Sustainability in design
twin buttes farm
twin buttes sustainable house in the process of being built
The Final interdisciplinary project for freshman this year was to build something on campus that was sustainable.
To explore sustainability the ninth grade got to go on field trips. I went up to the Twin buttes development where we got to tour sustainable houses and a sustainable farm.
In the garden I got to see what real sustainability is: the farmers made most of what they used themselves, cutting down on the waste created by traditional farming. They made their own compost with local materials and used it to fertilize the soil, most farms ship their fertilizer in, which is bad for the environment. They also farm bees to fertilize crops. What makes the farm sustainable is that it is (mostly) a closed system, meaning it makes what it uses and uses what it makes with as little waste as possible.
I was very inspired by the twin buttes farm and greenhouse and decided to use some ideas and knowledge from that visit. I got to see a geodesic dome on another field trip in turtle lake. We learned that greenhouses have to maintain a high temperature and level of humidity;which you can create by keeping standing water inside or composting inside. You can keep the standing water in a coy fish tank (with live coy fish!) or a bathtub. The sun hits the clear plastic and the heat is trapped inside. By trapping this heat and making it humid inside you create a new climate, which helps the plants grow.
When our teachers told us we would be building something sustainable on campus within 4-5 weeks, I didn't believe them, I didn't think we could do it. I really didn't think we could produce anything when we took the whole first two weeks prototyping, ideating and designing.
I really liked the gardens that we visited and wanted to do something like that on campus, my first idea was a keyhole garden which you can see on your left. The keyhole garden uses materials that would otherwise be treated as waste which made it very appealing to me. I first sketched the garden, many, many times. Then I built a physical prototypes which people then critiqued. The 9th grade team didn't like the keyhole garden idea because it did not fit their values of community.
Now that we are done with the project, I see that the prototyping process was important. The data that we gathered when prototyping helped us make decisions throughout the project. One thing that we did when prototyping was empathy interviews with students and staff. Through observing students and interviewing them we found that they value community and communal space. We tried to stay true to the spirit of Animas in the aesthetics of the dome. For example we used materials that we found on campus, like wood from our first physics exhibition, the Rube Goldberg machine to make a bench/ storage unit.
how a greenhouse uses the sun for heat
keyhole garden
This is our physical prototype for the whole area including the path down to the river.
This is our scale drawing of the interior layout of the dome. The four circles in the center are the tire planters, the small rectangles on the perimeter are the wooden garden beds, the larger red rectangle in the bottom right is the bench/cabinet, and the circle next to it is a barrel that we will use for water storage when we get the water system set up.
Our steps from the bottom of the hill! Nick and Amelia dug the spaces for the stone and I put the mortar under the stones to provide balance and then mortar all around them to provide stability. I also added mortar on the risers (vertical sections between the flat sections that you step on) so that the dirt would be less likely to collapse and crumble with pressure over time.
We decided to build the dome around this black wooden pole. I thought about the value of community that students find very important and came up with the hand-print idea. Xavier, Darby, Billie, and I put our hand prints all over in our school colors: green and yellow and then paint 'Animas' and 'class of 2021' on the sides of the pole.
Our path to the creek! Our group cleared out lots of bushes and plant debris to put this path in. After they put the stones in, I thought they were hard to balance on so I decided to mortar these steps too! Now that this path is clear some sophomores put in a water wheel that generates electricity!
Our group leader Sarah worked hard on this herb bed that sits on the left side of the creek path.
please read the info on the upper right side of the screen for a brief description of each project!
dome tour!
tire planters
Steps to the dome
I had fun building this bench/cabinet piece. You can find out more about the process in the description of the video above!
We used the wood from a project we did earlier this year called the 'Rube Goldberg machine'. We wanted to keep the same paint on the doors because it ties back into the value of community.
Some of our group members! (from left to right) Billie Brand, Amelia O'toole, Darby Voorhees, Sarah Okane, Grace Dendy, (standing behind) Amira Aquarian, (kneeling on the far left) me: Rosie Gurnee.