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Sustainability Mashups develop dialogue between disciplines 

By Karen Herland

CSU Sustainability VP Alex Oster kept meeting different people around the university involved in dynamic and innovative sustainability research projects but whenever he asked one if they were aware of the related work another was doing, he was told that opportunities for such discussions were rare.

“I realized so much knowledge about sustainability is very specialized and people work within very narrow fields,” he said. “But often the solutions require moving outside of your own field.”

This idea led Oster to institute Sustainability Mashups as a feature of his programming for February as the CSU’s Green Month.

The idea was simple. Bring together two people from entirely different fields of study to address a common theme related to sustainable practices and see what happens. The mashups open up the space for building collaboration.

“I think this kind of series is really important and needs to keep happening,” said pk langshaw, who participated in the first mashup and has let sustainability feed her design arts practice for over a decade.

“Until recently, sustainability was primarily understood as ecological—eco designs, reuse and recycling, for example. Now, there’s more of a movement to acknowledge the inherent integration of economic, social and environmental elements,” said the design and computation arts professor, who describes her work as social design.

“Much of my research/creation projects and teaching initiatives have a component of university and community interaction.”

For the last ten years Concordia design students have been working mentoring youth from Centre Dans La Rue serving youth at risk. The DLR high school students earn credits by learning computer skills and the design students are credited for sharing those skills.

More recently, she has been running a design laboratory called d_verse through Hexagram. This project is more abstract involving a variety of communication technologies in performance. The sustainable element is also less directly accessible and the result of intensive research to source the most socially, economically and environmentally sustainable materials, practices and resources in producing and presenting the work. “It is really embedded into everything I do. It’s sometimes not obvious.”

Langshaw was paired with geography planning and environment professor Jochen Jaeger, whose research tracks the impact of urban sprawl, roads and transit systems on the natural world and ecosystems.

They were both very aware of the importance of language in terms of their own work and their ability to understand each other’s approach. “It’s like a multilingual dialogue. You realize that the same words, from different perspectives, have different meanings,” said langshaw.

“It’s important to clarify concepts,” added Jaeger. “You need to really immerse yourself in the other discourse to understand each other.”

Jaeger’s PhD research combined quantitative research based on landscape metrics with qualitative information collected from interviews with people involved in transportation planning, landscape planning, and nature conservation. Now, 12 years later, he still recognizes the difficulties inherent in combining two different fields, and the rarity of this type of practice. “Just a few scientific journals publish such trans-disciplinary work. Unfortunately, a lot of the research stays within one discipline, or is very shallow.”

He is also suspicious of how some scientists are using the word “sustainable” instead of really understanding and applying the concepts behind it.

“In some cases, you see people substituting the term ‘sustainable management’ when they really just mean ‘good management.’ It’s a new name but they haven’t really changed anything.”

Ultimately he’s very excited by the potential of projects where those involved really take the time to learn, understand and apply different approaches from outside their own field.

“I’m really very supportive of this process. This connection is essential if we want to bridge the gap between political declarations about moving towards ‘sustainability’ and the actual decision making in the real world.”

Oster planned three mashups for the month. The last one will take place on Feb. 16 in the MB Building. See details on the other workshops and lectures programmed for Green Month online.

A month of programming is only one of the initiatives Oster has introduced as VP Sustainability and Special Projects. He is also working to have the CSU adopt an ethical purchasing policy and a dietary choice policy to ensure vegan and vegetarian options at CSU events.