Ontology for semantic web dealing with classes such as: Benefit | DevelopmentStage | Disruption | Embodiment | Improvement | Innovation | Innovator | Need | Problem | Symptom | Usage |

Here's a link to an interesting article published today at R&D Magazine for your general discussion:

http://www.rdmag.com/a...#

The article offers this "partial checklist" of considerations for site selection, arranged alphabetically by authors:

"Access to academic facilities
Access to locally manufactured/supplied materials
Access to traditional shipping routes/modes
Ecological restoration possibilities
Environmentally sensitive areas
Existing and potential parking characteristics
Historical uses
Mass transit access
Natural drainage patterns
Natural vegetation
Potential building configuration placement choices
Potential employee housing distribution map
Prevailing weather patterns
Soil analysis and contamination concerns
Solar orientation
Stormwater retention capabilities
Surface and subsurface rock strata
Topographical survey
Traditional insect habitat
Utility access for special purpose lab equipment
Zoning and neighborhood characteristics"

Perhaps "alphabetical" to duck debate on rank, and considering the inset graphing of "where sustainable projects reside", there doesn't appear to be much consensus.

Lot's of food for thought. For example, what does "prevailing weather patterns" mean in the midst of climate change? Most interesting to me at the moment is the top subheading: "Lower energy operating costs outweigh the extra cost to install sustainable systems." However, nature works this way too, if we consider *cost* as physical work. Unique life surrounding deep ocean vents is an example, which forms locally dominate those migrating from above that draw on the more permanent sunlight and come down for lunch, but the dark, cold journey makes this an energy trade.
And here's the core:

A regenerative commons has an energy supply that costs the same or less than that of competing systems.

Keeping in mind that creatures eat each other for energy, systems with relatively lower energy costs tend to be food for other systems as everything sustainable moves towards *balance*.
In that regard, today, the challenge is renewable-energy storage. Sunlight is cheap and fast, but storage is tough, nature solves this with biomass.

Managed forests are a deep solution for people and planet because they have this element, which is good to go in the search for the pattern language of "sustainability" in nature: *Value loops*.

Another crucial element is "prosperity", which might usefully be equated with *beauty*. It's "what's for lunch", as the saying goes.

"How can we design systems when we don't know what we're doing?

The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown. Not so unknown that they're hopeless, but not enough theory to predict the results of our decisions. Systems at this boundary often rely on emergent behavior — high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions.

When designing at this boundary, the challenge lies not in constructing the system, but in understanding it. In the absence of theory, we must develop an intuition to guide our decisions. The design process is thus one of exploration and discovery.

How do we explore? If you move to a new city, you might learn the territory by walking around. Or you might peruse a map. But far more effective than either is both together — a street-level experience with higher-level guidance.

Likewise, the most powerful way to gain insight into a system is by moving between levels of abstraction. Many designers do this instinctively. But it's easy to get stuck on the ground, experiencing concrete systems with no higher-level view. It's also easy to get stuck in the clouds, working entirely with abstract equations or aggregate statistics.

This interactive essay presents the ladder of abstraction, a technique for thinking explicitly about these levels, so a designer can move among them consciously and confidently.

I believe that an essential skill of the modern system designer will be using the interactive medium to move fluidly around the ladder of abstraction."

" A statement of a learning objective contains a verb (an action) and an object (usually a noun).

The verb generally refers to [actions associated with] the intended cognitive process.
The object generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct.
(Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, pp. 4–5)

The cognitive process dimension represents a continuum of increasing cognitive complexity—from remember to create. Anderson and Krathwohl identify 19 specific cognitive processes that further clarify the bounds of the six categories (Table 1).

The knowledge dimension represents a range from concrete (factual) to abstract (metacognitive) (Table 2). Representation of the knowledge dimension as a number of discrete steps can be a bit misleading. For example, all procedural knowledge may not be more abstract than all conceptual knowledge. And metacognitive knowledge is a special case. In this model, "metacognitive knowledge is knowledge of [one's own] cognition and about oneself in relation to various subject matters . . . " (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, p. 44). "