Lessons towards a showcase building

We’re starting to retrofit one of our buildings as a showcase of sustainability.  I’m thinking about Schendler’s advice to find your biggest lever and pull on it.    As an educational institution we need to do more than just have a sustainable building.  For us, our biggest lever is to use that building to create a engaging experiences that will change behaviours – for the better.

I’ve been working up a set of guidelines for the engagement. Here’s a draft (the images here are mostly from the Eden Project and the Centre for Alternative Technology).

1. Be doing the right thing AND provide a quality experience for both the users and visitors.

2. Everything is an opportunity for learning.

3. Explain what both what you have done and what you are doing. Anticipate questions.

4. Engagement comes not just from information, but interaction, stories and relevance (and appealing to humour).

5. There is no “back of house”. Even works-in-progress are on show and subject to the same rules of doing the right thing and of engagement.

6. Take opportunities to make systems visible in ways that are relevant. Promote systems thinking, especially where resource use and/or impacts are usually hidden.

7. Make the right thing to do the easy option (without taking away from a quality experience), and give frameworks so that people can take that away with them.

8. The right answer is not always clear or obvious. It is OK to present different options.

9. It will never be finished – the journey is as important as the destination: where did we come from, how are we travelling, and where are we going?

8. Given that it will never be finished, we need systems of interpretation that are timely and flexible (ie temporary signage is needed but still needs to look good).

9. Treat the entire thing as a canvas (even the mundane) (see also this set)

10. Use multiple formats for deeper engagament and to extend the experience.

11. The development of the space should engage the community and be part of the learning process, in turn the space becomes a part of the community. The aim of the building both as a structure and a process must be engaging experiences that will change behaviours.

What have I missed? Let me know.