerative direction? And haven’t the lessons from the pandemic shown us we need to change the world? That it might be time for Universal Basic Income to provide security to all? Or creating and distributing vaccines that aren’t given first to the rich and powerful nations first? Perhaps it’s also time to reimagine our economy and question how we create more value-aligned systems that strive to help everyone, not just a select few.
ASK for a Better World is all about striving for happiness in 2021, and motivated by making more just and equitable work.
MAIN STREET CHALLENGE PLAYBOOK!
We thought we would share our entry in the Country-wide brainstorm called “Main Street Design Challenge”. This was a challenge to address main street revitalization in the current and post-COVID era. The playbook was released today on World Architecture day!
THE STORY BEHIND OUR ENTRY:
Truly Sustainable Design Is part of an Ecosystem 🌿
Image from Except Integrated Sustainability showing a rendering of the “Polydome” net zero urban farming
We all know how incredible nature is. Lately at ASK* we have been reflecting on the idea that anything truly sustainable cannot be compartmentalized or siloed. Everything needs balance through expansion and contraction, life and death, dynamic ever-changing synergies that provide and take nourishment in balance. This is true from the human body, to the urban environments we create. We have realized that nothing man-made is TRULY sustainable unless it is designed to be part of an alive, diverse, self correcting, closed loop ecosystem. EVERYTHING that is being created to be in our world should be thought of within the context of “what ecosystem is this a part of? What role does it play? What does it use and what does it nourish?”
We found this incredible article/interview from 2012 on a net zero farming idea called “Polydome”. The article is an interview explaining the concept of the urban food system as an Ecosystem. Gladek goes a step further, explaining how the urban farming ecosystem can be integrated into the other “urban eco-systems” as well, such as using excess heat from the greenhouses to heat residential homes.
Polydome is a concept for a new kind of polyculture greenhouse that achieves very high yields by strategically interweaving crops and livestock. With its diverse outputs (over 50 crops, two mushroom varieties, chickens, eggs, fish and honey), even a small Polydome system can provide a richly varied food supply for a large population. We calculate that with the yields and diverse outputs shown in our model, Polydomes could allow most western cities to produce most of their own food within city borders.
Eva Gladek - CEO of Metabolic
In this article, the innovative Eva Gladek states eloquently what the main barrier was 9 years ago, and still is today:
“even if we were off by a factor of ten, it is clear that commercial-scale urban agriculture is feasible, even economically speaking. And Polydome is only one of several approaches that could work. What we're missing is the investment, political support and urban farmers who are willing to take this task on. Knowledge and social barriers have become more of an issue than technology at this point.”
Eva Gladek - CEO of Metabolic
We believe the same problem exists in creating truly sustainable buildings and cities. Within the field of the built environment, we have the technology and the knowledge to have a completely different world. What we need now, is for enough people and municipalities to be educated in sustainable architecture that there is a growing belief in the possibility that our cities can be THIS incredible (and they absolutely can be).
Image from Except Integrated Sustainability showing a “neighbourhood context” of a city that thinks like an ecosystem.
At ASK* one of our research projects is to figure out how to overcome this “belief” barrier, and what the best way to educate and advocate, so that people are individually motivated and inspired to get into action! More on ecosystems later…
Returning to work? Navigating Your Future Workplace
The above article provides a roadmap for the considerations of a physical office and the opportunities for Work-from-Home (WFH) or Work-from-Away (WFA)!
We believe there are ways to challenge “business as usual” or a “return to normal” and create a lower carbon/less ecologically intense way to make a living.
Below are some resources on what we’re learning, reading and workshoping!
Navigating Your Future Workplace Post Covid19: A Roadmap
June 11: Webinar on Navigating Your Future Workplace!
Who finds Working from Home Undesirable?
Perkins & Will’s Roadmap for Return
Here’s What the Post-Corona Virus Office Looks Like (forbes.com)
ideas to re-configure our world.
The last few months has given me a good amount of time to read and to reflect. This has yielded some insights and opportunities I hope we will seize in the great covid19 upheaval. Here are some articles that speak to everything from the end of conventional office space, to how we redesign our cities to further calls for a “Green New Deal” that is the smartest way to reimagine our world.
This article from the Guardian really hit home the changes we must see for life in an ongoing-pandemic world.
We must adapt our spaces and movement through buildings and the city to be “touchless.” Can our smart devices be our conduit for controlling everything from elevator call buttons to
It’s hard to imagine co-working spaces be viable and desirable anymore. They will need to be flexible to allow for physically distant work stations and hygienic to allow for quick cleans after ever use.
This pandemic may end our desire for density. Read the article!
50th Anniversary of Earth Day. What Inspires you?
April 22, 2020 marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth day.
We’d like to share some books that have inspired our work at ASK* for a Better World. Hopefully, while you self-isolate or take pause from work, some of these works may inspire you! We know we still have a lot of work to do to become better stewards of planet Earth.
Books that Inspired our values, our life and our dreams.
What are some of your favourite books? Or ones that nifluenced your life?
Take this time to read! And to revisit your process, reimagine your work and impact on our environment. Now is the time, while we reconfigure our new world, to engage us in helping you with Lean culture, training and readying your work/workplace for a more productive, effective and ecologically-sensitive future. We can show you how to reimagine design process, collaboration and architecture by going slow now, to go FAST. ASK* for a Better World.
BONUS: Check out what we found on our walk, just before Earth day! An amazing family of owls in Edmonton’s river valley.
Great info-graphics from informationISbeautiful.net
#FlattentheCurve : Will We be Resilient ?
Could anyone have seen Covid-19 coming? I have to say, we are still somewhat shocked and in awe at how much our lives have changed in the last two weeks. Working from home isn’t much of a change, but having most meetings online definitely is. We really value collaborators and working with them, usually in the same room. It is taking a bit of adjustment to get the same amount of information over a video conference! And it is very challenging to put up sticky notes on the wall, or draw quick diagrams to brainstorm. We are innovating our online work process.
This pandemic has made it very clear that the work we are doing to help communities become more resilient and climate adaptive is essential. We are grateful to be working with La Cite Francophone & Just Powers on this very thing! And we are hopeful some people will find our Climate Resilient Home helpful in how they need to prepare for emergencies. We are blessed that we are all healthy and no one we know has been affected. If we work from home and socially isolate, we hope we can keep #flatteningthecurve !
The last of Calgary’s #climatestrike marchers.
Fridays {and everyday} for the FUTURE.
On Friday, September 27th, over half a million people marched with Greta Thunberg in Montreal. I was awestruck and refuelled with hope.
I had only caught the last of Calgary’s #ClimateStrike march. I had spent the morning with my colleagues from the Energy Efficiency Alberta board discussing our strategic plan in light of a new provincial government. How will we deal with a government that places “I love Alberta Oil & Gas” in their windows? In hindsight, perhaps I should have walked out for the #climatestrike, and encouraged our board to see the thousands in Calgary whom made that commitment on a close and wet Friday. We must heed the #cliamteemergency and actively start making bold, difficult and necessary steps for our children’s future.
This New York Times article best explains our predicament: For Our Future, the Oil and Gas Industry Must Go Green
Alas, I have found hope and true, passionate leadership in Greta Thunberg. She has re-energized me and allows me to overcome my climate anxiety.
Also, if you are an architect in Canada, here is the site where you can declare your commitment to “urgent and sustained” action for this emergency:
https://ca.architectsdeclare.com/
Join me. Demand a better world.
AIA votes for Urgent & Sustained Climate Action!
At the AIA National Convention in June, we saw some hopeful and positive steps with the declaration of Urgent and Sustained Climate Action.
The AIA's resolution calls for its 94,000 members worldwide to "exponentially accelerate the decarbonization of buildings, the building sector, and the built environment."
Ask* for a Better World has been mobilized by the Consulting Architects of Alberta to deliver “Pitching Green” workshops in Edmonton and Calgary, to help make the case for carbon neutral and net zero energy architecture. Stay tuned for dates in early autumn.
It’s imperative we act now and work with determination as we have taken an oath as architects to ensure the public good.
Touring the hangars at Harbour Air YVR airport!
It's been three months! My probation period is over!
Time flies! As I write this, we are coming up on the end of four months of working as Ask for a Better World! I can be more delighted to share how exciting it’s been. I have been fortunate to have clients that are fantastically values-aligned with what I set out to do. We began working with Fare Community and workshopped through their space needs. Our Space Confirmation Report to CMLC was presented earlier this month.
Workshopping with the Fare Community!
Next, aFAB.world collaborated with EcoAmmo and Red-5 on a Lean assessment of Harbour Air Seaplane operations in Vancouver! It made a aviation-geek like me pretty giddy. Our hope is we can continue to help Harbour Air on their Lean journey, especially as they announced they will be the first airline in North America to fly electric planes!
And we are working with All One Sky Foundation to develop a Climate Resilient Virtual home for citizens of the Edmonton Metropolitan area community and Wetaskiwin. This will be an online resource of how people can outfit their homes to be resilient for wildfire, flood, extreme weather events and our changing climate.
And there’s more to come! We started work with the Canadian Wood Council on low-rise commercial building prototypes! So, we are grateful to our clients and collaborators for giving aFAB.world a great start to our new company.
Mentoring and Coaching the Next Generation!
I am delighted to mentor and coach the next generation. It is one of the most rewarding things I do!
I enjoy facilitating Lean Coffee with my Lean Six Sigma black belt sansei, Avel Espiritu once a month! Even though I'm not a morning person, it's a great opportunity to learn and share lean culture and the ideas and tools that make it so amazing.
I also have had an opportunity to work with University of Alberta MBA students! Nelson, Rob and Oliver took on a project to look at Ask for a Better World as this their business development project, particularly with an IPD aspect driving their value proposition.
Last week, I also toured NAIT architecture students through the priMED Mosaic Centre. I can't believe how this building can continue to inspire and surprise people.
And the most enlightening thing was seeing Lénárd Grossmann's science fair display on using an artificial neural network (ANN) -that he programmed/developed in Python- to accurately predict the happiness of a person for a house design. He's only in grade 11, the same age as my son, who is as equally nerdy in the best way possible.
And that is why I spend time with those wanting to learn… I end up learning just as much! And education is where we start to Ask for a Better World!
Finding my Reason for Being!
I am incredibly fortunate. I think I’ve found my reason for being. The Japanese concept “Ikigai” noted by Neil Pasricha recently in the The Star outlines why I now jump out of bed every morning. It’s totally my rocket fuel. I am lucky to find how my passion, my mission, my vocation and my profession can align into my reason for being. I want to help values-aligned clients realize high performance, net zero energy, carbon neutral and regenerative architecture. And solve their problems within a collaborative, lean culture. Just ask.
Beverly Heights House, Edmonton. Our own experiment on ourselves for net zero energy living!
Chasing Net Zero Energy!
In 2010, we had a phenomenal opportunity to move on to the path of net zero energy living. I had serendipitously stumbled upon an amazing house lot for sale in Beverly Heights. I was looking for commercial sites for a client and found a house lot listed that I knew exactly it’s location, and at a bargain price, as it was still somewhat a buyers market.
With the help of my parents, I was able to scrape up enough money for the bank to allow us a mortgage to build our house ourselves. I cannot begin to tell you how many people helped! My wife Serena has really been my biggest supporter and believer in this very personal project!
I started a blog at Chasing Netzero here to tell our story, our experiences, what not to do and how it all came together.
And it’s now been over 7 years since we moved in! The house is performing admirably and while there are only a few things I would change, I am so blessed we have been able to test this passive house principles to great success on ourselves!
We have a 4.8 kW solar array and created a passive solar design.
We used concrete floors for thermal mass and torrified wood (ask me what this is!) for stairs.
*For a better world
THIS IS MY CALL TO ACTION.
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