Mark Ernst

a forecast of the transition to a sustainable personal life on Texel in 2065 (have a look at the video/visuals) a general overview of the sustainable island in 2065, and possible transition pathways (report) an impression of  the development of island tourism 2015-2065 (view the documentary)

Re-generating Inorganic waste: Proposal for field research   On Tuesday afternoon 12 January 2016, 13:00-17:30 hrs, the group has to organise its own additional research on the sub-system. To draw your design in even more detail, you may want to visit a company to do some interviews with experts, inhabitants, entrepreneurs, civil servants or politicians. It is recommended to start timely with…

I wake up in the morning by the sounds of whistling birds and first detach myself from my health monitor. The screen shows I’m 100% recovered from my training of yesterday, that my muscles have grown by 0,5% and that I’m fully charged for a beautiful new day of my life. My battery had some problems charging lately, but it seems to be working properly again. It means my biomechanically enhanced…

During the research on the waste management system choices had to be made in order to properly narrow down the design problem. In this research the relations between the inhabitants of Texel, companies operating on Texel and the tourists visiting Texel turned out to be of great importance. The inhabitants can set the example, but both the companies and the tourists product a lot of waste and are…

As can be seen in the pathways there are a lot of stakeholders and events that are related to changing the waste treatment system. The municipality should communicate their vision and make way for entrepreneurs to be able to start new sustainable waste treatment businesses (and others). The existing companies should have a common understanding about sustainability and have to implement it in…

One possible technological solution that can, to a large extent, solve Texel’s inorganic waste problem is biodegradable packaging. Solid waste predominantly consists of packaging waste (In developed countries, food packaging represents 60% (Northwood and Oakley-Hill, 1999) of all packaging.). Consumer goods without any kind of packaging is unfathomable nowadays. Even though theoretically, 93…

Ram Kamath Ely, Smith & Stirling, 2013 1.Hybrid Innovation pathways At the two ends of the spectrum of possible trajectories to sustainable systems ,are green industrialisation and grassroot innovations. Green industrialisation pathways are led by the government or large corporations. Such initiatives are top-down in nature and are driven by technology push. Grassroot movements are citizen driven…

I was reading the news this morning, thinking how hard it is to make the transition happen to a sustainable, 100% self-sufficient Texel. There are so many things to deal with, it’s such a complex system. But then I read an very interesting article in The Guardian. As we are trying to begin small, designing a sustainable island like Texel, one small country at the other side of the world is…

The context, place and time, is quite fixed for the tourists. So the design space is situated more in the action and relation part. The tourists need to be more ‘connected’ to the local citizens. They need to tune in and be engaged in the system of collecting and seperating the waste. When also their communion feeling is improved, their reputation will go up. What is important is that they will…

Last week I was working in an office building in the city centre of Rotterdam, near Central Station. An office building like many others in The Netherlands:  where the lights stay on when everybody is already celebrating their weekend; where computers are on and running 24/7, so also during the nights and the weekends; where the heating is on 24°C degrees so that the people can only wear a t

When future architectural historians will look back to the twentieth century, from their sustainable world in the second half of this century, they must wonder why we did so little about sustainable living in the second half of that century. It wasn’t because we didn’t have enough money, cause we had. It wasn’t because we didn’t have the knowledge, cause we had. It wasn’t because we didn’t have…