This program features the author and designer of the recently released book Designing Lightness: Structures for Saving Energy. Designing Lightness is an appeal to start designing minimum-weight applications to seriously save energy. It also offers practical advice for doing so. Designing Lightness entertains the reader with its free associations, creating unexpected crosslinks between the world of composite materials and structural solutions. The volume precedes the conventional approach to sustainability, which focuses on symptoms rather than causes of environmental overload. Of interest to all design disciplines, it provides examples from packaging, vehicles, skyscrapers, and nanoscale phenomena.  

About the speakers:
Ed van Hinte graduated in Industrial Design and Engineering at the University of Technology in Delft. He became an author of professional books. Now he is mainly interested on the consequences of the reduction of material flows, of everything from food and consumer goods to airplanes and buildings with Lightness Studios Foundation. He is also a teacher and gives workshops on design and architecture all over the world. He is involved in design research at DRS22 in The Hague and works as an acclaimed design critic and writer. The most important books concern: lightweight structures, food waste reduction, long-term product value cultivation, and material flow management. His latest is Designing Lightness: Structures for Saving Energy, co-written with Adriaan Beukers and designed by Studio Renate Boere.

Quirine Dob, speaking on design of the book, is a designer, writer and project manager for Studio Renate Boere, where she has been working since 2018. Studio Renate Boere is a design studio that explores the latest graphic design practices. The firm develops and invents, apart from classical graphic design, interactive installations, hybrid publishing, and self-initiated innovative products. Research into new channels and media is an important part of their work. Dob is also a guest lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and she is studying at the Artistic Research Master track of the University of Amsterdam.
Organized by
AIA New York | Center for Architecture