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Ann Thorpe
Ann has led university courses on sustainable design in the US and the UK. She has also worked with US architects and designers to support green building and product stewardship, which included serving as co-chair of the US Green Building Council’s Cascadia Chapter and participating in collaborative eco-redesign projects with companies. She has published articles and presented papers on sustainable design internationally. She spent time as publisher and editor of On the Ground, a journal on community, design and environment. Ann holds a BS in Design and Environment from Stanford University and an MA in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. [find this bio boring? try this one instead...] current affiliations contact c/o Department of Design, Development, Environment & Materials London Book Launch RSVP essential to Catherine Tchitembo by email only to catherine.tchitembo@ucl.ac.uk Online Book Discussion
Influences: my two favorite franchises are Jane Austen and Star Trek. Someone once asked me why I would like such a militaristic show, and I thought “yeah, why is that?” Of course I realized later that Star Trek has always been about design and sustainability. It’s what Bruce Sterling calls “design fiction.” And Jane Austen, well, perhaps you can spot a few of her phrases in my book. Favorite sayings: My favorite saying now is, “don’t tell yourself ‘no,’ let someone else tell you ‘no’.” This is something my mom always said to me when I was growing up and giving lame excuses for why I couldn’t do this or that—things I wanted to do but was too afraid, shy or whatever to try. The saying wasn’t my favorite then, but it really helped me grow. Once you master it, you move into this mindset that recognizes it takes 9 “no”s to get to a “yes.” This came in handy with the book, where many people said “no.” My other favorite saying comes from an Australian friend. When I first heard it I was stunned, amused—and relieved: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Perhaps this is a corollary to, "if you're not falling down, you're not trying hard enough." Consider, for example, Buckminster Fuller, who liked to say he was, "the world's most successful failure" --a guy who tried hard and fell down, sometimes. Really, why “atlas”?: The original title for the book was, Sustainability as a Language for Design. I loved the title, but others with experience didn’t. So I started casting about for another title and hit upon the Atlas. I really like maps and atlases. I like the fact that they capture so much information visually as well as how they capture perspectives. Like design, it’s an overlay of disciplines on one plane—geology, sociology, biology, economy…In fact, maps are beginning to form a theme for my work. One of my previous projects was a web site that offered a virtual map of recycled content buildings (regrettably the site isn’t up anymore). In fact I have a project on the back burner that concerns maps but I can’t say anything more about that now. Design: I’ve been a designer since I was quite young, but my medium has changed substantially over the years. I was captured by the romance of the modernist designers – like Charles and Ray Eames -who wanted to use design to improve things for normal people. At the same time, I’ve always been torn between aesthetics, style and form on the one hand, and pursuing something “deep and meaningful” on the other. As I’ve started to study consumption and to understand the meaningful role that objects have always played for humans, I have a better appreciation for the depth and meaning of aesthetics, style, and form, but I'm still drawn to the bigger picture. The thing I love about design is its interdisciplinary nature, the unexpected intersections that make the connections between form, style and the bigger picture - how the process of resolving a problem brings it all out. Other interests: skiing volcanoes and knitting. This combination is more common than you might think (among both men and women), especially on the US West Coast, where I’m from. I've been knitting since I was a teenager and backcountry skiing since I was at college.
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