All of us at Design4D wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year!

In lieu of sending Christmas cards we have made a donation to the Oxfam East Africa Famine Fund.

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At Design4D we've been researching how health centres could play a larger role in the Big Society. Traditionally these are places where ill people come to get advice and medicine. Even some of the new expensive centres are mono-functional and completely introverted offering little back to the public realm.

Our research led us to discover a pioneering scheme called the Peckham Experiment in South East London. Established back in 1935 this experiment looked to provide health, leisure, education and family support in a community run scheme. There was even a farm nearby where organic food was grown to be sold in the centre. The focus was on achieving more than just a disease-free community but a healthy community. The architecture was an important part of this process and was specifically designed to express and accommodate the flexible needs of the project. This was more than just a place to get medicine this was a focus for community involvement and support.

We are slowing moving out of a recession caused by the invisible hand of greed but are about to enter an exciting new era. Architects and top developers have realised that to create sustainable communities you need to consider both the green agenda and the Fourth Dimension in architecture. We look forward to a healthy future.

The Peckham Experiment 1935

According to the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration more people die each year from traffic accidents (1.2 million) than from malaria (1 million). Millions more are injured and maimed. In Sao Paulo, traffic jams can stretch well over 100 miles and commute times average between two and three hours a day. With an expanding population and growing car ownership, traffic gridlock is inevitable adding to pollution problems and social frustration. Yet the car is a status symbol used to express ones success in modern society. Could this be about to change?

At Heathrow airport they have just launched a series of driverless pods which take people from the car park to the correct terminal. After hearing so much about Google's driverless car it is exciting to see a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system successfully up and running in Great Britain with future plans to incorporate the system in other cities. The future is nearer than you think. Watch this space...

This is an interesting documentary which looks into the mysterious and rapid decline in bee numbers. Bees are critical to the pollination of flowers which then results in the growth of fruits, vegetables, etc. Without bees our food crops would be devastated. The decline in bee populations has been so great that in America they are now flying crates of bees from Australia! This is obviously not sustainable. The exact cause of the bee deaths is unknown although a combination of intensive farming, removal of hedgerows and chemical pesticides are likely factors.

I am a big fan of green roofs, not only for their thermal mass and aesthetic appeal but because they encourage greater biodiversity. Urban bee keepers are helping to combat the decline in bee populations but we need to see cities providing suitable habitats for plants and animals, if not for our psychological benefit then definitely for our food production survival.

Action needs to be taken NOW before the disappearance of the bee has Serious consequences..

This video shows a highly plausible prediction of the future where networked home appliances tap into our digital social networks to predict and potentially shape our mood and home requirements.

Facebook enables a person to keep in touch with numerous social groups simultaneously while applications such as Foursquare enable real-time locating of individual people. This technology begins to form a database of your personality as shaped by your friends and surroundings. From this database we will see the birth of digital personalities, much like HAL in 2001:Space Odyssey, tailored to compliment your own mood and requirements. How is this going to affect our relationships with one another in the future and the environments we live in?

Transition Towns is a grass roots movement looking to provide answers to the issues of peak oil. Its initial proposals have many things to commend including the focus on rebuilding community and localised food sources as proposed on our Creekside Arcade project. Although I agree with parts of the model, I'm not sure that the anti-growth idea as discussed in the video is realistic to the human psyche which is pre-programmed through curiosity to develop, grow and evolve. Maybe economic growth needs to be redefined around carbon reduction and not GDP? Quality over quantity?

The definition of Happiness is wanting what you've got, not getting what you want, but where is the balance to be struck between unsustainable growth and negative human inertia, as seen in the Dark Ages, in the quest for happiness and sustainability? Could growth and profit be encouraged but redistributed to benefit communities? And how does localism factor into the global network? Big ideas that will effect urban design and which I hope to develop at the RSA's Profit with Purpose working group this week.

At Design4D we design with consideration of the fourth dimension. Why? and what does this mean?

Three dimensions describes an object by its x, y and z co-ordinates. In physics the fourth dimension combines three dimensions with a dimension of time to create spacetime. This concept of spacetime was important in the realisation of Einstein's special theory of relativity. Shifts in scientific thinking have always affected art as artists look to explore new ideas. Some of these explorations depict visual representations of the fourth dimension such as the tesseract or the mobius strip which in turn architect's have realised into literal built form.

As a student I was less interested in the physical articulation of spacetime but more in the potential of this fourth dimension of time within the design process. I began to explore time based media such as kinetic artwork and film. I found film captured movement of light, human narratives and spatial experiences better than the frozen two dimensional image or the rotated three dimensional sculpture. The concept of human narrative began to play a stronger role in my work as I looked to explore intangible time based ideas about creativity, community, sense of place and memory. These are ideas critical to a stable and harmonious civilisation the more our population expands and lives in closer proximity. There are no fixed rules as to how you explore and guarantee these important aspects of architecture are fulfilled but at Design4D we have formulated a framework called the Chronetik process. This process enables us to test how our schemes have considered more than just the social, environmental and economic aspects that the triple bottom line of business dictates.

Big Society, community, civilisation, call it what you will, but we believe that as our population expands the role of the architect will be key in achieving these social goals through consideration of the fourth dimension in architecture.

Visual representation of the fourth dimension

It may not be a popular view in architectural circles but I have just finished reading Prince Charles' book 'Tradition and Sustainability' and would recommend it to all architect's, as a lot of what is said is excellent common sense in terms of sustainability.  Unfortunately, where it is likely to become unpopular is its narrow definition of 'Traditional' style.

It would be interesting to hear what Prince Charles would say about our Shell House scheme, which we are currently talking to a number of developers about building. Here is a house that ticks all of the sustainability boxes, including its consideration of the "fourth dimension", which the book defines as "...community, memory, sense of place and creativity...", but the way it looks is the result of its construction and response to site. Potentially a 'classic' piece of architecture, but would the Shell House satisfy Prince Charles' belief in 'Tradition'?                       

Last week I watched 'The Human Planet' an amazing TV series documenting how the human species is the only animal to have carved out a life in every habitat on earth. The series reminded me of a book that had a big effect on my own design process titled 'The Naked Ape'. Published in 1967 the book was radical in its day for its zoological analysis of humans. It was the first time I had thought of humans as just another animal on the planet with the book describing how much of our 'civilised' life is constructed to relieve our most primeval instincts.

One of the main roles of architects in society is to enable the rapidly growing human population to live in closer proximity, something that is not necessarily 'natural' to our species. So while functionally an architect must come up with clever solutions to draw light and air deeper into denser living environments there is also an element of joy, spirit or soul which much be uplifted to enhance the monotony of life in the concrete jungle.