Living Future 2015

Google and GSA will share strategies to develop, implement and validate new practices to enhance occupant health and experience - in contrast to existing standards that emphasize risk reduction rather than health promotion. Both Google and GSA will present highlights from their work using evidence-based approaches to identify the links between health and indoor environmental quality. Google will present a process for developing design and construction IEQ performance targets, and how occupant experience metrics can be commissioned and verified.  GSA will present findings from field studies of indoor daylight in which study participants wear sensors to measure circadian light exposure.

Our session is inspired by the understanding that, in any sustainable system, waste must equal food. Food, in turn, is culture – a prime topic for restorative design. Connecting local communities, food and nutrient flows is key to restoring culture and our environment. This workshop combines education and application aimed at cultural and environmental restoration. The goal is to gain food independence, eliminate waste, repair culture, improve health, and transform a regional food web. Our session is designed to harness the wisdom of the Living Future crowd in applying a nascent Net-Zero Nutrients imperative to a First Nation community and homeland.

Through working with companies of all sizes and industries, we know most organizations have a wealth of employees who care about the environment and want to make a difference. However, sustainability programs that try to leverage human behavior to create change often fail--even though the desire and motivation is there--because owners bet on a single intervention to engage people, rather than using a collection of influential strategies. Learn how to inspire the people you work with to create change through the Influencer Model developed by VitalSmarts, named Change Management Approach of the Year by MIT Sloan Management Review.

Building developers and managers struggle to quantify the personal and communal health impacts of energy decisions. Evaluating building energy efficiency and operating costs is fairly straightforward; improvements in employee health and well-being are less so, and improvements in the health of communities abutting extraction, processing and transfer activities can seem abstract. In this session, we will illuminate human health and energy relationships at the building, neighborhood and regional scale as well as reveal health evaluation strategies using the best available evidence base from emerging health and energy policy science.

The first of the Baby Boomers turning 65 marks the beginning of a population shift which will result in the largest senior population in American history. The resulting demand for senior care will necessitate unprecedented creativity in community-building – providing the physical infrastructure needed to address expanding needs while capitalizing on the social equity retirees can bring to communities. This interactive session will explore current models for the delivery of care, emerging technologies, and alternative development models for distributed care and self-directed cooperative aging. It will attempt to envision a model where care is integrated into vibrant, diverse and healthy communities.

At Google, we strive to create the healthiest workplaces imaginable that positively impact the health and well-being of our employees, both today and 30 years from now. To that end, we’ve set ambitious performance goals across our global facilities portfolio, establishing key criteria and metrics for use experience, sustainability and health - including indoor air quality, acoustics, biophilia, lighting quality and thermal comfort - that best support employee health, happiness and productivity. However, performance metrics to attain some of these key objectives can be difficult to quantify and existing standards and benchmarks are sometimes too prescriptive. Using the Google Chicago office project as the case study, this session explores the opportunities and challenges with using leading industry standards, such as LEED version 4, WELL Building Standard and Living Building Challenge to achieve some of these ambitious outcomes while meeting Google’s priorities to create high performing workplaces.