For this phase I reviewed the guidelines and information for producing outputs. It is quite a lot: some pages from the web site, several longer emails, the output on outputs and design cycles paper from Andy Langford, the evaluation sheet, the email conversations on the grading system and the emails in regards to the delivery timing and processing of outputs. For the evaluation sheet I had to create another spreadsheet that contains all the detail explanation of all the different criteria in order to print it out. I couldn't help feeling that this is too much and getting too academic. It took me a whole day! I do want to integrate some of the suggestions and approaches in this output and I also want to encourage Gaia University to produce maybe a 2 to 3 page document that covers it all.

I decided to change the title for this project from "Urban Residential Retrofit for Sustainable Living" to "Urban Residential Design for Sustainable Living". For me the word "retrofit" emphasizes the construction aspects of this project a little bit more than I want, leaving out the social and economic thinking.
This project is intended to showcase and realize an example how to transform, over a few years of time, a fairly "regular" single residence home in a town setting into a place of urban sustainable living or taking major steps towards that goal applicable to a wide range of situations. My vision is to take the already existing built environment, in this case our home, and redesign it in a way that achieves a significant reduction of the ecological footprint with a minimum of resources and costs and, at the same time, without lowering the quality and comfort of living.
The original project scope recently has been extended to also include a component that is uncompromising in terms of material selection and lifestyle. For more details see the article "Project Definition".
This project is also viewed as an example of something an individual, family or small group can do from the bottom up, and as such complement and infuse projects that work on a larger scale, like city repair, re-localization, post-petroleum, transition towns and climate change that work bottom down, aiming to discontinue many of the self-destructive behaviors (see also Ecopsychology and Deep Ecology) of humankind and provide support for individuals, households and communities to create a sustainable culture.

For this phase and output I am following the SADIE design framework as described in Andy Langford's paper (this is 6MBs!) and some of the concepts from software development and project management described in the survey. I also started using two mind maps - one for gathering all the ideas in regards to this project phase (please see HELP before accessing this document or download the mind map file for viewing it with FreeMind) and one to produce this output, which exists only on paper.

Besides photos and any conceptual and detail drawings I consider the project and budget plans to be the major results of this phase.

In order to stay within the intention and requirement of the project to be a demonstration site, one of its main strategic qualities, and based on our time schedule and availability of resources, we decided to focus on the front yard, the deck on the East and North side and on increasing our ability to grow more of our own food.

The decision on the actual implementation scope (mainly the front yard), the studying of the material on output creation and the experience of constantly needing to overlap the different design cycle phases, made me realize again that I am actually using an incremental design process for this project (see journal entry from 05/30/2007 with the title "Analysis & Design phase Journal of my project", sub-section "A Long Entry Today! Incremental Design." from May 21st, 2007).