I did not do an official count but I would guess there were at least 90-100 people who made it out on Friday Feb 7 to the first Sustainability Drinks event at betahaus. I was feeling pretty excited about giving my talk on „Broad Spectrum Sustainability“ but the audience was a looking a bit tired after they had just sat through an hour of introductions and the first presentation. So I decided to take a chance and do an experimental interactive warm up exercise where I quickly divided the audience onto 3 groups and got each group to sing part of a groovy loop. People warmed up to it quite quickly and it proved to be a humorous interaction for everyone in the room. At this point I gained most everyone’s enthusiastic attention and an atmosphere of good will and fun filled the room.
My goal was to get people to think more broadly about the concept of sustainable development by stepping beyond the typical perspectives of ecologic and economic frameworks to also consider aesthetic, personal, social and cultural perspectives of sustainability. This portion of the talk focussed on an understanding of the idea that sustainability = the ability of a system to maintain balance, and how that could be interpreted considering all six perspectives.
Later the talk evolved towards showing how these perspectives on sustainability were used to develop the Baumhaus concept, it’s design and event programming as a „platform for broad spectrum sustainability“. I included part of the video from of our 3-d fly through as part of the power point slide show that the audience seemed to enjoy.
During the fly through I told people that the Baumhaus is a project to build a public space in the form of an indoor tree house in the Wedding district of Berlin as a platform for collaborative sustainable development. I spoke a bit about one of the fundamental ideas behind the Baumhaus project: utilizing the transformative super powers of aesthetics, art & design as functional tools to create an environment dedicated to the idea of inspiring people to come together and engage with each other in meaningful ways.
The last part of my talk focussed on giving an example of a how I used a flexible contextual framework called, „The Inner Commons,“ that I am developing to explore my own sense of personal sustainability. The looks on people’s faces were great; I definitely sparked some curiosity, confusion and even started cultivating a few new collaborations…
At the end of my talk I made the big announcement that the Baumhaus has a new partnership with the Thomas Mampel & .garage, a well respected business coaching institute here in Berlin. The .garage and Baumhaus are now going to be jointly developing a hybrid program for developing and coaching social start-ups with broad spectrum sustainability perspectives. As part of our partnership the .garage has offered to fund significant part of Baumhaus overhead costs during our design and building phase.
We are really happy to have Thomas Mampel and the .garage as partners along with many of you in our common quest to use frameworks of sustainability as tools to develop more humanely balanced communities and businesses.
Peace,
Scott
p.s. [it might take a bit of editing but I will eventually put parts of my presentation online]
All photos – Andrew James
