AIA CES

Sustainability, Healthy and Safe Communities, and Professional Practice Top Priority List

The AIA has unveiled its 2008 federal legislative and regulatory agenda, looking to build from the Institute's advocacy successes in 2007 while continuing to raise the profile of design issues at the national level.

The agenda reflects three broad themes -- Designing a Sustainable Future, Promoting Healthy and Safe Communities, and Helping Architects Practice their Profession -- that address the core values and priorities of the AIA's more than 80,000 members. The issues span from green building to affordable health care, to the nomination of a licensed architect as the next Architect of the Capitol.

The agenda focuses on these key issues:

Designing a sustainable future

• Extending energy efficient tax incentives
• Promoting carbon neutral buildings through climate change legislation
• Greening America's homes

Promoting healthy and safe communities

• Using tax incentives to revitalize older neighborhoods, create affordable housing, and preserve historic structures
• Promoting community planning as a part of transportation planning
• Providing incentives to clean up brownfields
• Helping communities respond to disaster
• Protecting the integrity of the U.S. Capitol by making the next Architect of the Capitol a licensed architect

Helping architects practice their profession

• Reducing barriers to small design firms that want to compete for federal government design contracts
• Make health care affordable for businesses

If you were to create continuing education courses, what content would you need to teach in order for AIA members to accomplish these agenda items?

For the tech:

"Portability" is a word you’ll hear a lot this year. More mobile phones will provide desktop computer functions: Web surfing, viewing TV broadcasts, two-way video game playing, social networking, etc. Even so, cell phone prices will drop this year.
Web tablets are on the verge of taking off, with qwerty keyboards on a touch screen and scores of functions for under $250. Size: 6" by 3". Early versions are already available ... the Nokia N800 and Sony’s Mylo, for example. Web tablets are really just big wireless smart phones.

Google will develop a phone with better Web browsing ability. Instead of the small number of Web sites offered by most cell phones now, Google’s phone will enable broad Web access. It’ll speed up searches, and its mapping technology will let users locate nearby restaurants, for example, as well as view menus and read recent reviews.
More service improvements are on tap for 2009 after the sale of airwaves in the Federal Communications Commission auction this month. Once TV stations free up wireless spectrum when they go all digital, mobile technology will be even more competitive, lowering prices further.

Cybercrooks are moving into industrial espionage in a big way. They function as a new breed of widely dispersed organized criminals. Gangs in one country work with servers in another to stage an attack on a company in a third ... stealing secrets to gain a competitive edge for themselves or to sell to competitors of the company being hacked.
Top targets: Financial services, IT, aerospace, and Rx drugs. Ongoing vigilance is the best way to protect against serious damage. . . "  Read the full AIArchitect article.

Outside of the AIArchitect article, I read interesting information on podcasting, and YouTube for professors.  Continuing education will reap the benefits of these forms of content delivery.  What have you experienced as a student that was innovative in delivery approach, and effective in teaching?

A coalition of eight architecture, landscape architecture, and design organizations are pushing to create a new National Academy of Environmental Design. As a new part of the National Academies, the National Academy of Environmental Design would focus on the built environment, and how buildings and cities could produce less waste, consume less energy, and contribute to healthier living and work spaces.  Please visit ya-edu.com for the full article. 

As sustainable design theories become more prevalent in business decisions, what do design professionals need to know to meet the demands of not the public, and the associations that represent them?