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Like any other red-blooded American, I enjoy the latest video of some rickety old building, such as the Pacific NW’s beloved Seattle Kingdome, imploding or exploding. But at what cost? Especially when we know that a third of all the trash produced in the United States comes from construction and demolition waste.

Enter Chilean architect Alberto Mozó. In the design of the BIP Computers office in Santiago, Chile, Mozó incorporated the philosophy of transitivity—designing structures so that they can be easily broken down and reconstructed elsewhere. So now, as with every other important aspect of our lives, we can take our buildings with us when we go.

What makes the building transferable is the use of the same standard-sized timber beams throughout the design. At 9 x 34.2-centimeters, the beams do not need specialized labeling and placement because they can be used interchangeably. Also, due to the standard size, beams can be mass laminated, reducing the amount of waste during the process.

So, why hasn’t this trend been picked up in the U.S.? Some would argue that in such a mess of an economic crisis, cutting jobs (like that of wrecking ball operators) isn’t the wisest idea. But what about job creation? Why couldn’t these same wrecking ball operators apply for positions with a construction company that never really tore anything down? If construction companies hire someone to demolish buildings, they should be able to hire people to manage the breakdown and reconstruction of buildings.

With impressive resource-conserving initiatives already making their way through the architecture/construction industry (see LEED-certified buildings, houses made from recycled automobile parts, etc.), transitivity, the ultimate model of reusability, needs to be incorporated in our design much more frequently.

Regardless of the fact that a building being demolished looks much cooler than a building being responsibly broken down.

This is the second post in a series about messaging. To read the first one, go here.

When I heard about Facebook’s recent PR debacle, I wondered whether messaging could have helped them avoid it. If you haven’t heard, Facebook tried to change its terms of service under the radar. The new terms implied that Facebook owned its users’ content, and had the rights to distribute and sell it, even after a user deleted his or her account. After a swell of bad press and an enraged blogosphere, Facebook went back to its former terms of service and moved to reassure its users that they owned the rights to their own content.

The hubbub made me wonder, “Who, besides the Facebook lawyers, reviewed the new terms of service?” One would think anyone with a communications bent could have seen the impending trouble from a mile away. Had Facebook put its terms of service through a messaging process, where the words they intended to use were evaluated, revised, debated and tested, they might have avoided the whole brouhaha. Surely someone with an eye on the customer would have said, “Won’t these terms make our customers mad?”

The messaging process can be exhausting, but one thing it does (if it’s done right) is put a message through a number of tests. Is the message

• About something the audience cares about and wants?
• Communicating a unique benefit?
• Able to stand out against the competition?
• In line with the brand?
• Using words the audience will understand?
• Legally defensible?

And that’s the short list.

You may be thinking, “Why in the world should legal stuff go though a messaging process? Leave that to the lawyers and the weirdos with OCD who like to read the fine print.”

Well, if you want your brand experience to be seamless, then everything that goes out to customers—legal jargon, billing statements, marketing materials—should go through something like the messaging process: They all contribute to the customer’s overall perception of the brand. Facebook’s terms of service put a big dent in their image. Even though they’ve tried to repair the damage, its users are less likely to trust the company to protect their interests.

That leads me back to the question, “Why are messaging experts so nosy?” Here at AHA! we ask our clients a lot of questions. Questions about the product, the competition, about what they’ve done before, what they want to do in the future, legal compliance questions, environmental and ethical questions. That’s because we know words have power. And words say more and mean more than some would ever expect, as Facebook recently learned the hard way. If we do our jobs right, ask the right questions, put our words through the wringer, we eventually get to just the right ones.

The downturn of the economy has made people think twice about the way they spend their hard earned dollars. The act of shopping has been redefined, where bargains and sales have become a consumer’s best friend. In these trying times, will “green” practices come second to frugality, becoming a thing of the past? According to Green Seal and EnviroMedia Social Marketing they won’t. In fact, their recent study (PDF) found that 82% of consumers are still buying green products, even when they cost more.

Four out of five people are saying that they are still buying green products and services today, but how do they come to choose one brand over the next? Out of the 1,000 consumers surveyed, twenty-one percent (21%) say a product’s reputation is the biggest factor they weigh when making purchasing decisions followed by word of mouth (19%) and brand loyalty (15%). Only 9% say green advertising is their primary influencer.

With statistics like these, how brands choose to communicate their message to consumers is proving to be crucial for being able to weather this economic storm and move on to brighter days.

I just wanted to share an excellent piece written by my esteemed rep in Congress, Earl Blumenauer, for the Huffington Post. In it he lays out many good reasons for bike- and pedestrian-friendly investments in urban infrastructure, specifically bike paths. He cites Portland as a shining example of the benefits of bike commuting, with eight percent of downtown Portland workers cycling to work. As members of the minority party in the Senate are attempting to remove such investments from the hotly-debated stimulus bill, I think it’s important to add my voice to Blumenauer’s to help proliferate facts over fiction. Blumenauer’s points, some of which are included below, make a good business case for cycling and the potential environmental benefits.

On a national level, Blumenauer cites, more than 50% of working Americans live less than five miles from work, an easy bicycle commute. Already more than 490,000 Americans bike to work. Nationally, if we doubled the current one percent of all trips by bike to two percent, we would collectively save more 693 million gallons of gasoline – that’s more than $5 billion dollars – each year. From 2007 – 2008, bicyclists reduced the amount Americans drive by 100 million miles.

The ROI for communities is significant as well. For each $1 million invested in an FHWA-approved paved bicycle or multi-use trail, the local economy gains 65 jobs and between $50 and $100 million in local economic benefits. After investing less than 1% of their total transportation budget in bicycle facilities in the past eight years, the City of Portland has seen a 144% increase in bicycle use – and the growth of a $90 million bicycle industry that has added nearly 50 new businesses in just the past two years.

Apparently, the minority in the Senate doesn’t agree with Blumenauer and has attempted to remove all bike path investments from their version of the Stimulus bill. So my question is: is cycling partisan? Will it be a wedge issue for the next election? I can just hear the talking points now.

Clearly, an anti-bike agenda goes against sustainable practices. Help create sustainable jobs by promoting investments in bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Let the people decide whether to drive, walk or ride.

The peanut butter salmonella scare is just the latest in a long series of food contamination issues—and it is, unfortunately, not the only one in the news right now. What else should you be worrying about? Antibiotics in your vegetables. And yes—possibly even your organic vegetables.

In a nutshell: researchers found that as much as 90% of the antibiotics given to livestock (to promote growth and prevent illness) gets excreted. And what do we do with cow manure? That’s right—we use it as fertilizer. The result? Trace amounts of antibiotics get absorbed by plants as they grow, and we all end up with penicillin in our peppers. (You can read more about the health and environmental implications of this at the Ethicurean.)

This is in addition to another study that found trace amounts of mercury in high-fructose corn syrup (PDF).

So what is a consumer to do? Nothing feels safe (and likely, nothing is totally safe). It’s already hard enough to communicate about food, with labels like “natural” and “organic” meaning next to nothing. But now these words mean even less: we can’t avoid low doses of drugs in the safest of the safe healthy foods (whole, organic fresh produce) even if we try. Consumers need a dictionary to purchase anything these days: free-range, cage-free, pasture-raised, grass-finished, rBGH-free. What’s next: “Grown with antibiotic-free cow shit”?

Seventh Generation tells us that we have “the right to know” and we do—the question is how are we supposed to know when we have no meaningful language with which to talk about it?