Sustainability Street

Beyond Conventional Signage: Making Sustainability Simple, Accessible, and Actionable

Sustainability Street was conceived by the UBC Sustainability Office as a living platform for sustainable thinking.

But the communications challenge was significant.Traditional interpretive signage risked turning the experience into instruction — something people read, absorb briefly, and move past.

The opportunity was to create something more integrated: a visual and environmental system that could make sustainability feel present in the space itself.

Rather than adding communication onto the street, the ambition was to make the street communicate.

Rethinking What Signage Could Be

The project began by questioning a basic assumption: Did sustainability need signs at all?

The answer became the central idea — a “signless street.” Instead of relying on conventional interpretive panels, messages were embedded directly into the landscape.

Words such as BEYOND and MOMENT were etched into the street surface and filled with recycled glass, turning movement through the site into an encounter with ideas rather than instructions.

The dandelion became the central metaphor for the identity. Its relevance went beyond form. A dandelion survives, regenerates, spreads, and adapts — characteristics that closely aligned with the broader ambition of the project.

Like seeds carried by the wind, the idea was that sustainable thinking could move outward from the street itself, influencing people beyond the immediate site..The metaphor gave the project an emotional and conceptual layer without resorting to literal environmental messaging.

Turning the Streetscape Into a Medium

The communication system was designed as part of the landscape rather than as an addition to it.

That principle was informed by ideas from land art and earthworks, where intervention and environment become inseparable.

The result was a streetscape that operated almost like urban poetry. Words, materials, and forms invited interpretation rather than prescribing conclusions.

Visitors were encouraged to encounter ideas around sustainability through movement, curiosity, and reflection.

The communication was deliberately non-didactic — allowing the environment to open a conversation instead of closing one.

Making a Complex Idea Easier to Experience

Sustainability can become abstract very quickly. This project gave it a physical presence.

By embedding the message into the environment, Sustainability Street made the idea more immediate, more accessible, and more human.

The experience did not ask people to study sustainability. It asked them to notice it.

That distinction helped turn a complex subject into something people could encounter naturally through the public realm.

Recognition for a Different Kind of Public Communication

The project received a National Award of Merit from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and a Silver Award from the Design Exchange Awards.

The recognition reflected the strength of the project’s central idea: sustainability, landscape, communication, and public experience were not treated as separate disciplines.

They were designed as one system.

Sustainability Street is an incredible achievement. You deserve our gratitude for taking this project so seriously and being so committed to its vision and intent. It has truly been an accomplishment on the design firm to develop this street. Congratulations on so successfully implementing the communications component of this project. I wish to extend my gratitude to you, your hard work and dedication to the vision of Sustainability Street.

Freda Pagani, Diana Foldi
UBC Campus Sustainability Office