Dr Axel Laistner, Managing Owner, Axel Laistner Consulting, Germany
Speaker Biograghy:
Dr Axel Laistner is a Sustainability Auditor of IASA eV. Sustainability has been an engineering guideline throughout his career, always balancing the target triangle: Business – for Humans – Now and in the Future.
He has been active in developing airports and complex urban infrastructure using a system integrative approach for over 23 years. He co-founded the XL-AERO Association of International Specialists for Airport Design and Aviation Management. He is an Energy Auditor and an Energy Consultant for business and industry accredited by the German Government. He has made a point of always learning by working across interfaces not at them. This has proved to be a successful approach providing a multiplicity of experience variety: from masterplanning to maintenance setup, from supply system design to security and crisis stability enhancement, from airfield design and construction to building energy performance. He has learned that sustainability is found in synergies and win-win combinations.
Day 3 - 17 March
Session:
IASA Forum
09:45 - 10:15
- Never too early – sustainable by thinking ahead
Synopsis: Our highly technological world is segmented and broken up into specialisations, processes and systems of systems. The psychological focus is becoming ever more polarised between money in the developed and emerging world, and religion in parts of the world struggling either economically or with authoritarian policies, or both. It is increasingly falling to engineers and technical systems experts to create the opportunities for balance: making a profit/being useful to humans/having limited or renewable footprints. Solutions are available, courage is needed.
Audience will learn:
- Creating the future is a task of engineers and designers with a political impact
- Sustainability is possible now if we start breaking down our comfortable stove piping and interface limitations methodology
- Sustainability needs logic and psychology: engineers know logic, business runs on 'vibes' – never the twain shall meet?
- The fiction of 'apolitical' engineering is as dangerous now as the 'apolitical' military fiction ever was and is
- The world looks to us to come up with solutions – we need to make them palatable