interacting with our environment

the direction of the class has led us to investigate five different topics of "our lifestyles" in separate groups.  each group will be a set of people with an interest in one of these topics who will be able help each other in our own, individual projects.  essentially we are creating a project of our choosing with a support group.  the professor will lead us through discussions, exercises and offer case studies, but we will each be designing our own project.

i am in the "interacting with our environment" group.  as to what exactly this means... no one yet knows.  i have interpreted it to mean DEALING with the PROBLEMS that occur from humans REACTION to their SURROUNDINGS.  people develop physical and social needs based on how they want to live their lives, and the solutions that occur from addressing these needs tend to create problems that we hear so much about today.  we lament about how our downtowns have no parking when we have created the problem through our reliance on the automobile, or how we are dealing with chemicals and toxins in our buildings that we have created by making them air-tight.  or how the products that we use today are less about functionality as they are about fashion.  the reality is:  these are all design problems.

there are an infinite number of avenues of which to explore this topic, however i am choosing to explore the most basic, yet largest scale human response:  buildings.  more explicitly i will explore our social relationship to our human-built environment at the scale of our urban cities today, and how we can not only design for some of these issues we face today, but also on how we can design for the issues of tomorrow.