alan wells

During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design – it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:

Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.

I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki – it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.