Week 2 discussion sustainable design

answer these in essay format 1. Before you begin this Discussion, you’ll want to read the article from this week’s resources: National Geographic: “Big Idea: The Carbon Bathtub”. Then please visit this online climate game. (You’ll need a computer or mobile device that supports “Flash” animation.) In the game, atmospheric carbon dioxide is depicted as a "bathtub." If atmospheric CO2 exceeds 450 parts per million, the "bathtub" will overflow. First, hit the "play" button on the upper left of the game, to show historic emissions and CO2 concentrations up to 1997. Then, you get to decide the future of CO2 emissions from 1997 onward: you can let them increase, stabilize them, or reduce them. Try all three choices – it won't take long. Using ideas from this week, explain what's going on in the simulation - why does it behave the way it does when you make different choices? What conclusions do you draw from this? Can you apply the “bathtub” analogy to other situations with which you are familiar? 2.Your research this week will begin with thoughtful observation. We’ve used a “bathtub” analogy to think about stocks and flows in systems. Keeping that in mind, please observe and think about something in the built environment that you can directly examine and analyze. It could be a building, neighborhood, park, household, commercial establishment, part of our built infrastructure, and so on. You may find it very helpful to draw a diagram of it, using a box or other symbol as a stock, with arrows, valves, or other symbols indicating flows into and out of the stocks. For what you observe, please think of it as a system of throughput: materials and energy, possibly people, flowing in and out, similar to flows in and out of a bathtub via faucets and drains. Part One Please report about the stocks and flows of what you’ve observed. What is flowing in and out? WHY are those flows occurring? What goods and services are enabled or supported by those flows? Does a lot of benefit result from each unit of flow through the system? Why or why not? Where do the “source” flows come from? Where do the “sink” flows go? Are the “sink” flows useful “source” flows for other systems? As you observe and think about this, what conclusions do you draw? Can you make suggestions about ways to redesign the configuration of the system to provide more service with fewer throughputs? Part Two Please read the (instructor-edited) excerpt from Wikipedia on “Emergent Properties”.