BeeP Blog

All of us at Blue Practice love field trips. We have some of our best, most inspiring days when we get out of the office and meet people face-to-face to learn about them, their work and the way they view the world. On Friday, we had the wonderful opportunity to take a group of 12 visiting journalism, architecture and environmental studies students from the University of Kansas in Lawrence and their professor Simran Sethi, an award-winning environmental journalist and author, on a field trip to visit four of our clients — a “Green Business Crawl,” as one of the students, Meg Ruggieri, aptly called it. We went, by Bauer’s biodiesel bus, to see William McDonough + Partners, PACT at the offices of their design collaborators, fuseproject, Lemnis Lighting and Mission Motors.

Back in Lawrence, the students spent the semester learning about green reporting, green jobs and green justice. They came to the Bay Area on their spring break as “embedded reporters”  to get a first-hand look at the growing field of green collar jobs. Along the way, they participated in a solar panel install on low income housing in Oakland with the non-profit GRID Alternatives, visited Laney College’s green jobs program and learned about the installation of greywater systems from the Greywater Alliance. With us, they met innovators who are pushing the boundaries of sustainable design and challenging perceptions of “green” products, as well as helping to pave the way for the widespread adoption of new technologies, like energy efficient lighting and alternative energy vehicles. The theme of the day seemed to be “no compromise.” To help make sustainability become the rule, not the exception, it needs to be easy (LED bulbs that resemble the incandescent bulb and can screw into a regular light socket), attractive (beautifully designed underwear that fit perfectly and align with consumers’ values) exciting (an electric motorcycle that delights even the most skeptical, die-hard gas motorcycle riders) and people-centric (buildings that inspire health and wellness and preserve precious natural resources for the benefit of future generations). Here is a snapshot of our day:

At William McDonough + Partners, the head of the San Francisco practice, David Johnson, provided a quick lesson in Cradle to Cradle 101, and then shared how the firm applies this philosophy to the built environment, using current projects for NASA and UCSF as examples. At fuseproject, Design Director Josh Morenstein and PACT CEO and co-Founder Jason Kibbey talked about how the studio collaborates with small companies like PACT. They also explained how they made decisions about PACT’s design, packaging and supply chain to create a completely new kind of underwear brand that could be both beautiful and sustainable, challenging stigmas attached to “green,” organic apparel. At Lemnis, Founder Warner Philips demonstrated an unbreakable, low-cost LED bulb that will light up Africa, and told the story of the Pharox bulb, a dimmable LED bulb launched in his home country, the Netherlands, and now available in the US. Finally, at Mission Motors, company co-Founder and President, Edward West, told the story of the high-performance electric superbike, the Mission One. In addition to learning about advanced lithium ion battery technology, touring Mission’s workshop and viewing the Mission One close up, students heard a recording of what it sounded like when the bike hit a speed record of 163 mph. One of the students described it as sounding “like something out of Star Wars.”

The students captured the entire experience via Twitter. You can view the feed here, or search Twitter for tweets and photos tagged #greenjobsku. Some of the students’ photographs are below, and you can see more on their flickr page. We want to take this opportunity to thank Simran and the entire group, Josh Hafner, Beth Beavers, Ariday Guerrero,Devin Lowell, Nick Mott, Bryan Dykman, Meg Ruggieri, Kristina Beverlin, Jordan Jaymes, Zach White, Laura Santora and Lauren Keith, for an unforgettable day!

We don’t have a photo from Mission, but here is an engine test that is pretty darned cool.