Addressing Resistance to a Fact-Based Approach

Abstract

Facts are critical to making informed decisions but are often not enough to convince people to change their priorities. Scientific approaches like LCA presents obstacles and opportunities to non-specialists, including designers.

The self-preservation instinct is typically hardwired into each individual. This genetic predisposition to avoid certain risks that loom large in our consciousness both safeguards the continuation of our species and blinds us to less visible and possibly much greater threats. Media outlets play to the natural human reliance on heuristics and implicit biases. The confusion a “post-fact” world creates serves to maintain the status quo by perpetually calling into question well-established facts and stalling fruitful debate. Spectacular headlines provoke irrational fears that distract from other, more statistically likely threats.

Rhetorical techniques frame facts. Denialism is intended to create paralysis. More information is not necessarily better, if it is derived from sources that only confirm sociopolitical biases rather than challenging them. It is important to acknowledge contextual headwinds operating at the largest scales in society before blithely applying a targeted set of analytical techniques to measure environmental impacts in a design project.

Before presenting the “how-to” of integrating a data-driven approach to sustainable design decisions, however, it is important to recognize that facts in one domain are not always enough to persuade a decision-maker. Attributional LCA may improve process-based decisions without requiring wholesale recanting of firmly held world views. Non-geometric data serves designers as a foundation to a fact-based and measured approach.