Multi-Level Perspective Mapping: Poor Air Quality in Pittsburgh
Assignment 2 of the Spring 2020 Transition Design Seminar
Introduction
We are Team Holarchy, and our wicked problem is Poor Air Quality in Pittsburgh. In this assignment, our objective is to use the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework to gain a deep understanding of the large context within which our wicked problem arose and the ability to ‘read’ systems dynamics in order to seed and catalyze change within a system. In this post, we will cover:
- Historical contributing factors to the wicked problem at the niche, landscape, and regime levels;
- Proposed sites and concepts for intervention;
- A description of our process; and
- A brief discussion on the difficulties, insights gained, and comparisons to a traditional design process.
01 Historical Contributing Factors
00 Poor Air Quality and Early Time
While poor air quality emerged as an issue around the time of the industrial revolution, our timeline includes dates that reach back to the early evolution of humans. We included these dates as a provocation to push our thinking about and question the limits of the contours of the problem. Early events in the development of humans point to a few themes that run through our timeline: tools, making, and communication, and how those things enabled contexts and power structures that gave rise to our wicked problem. What was surprising about this research is that even early human development, humans demonstrate a capacity to make; making manifests in more contemporary parts of the timeline as manufacturing.
The first tools appear as early as ~1.5m BC. These Acheulean tools first represent resource utilization and the ways in which humans reshape those resources to serve a purpose. These tools were used to do things like cut wood from trees; hunt, kill and gut animals; and are believed to even serve as a form of social representation. One researcher believes these tools were first commodity, which draws lines to our use of goods as a status symbol and consumer culture (buying/owning for status).
Communication also appears in early forms with the emergence of visual representations of things like animals, which leads to cave paintings, then to visual language, to photographs, the printing press, and eventually to the internet, smartphones, and the “Smell PGH” app as a way that people communicate about pollution in a crowd-sourced manner.
It’s hard to separate these early features of human development from the evolution of all that follows. In some ways these parts of the timeline don’t explicitly give hints at solutions, but they do beg the question as to where we draw a line for viable solutions. If making/doing and communicating are intrinsic to being human — in that these things runs back to the origins of humankind — we might ask a few questions: In what ways did, for example, the origin of Acheulean tools inform and afford the evolution of other forms of making to the point of industrial revolution? And what opportunity lies in accounting for and including making/doing and communication in a viable solution proposal? And last, how does an understanding of this history and these essential ways of being human inform our understanding of capitalism and industry; of geopolitics; of transportation technology and regime investments; and of environmental awareness.
01 Air Pollution, Capitalism and Industry
According to the Breathe Project, 58% of air pollution in Pittsburgh today comes from industrial sources, including manufacturing. Pittsburgh’s industrial history is tied up in a broader American history of colonialism and capitalism. When Europeans sailed to America to establish colonies in the early 1600s, they brought market-based capitalism with them. Jamestown and Boston were both founded under the charters of English corporations. This colony relationship extended to the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783, while capitalism has endured to the present day.
From roughly 1790 to 1830, the American economy transitioned from one of agriculture to industry. During this period, America lagged behind Britain’s industrial transition because of an abundance of land and scarcity of labor, which reduced interest in expensive regime investments in machine production. A turning point came with niche technological innovations such as machinery made with moveable parts, which revolutionized manufacturing in the arms and textile industries and increased the demand for metal parts. Meanwhile, technology developed for extracting and purifying iron ore enabled the growth of Pittsburgh’s steel industry as manufacturing in America took off. At the turn of the twentieth century, America’s economic transition from agricultural to industrial was squarely entrenched at the regime level: in 1900, most Americans worked for an employer, and the economy revolved around the factory. By 1914, the U.S. was the largest industrialized economy in the world, with Pittsburgh’s steel mills working full force.
Research and Development as an Economic Driver
The transition pathway of a niche technological innovation rising to the regime level, such as iron ore purification or movable parts in machinery, is not exclusive to the eighteenth century. In more recent times, investments made by research institutions, companies, and government at the regime level have been aimed at developing niche technologies in clean energy and transportation innovation. After the crash of the steel and manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy in the 1970s, Pennsylvania’s state government adopted an economic development plan, including the Ben Franklin Technology Partners program, based on funding technology research. Pittsburgh benefited from using state money for funding technological research and development at its local universities, including Carnegie Mellon University. Meanwhile, its economy slowly transitioned from steel and manufacturing sectors to banking and financial services, healthcare, and education.
The relationship between regime-level institutions investing in niche technological innovations in Pittsburgh began a new chapter when Google established a Pittsburgh campus in 2006. By 2010, Google had doubled its staff in Pittsburgh and moved to fancy new digs at Bakery Square, a former industrial building in the rapidly gentrifying East Liberty neighborhood. Several other technology companies, like Uber, Argo AI, and Aptiv, followed suit. As of March 2018, there were 41 percent more jobs in R&D than in the mills.
02 Pittsburgh as Place: Geopolitics, Natural Wealth, and Air Quality
The first waves of colonialism appear on our timeline around 1600; this period follows the emergence of gunpowder in China (ca. 850), the first use of rockets (1232), and a landmark event in 1239: a royal charter for development of coal fields in Newcastle, England. The Newcastle coal charter set forth the rapid development of coal as an energy source, and hence the development of other extractive resources such as oil for energy and manufacturing.
The development of gunpowder in roughly 850 ushered in a new age of explosives in conflict. We see the ramifications in the French and Indian war (1754–1763), which changed the relations between European settlers and the original inhabitants of the Pittsburgh territory. And again a few years later in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), following which the second amendment fostered a mindset toward guns as a symbol of freedom from tyranny. The same site of the French-Indian war and a key location in the American Revolution, Pittsburgh’s location was crucial to the Industrial Revolution.
The development of Pittsburgh’s steel industry can be attributed to a confluence of factors at all three levels of the MLP: the Bessemer process as niche innovation; a controlling regime of steel barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (regime, and in many ways the regime), and Pittsburgh’s naturally evolved ecosystems included rivers ideal for transportation and coal ripe for extraction (landscape).
Conflict between factions of people run through history, but in more recent millennia, that conflict has been fueled by a race to develop bigger and stronger weapons. Pittsburgh became the “Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II (1939–1945), producing steel, aluminum, munitions and machinery for the war. This war culminated when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, starting the cold war, and ushering in the nuclear age. The U.S. emerged a superpower of arms and steel.
But in Pittsburgh, the same natural features that made it an epicenter for the steel industry made possible serious smog and pollution issues. Air quality as a public health issue hit a tipping point in 1948 in Donora, PA: a multi-day weather inversion stuck in the river valley trapped sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases from U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel & Wire plant, killed 20 people, and sickened 40% of the town’s 14,000 residents.
03 Transportation and Emissions: From Niche to Regime
Transportation emissions are a leading cause of poor air quality in Pittsburgh. Historically, Pittsburgh’s geolocation presented several opportunities as a transportation hub for the purpose of trade and commerce. Owing to the 3 rivers, one of the earliest steam boats ‘New Orleans’ was built in Pittsburgh in the year 1811. During the War of 1812, when the demand for iron skyrocketed, foundries, mills and forges were established along the banks of the rivers. Workers flocked the area due to Pittsburgh’s wealth of natural resources, including oil, coal, limestone, natural gas.
The Industrial Revolution led to the development of railroads and a network of railways in the United States. Iron production increased significantly due to use of coke for smelting and refining pig iron and cast iron, which spurred the development of railroads. For example, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first common carrier and the oldest Railroad in the United States built for the purpose of transportation of goods along a series of canals to the goal of providing commercial means of transportation between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. By 1846, the Pennsylvania Railroad company was established to build a line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh for the purpose of freight transport. By 1882, it was the largest railroad by traffic and revenue and the largest transportation enterprise in America. It soon became the largest corporation in the world with a budget second only to the U.S. government.
The amount of iron being consumed by expanding railroads provided metallurgists with the financial incentive to find a solution to iron’s brittleness and inefficient processes. The year 1855 saw the introduction of the Bessemer process. It provided an inexpensive way for the production of steel from molten iron. Steel was preferred over pig iron and cast iron owing to its distinct properties. George Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh native, further propelled the development of railroads by inventing the airbrake. The Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) was subsequently organized to manufacture and sell Westinghouse’s invention. It was in time nearly universally adopted by railways.
In 1866, iron ore deposits were discovered in the Mesabi mountain range near Minnesota. Making a ton of steel required a greater weight of coal than iron ore. Therefore, it was more economical to locate mills closer to the coal mines. Pittsburgh, surrounded by large coal deposits and at the junction of three navigable rivers, was an ideal location for steel making. Iron ore deposits were shipped to ports on the southern Great Lakes to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Around this time in the year 1875, Andrew Carnegie, along with Henry Clay Frick, established Edgar Thomson Works for the mass production of steel using the new Bessemer process. The transportation channels available across the rivers made it easy to get raw material from West Virginia up the Monongahela to the mills in the Mon Valley. He also established the The Butler and Pittsburgh Railroad Company to establish a single line across the Allegheny River. Carnegie formed Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad under this exclusive ownership. This established Carnegie as a dominant player in the steel market. Having established a hold over manufacturing as well as distribution, Carnegie single handedly catered to the supply and demand loop.
Meanwhile, developments in the field of automobile technology such as the internal combustion engine, the spark plug, and the spray jet carburetor led the development of the first successful American gasoline automobile. In 1899, thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles. By the year 1913, this number increased to 485,000 of the world total of 606,124. While this number dropped during the Second World War, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 provided a boost to the development of roadway infrastructure, which at that time was one of the largest items of government expenditure. The introduction of the legislation encouraging a greater use of electric vehicles in the year 1960 renewed an interest in Hybrid (HCE) cars with an attempt to reduce air pollution. By the year 1980, 87 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 52 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic car sales were for replacement. While the 20th century saw the proliferation and entrenchment of the gasoline-powered automobile, the 21st century could pave the way for electric vehicles. Greater awareness of climate change, with actions taken by the Obama Administration to promote the adoption of electric vehicles, could spur this transition.
04 Environmental Awareness: Cultural Attitudes on Improving Air Quality
We’ve identified patterns of environmental awareness historically aligning tightly with environmental landscape shock, citizen health being harmed, the emergence of communication of the issue, and how it shaped regime-level policy changes throughout time. For example, in 1902 the term “smog” was coined as the Second Industrial Revolution hit its peak, when environmental issues started to emerge in London. In the mid 1900s, city smog struck multiple American cities, and the local government started initiatives by establishing health departments and started regulating air quality. Similarly, in contemporary Pittsburgh (2015) PennEnvironment coined the term “Toxic Ten” to point out major sources of polluters in the Pittsburgh region, which can be seen as an effective communication gesture.
Attitudes toward environmental issues have been conflicted throughout history, driven by different stakeholder goals. In the 1980s, when the US fossil fuel industry was motivated by bottom-line considerations, especially energy company profits. This led to aversions to government regulation across all economic sectors. We can still see forces at the regime level trying to control, delay or block binding policy around environmental issues: the Trump administration’s recent actions on climate regulation issues prevents a transition from coal-fueled steel production (US Steel’s Clairton plant) and coal-fueled energy production (Cheswick coal power plant) in Pittsburgh towards “cleaner” regime-level industries.
On the other hand, at the niche level, grass-root organizations dedicated to environmental advocacy, technology advancements, and institutional partnerships such as Smell PGH — an app which crowdsources and shares air quality issues — have contributed to the positive development of renewable energy and technologies mitigating air pollution. While some niche developments may counter the growth of renewable energy, there’s evidence of progress as renewable energy issues bubble up to the regime and landscape level in the form of advancements in Pittsburgh’s (and other governments’) renewable energy policy.
02 Proposed sites and concepts for intervention
Existing Interventions: Smell PGH, Smell MyCity and citizen air quality tracking
Concepts like air pollution are difficult to acknowledge due to their mostly invisible, often inconspicuous nature. This ‘invisible’ aspect also compounds another problem; namely, the delays. Information received in an untimely manner will often extend the length of delay and slow down the process of system change.
Efforts like the Smell PGH mobile app (launched in 2016) or the Air Louisville inhaler air sensor bubbling up at the niche level signal the need for a collective effort towards ‘visualizing’ this problem and changing public awareness through citizen science. Over the course of this assignment, we recognized that the benefits offered by industrialization and economic development often outweigh the negative impact on the natural world, at least according to a mechanistic capitalist-driven society. While the gains received from industrialization can be instantaneous, it is difficult to comprehend the ramifications of these actions as they unfold over a longer period of time with regard to the environment and public health.
CMU’s Smell PGH app started out as an intervention in Pittsburgh with a goal to engage the residents of the city in tracking pollution odors across the region. Wanting to build a sense of community, the creators adopted a collaborative approach towards developing a solution pertaining to air quality. The validation and power of a community voice bore fruits with the Allegheny County Health Department taking measures to analyze the crowd-sourced data to identify trends. Now, as a national version of the app recently rolled out (Smell MyCity release anouncement, March 2019), backed by Seventh Generation, there is evidence that the approach is working and worthy of further niche-level investment.
We recognize the power of ‘visualization’ to first develop awareness and understanding around the problem. This would allow the trends, patterns and outliers to be more easily seen. We believe this existing intervention could also be strengthened by connecting it to an ecosystem of additional citizen science and community movements, such as the Moms Clean Air Force. Collaborative, crowd-sourced efforts arising out of this consciousness will then fuel efforts towards mitigation at a regime level.
New sites and intervention concepts
Innovation and niche-level change: How small governments, influenced by niche organizations, can make progress
On our MLP, we saw the way that niche developments have affected a landscape change in Pittsburgh’s pioneering renewable energy system. Therefore, we believe that it is important to highlight local developments from organizations like the Energy GRID Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. These organizations have a hand in developing niche technologies and doing work around energy planning and research.
The Scott Institute was started by Jay Whitacre who also locally founded Aquion energy, a sodium-ion battery startup; the Scott Institute currently has 11 spin-off companies that are pioneering new energy startups in the realm of new, clean, affordable, and sustainable energy systems. Meanwhile, Pitt’s Energy Grid Institute is currently collaborating with the City of Pittsburgh and the Danish Government on energy planning and research, which is directly influencing Pittsburgh’s commitment to renewable energy.
We feel it’s worth highlighting these efforts because they demonstrate a regime/niche loop that ultimately makes landscape differences. For example, Jay Whitacre’s Aquion Energy was a niche company that came from his work at a regime-level institution. Even though Aquion filed for bankruptcy, Jay then went on to found the Scott Institute, which has spun off multiple niche startups, which comes back to the regime level through research and event collaboration with public (City of Pittsburgh) and private (Duquesne Light) regime-level organizations.
We think these matter because — as demonstrated in response to the recent COVID-19 outbreak — we can see state and local (especially large city) governments taking action to “flatten the curve” even as the federal government failed to deliver a thorough and timely response. Much in the way that cities and states have influenced the impact of COVID-19, we believe they have an opportunity to make positive changes on air quality.
We must acknowledge that COVID-19 and air quality are in some ways very different problems: COVID-19 is a pandemic that spread quickly across the globe, and the impact has been felt quickly nearly everywhere as people’s daily rituals have been forced to change. But the air quality issue is like COVID-19, in that air quality issues exist around the globe, are felt locally in the Pittsburgh region, and have a scale of impact — granted, usually at a much longer scale of time.
The WHO believes that 4.6 million people die of Air Quality related causes annually; COVID-19 has already passed a million deaths. But we can see that state and local governments are taking leadership. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has reified the city’s commitment to the Paris Accords, even as the federal government, under Trump’s leadership, has backed out.
This demonstrates that this kind of regime-level change is possible, and finding ways to support the niche developments and influence cities like Pittsburgh could be a great opportunity to make progress on air quality matters.
Change the goals and rules of the system: reforming governance at the Regime level
Our final proposed site for intervention is at the regime level, and it centers around changing the goals and rules of the system. In the course of the Transition Design seminar, we have read and discussed texts that describe the growth of the Cartesian, mechanized worldview and its tyranny over living systems. Today, that manifests in measuring global well-being in economic terms (a system goal) through metrics such as Gross Domestic Product. We imagine decentering the dominance of human economic activity as the chief goal of the system. What if instead we were to strive for and assess global well-being through another indicator, such as connection, health, or happiness? Additional options could include carbon emissions, biodiversity, green cover, and other environmental indicators speaking to the health of the biosphere.
How might we build momentum for such a change in the goals of our system? One potential transition pathway could be through reshaping the rules of the system. Our MLP analysis highlighted the entrenched relationships at the regime level between state and federal government in the United States and the major corporations that dominate the national and global economy. Reshaping the interactions between these powerful actors via campaign finance reform, rewriting the tax code, and even eliminating the electoral college could alter the balance of power in the current system and redistribute influence to everyday, individual Americans who do not currently enjoy the purchasing power of industry in the electoral politics of today.
With regard to changing the rules of the system, and with respect to air quality in particular, lessening the influence of manufacturing, steel, and petrochemical industries might also open space for air quality regulations to be made more strict. At the federal level, where the EPA’s Clean Air Act establishes a floor for industrial emissions that states must not dip below in their own regulations, we could imagine raising the lower threshold to restrict emissions further. This could cascade down to the state levels, requiring that states also tighten their emissions standards. Or, it could happen at the state or even local levels, where Allegheny County could work with the State of Pennsylvania to make emissions permits more costly and increase fines for emissions excess to a prohibitive level for industry. Furthermore, if all levels of government were to divest their subsidies from coal and other dirty sources of energy, that money could instead go to subsidizing and accelerating the development of clean energy, as we discussed in the above section (innovation and niche-level change).
Closing Thought
Early in our research for the Wicked Problem Map, we saw lines between each of the topics being tackled by other teams in our class. For example: industrial agriculture has implications for air quality (emissions from transportation, as just one example), for obesity (subsidies encourage a proliferation of unhealthy, mass produced foods), homelessness (food security is a major issue for the homeless, and industrial agriculture is driven by profits, not by a goal to feed people), and waste (farm-level food waste is estimated to be around 20–40%).
Some of the logic goes as follows: we feel that a key difference between a Transition Design approach to wicked problems — compared to more traditional design processes — is that it attempts to understand our problems at a greater scale which is typical of other design processes. So, if we are able to understand the problem at a larger scale than is typical, that implicates the deep interrelation of all of the topics our teams are tackling. And what wicked problem would not be connected?
As our team generated interventions, we began to feel that any intervention that would have a lasting, long-term, meaningful, solution-level impact on our wicked problem could or would also address the wicked problems being evaluated by other teams in the course. That’s to say: to truly address the wicked problem of air quality or obesity or homelessness or waste management is to address the wicked problem of air quality and obesity and homelessness and waste management, along with a host of other wicked problems. Because if these wicked problems come from the wicked problem, to “solve” any of these wicked problems might mean solving the wicked problem.
We think that mindset and posture are key; perhaps changing mindset and posture is the wicked problem, or at least closer to the scale of the wicked problem? In other words, to change what people do, we have to change how they think and what they believe. Changing mindsets is complicated, hard work; could it be that it’s the most important step in making real change?
03 Description of the Process
Our team began the assignment with a meeting before Spring Break to discuss the MLP framework, create a project plan, and identify research interests. During our Wicked Problem Mapping assignment, we had begun to identify a timeline of events contributing to the current state of poor air quality in Pittsburgh. We were able to begin identifying research topics based on this work. We kept the STEEP categories in mind in order to cover multiple aspects of the emergence of poor air quality through history. Finally, we assigned topics to teammates and agreed to meet after the break to discuss individual research and begin populating our MLP canvas.
Over the break, everything changed. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated its spread around the globe. Entire countries closed down, first at a local, then regional, then national level. Workplaces, schools, and universities began closing in an effort to prevent further spread. Carnegie Mellon was no exception, and we were informed about a mandatory transition to online coursework for the rest of the semester. We moved out of our studio spaces and dispersed to locations around the world to prepare for self-isolation and remote learning and collaboration.
Our team’s process shifted to reflect the disruption in course delivery. We abandoned our physical MLP canvas and worked entirely digitally using Google Drive, Lucidchart, and Zoom. Our first step after the break was to share our individual research and begin placing it onto a digital MLP canvas. Thus began our first conversations about whether a given factor was best placed at the niche, regime, or landscape levels, and how to best trace the paths of influences and relationships across levels and over time. We reconvened for several more rounds of independent research and group discussions until we felt that we had a thorough body of research that covered STEEP categories across time at all three levels.
Next, we began tracing connections between ideas and factors on our map. This began at the level of individual data points captured on digital sticky notes. Before long, a web of connections and relationships grew out across our canvas. To help us trace higher-level transitions and relationships, we clustered data points by topic or theme and gave each cluster a descriptive title. We then linked these titles to one another to trace the path of a transition or series of factors culminating in the wicked problem of poor air quality in Pittsburgh today.
Once we felt confident with our historical component of the MLP, we highlighted the current-day factors contributing to the wicked problem. This was quick in comparison to the hours spent on the historical component, given we had deeply investigated current factors in the previous Wicked Problem Map assignment.
With our MLP canvas in good shape, we moved to our interventions. We used Donella Meadows’ Places to Intervene in a System to help guide our conversation, although we did not refer to it exclusively. Here again, we attempted to cover a wide range of solutions that would span STEEP categories as well as niche, regime, and landscape levels of the MLP. Finally, we drafted our narrative for each component of the assignment and assembled images to include in our Medium post.
04 Brief discussion of the difficulties, insights gained and how this compares with traditional design processes
Challenges:
- The coronavirus pandemic continues to be a challenge in its disruption and redefinition of everyday life. While we felt that our team dynamic remained consistent,iIt was more a personal disruption for each of us affecting our mindset, posture, and routine. We have all felt overwhelmed with the amount of screen and Zoom time: there is no practical difference between meetings, individual work, class time, and reading.
- Another challenge with the MLP was scope. It was difficult to determine what to include, what is relevant, and how much is too much detail. We did not always reach consensus on this question and our final map reflects some compromise.
Insights:
- Industrialization, transportation, and technological developments were the “need of the hour” pertaining to that period of time. Riding on the wave of sustainability, almost a century later, the creators of Tesla envisioned a service which capitalized on this market-driven approach for promoting clean energy.
- While working on this MLP we realized that values have temporal manifestations. As civilizations develop, the attitudes, beliefs and principles that guide our decision making process vary in importance as a result of changing tendencies. Decisions resulting in a trade-off between these values are justified by their contextual association.
- The MLP justifies the idea that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” While niche level developments offer a window into one future, niche actors don’t have the influence to quickly bring the future into the mainstream now. Conversely, regime actors often have vested interests in the structures that maintain the status quo, and will use their power to squash niche developments or sometimes, when bringing them to the regime level, alter them beyond recognition, and that future is lost.
Comparison with traditional design processes:
- Scale: In some ways, this resembles a standard thorough design process, but at a much, much greater scale. We are looking at dramatic expanses of time, as well as expanding the reach of the systems that touch the problems being addressed.
- Forms of research: We noticed a greater focus on secondary research and literature review than in a more traditional design process. Also, the structure of the assignment didn’t encourage much in the way of user research. We didn’t talk with enough Pittsburghers living with poor air quality, and spoke with only a handful of air quality experts. This felt a little insular when compared to a more traditional design process.
- Measuring outcomes: We did not feel the MLP method provided guidance or means to evaluate potential outcomes of interventions on a larger STEEP scale. We believe this to be a similarity with a more traditional design process, which also does not typically develop evaluation methods to gauge success.
- Holistic perspectives: Provides a more holistic approach towards understanding stakeholder relations and the evolving value tensions compared to other, more commonplace methods such using affinity diagramming to synthesize interview data points.
- Ideation methods: We found ourselves using common design methods such as affinity diagramming and mind mapping to make sense of our solution ideas and how they related to one another, which helped lead to larger insights. This was a familiar experience in its similarity to a traditional design process.
- Solution landscape: Transition design takes into consideration a larger perspective to then develop area-specific solutions. Whereas, traditional design methods focus on ‘product’ optimisation to cater to a global audience.
- Feedback and critique: One major point of departure from a more traditional design process was the absence of structured critique and feedback (unless solicited). We felt it would be nice to have opportunities in class to get feedback on our work in progress and also see what other groups are working on. This is a typical component of a design process — viewed by many as essential — that was missing in the MLP. We feel the shift to remote work exacerbated this by eliminating the incidental exposure to and conversations around work that happens in a physical studio environment.
05 References
American History [ushistory.org]
The Climate Change Denial Campaign
Major Air Pollution Sources In Pittsburgh
Toxic Ten — Meet Allegheny County’s
The History Of Commerce: From Cattle To Bitcoin In 30 Seconds [INFOGRAPHIC]
London’s Historic “Pea-Soupers” | About EPA | US EPA
Origins and Evolution of Human Language: Timeline
Vocational education in the United States
The History of Vocational Education from the 1900s to Today
Ben Franklin Technology Partner
The Deadly Donora Smog of 1948 Spurred Environmental Protection — But Have We Forgotten the Lesson?
30 Years: Pittsburgh moves from heavy industry to medicine, tech, energy
Google’s Tech growth in Pittsburgh
2035 100% renewable energy 2019
Fossil Free Steel : Steelmaking today and tomorrow
Global Steel Industry Groups Call For Urgent Action On Steel Excess Capacity Crisis
Trump Administration Weakens Climate Plan To Help Coal Plants Stay Open
U.S. Steel to hold info sessions about Clairton, Braddock plant upgrades
