Goldilocks is a well-established design engineer with a reputation of being able to do good work that seems to meet the Sustainability Metrics that have been developed in the various industries she is involved in.  3 clients come to her:  TerraVicit mining company, the City of Geopolis, and WE-R-GUD architects.

The first has a problem – their canaries keep dying, and government regulations require that if the canary dies, they have to clear out the mine, at a cost of about $20,000 (unproductive workers, paperwork, overtime to meet deliverable, etc).  So they ask Goldilocks for the cheapest way of ensuring their canary doesn’t die.  She provides a fairly simple protocol: feed the birds, swap them out every week, use only young birds, set up a breeding program for durable birds, and pipe them fresh air.  Everyone goes away happy.  Because there was only 1 indicator, she designed for that indicator specifically.

Geopolis has a very well established program to be a Sustainable Community.  They have adopted a set of 64 indicators as their way of ensuring their taxpayers are getting quality of life from their efforts – these include the number of kids graduating high school with an ‘A’, and the number of low birthweight babies.  They ask Goldilocks to design a high speed rail system that can be shown to provide a maximal benefit to the community.   Her latest progress report suggests she should be able to finish the preliminary design work in 2046.  She is currently undertaking the research project that will determine, based on communities in Brussels, Munich, Tokyo, Adelaide, and Buenos Aries, what the impact that terminal location has on high school performance and birth weights.  She then has to make a subjective judgment about whether the data collected in those communities will have any reflection on Geopolis.  Good thing the budget and completion date were both set completely open-ended.

And her third client, the architect, has assembled an ideal set of indicators of building performance and human wellbeing.  They have a total of 7, each of which is relatively simple to gather existing data, to make projections with based on different scenarios, and are sensitive to design changes.  She’s been asked to make sure the design is producing an optimal solution to their problem statement (which is, of course, very well written).  Let’s say for argument’s sake that one of them is net rate of return on investment (which has been weighted for different possible future economic conditions), and another is employee satisfaction (measured in some equally clever way).  She is now tasked with making subjective judgments about how to trade off ROI against employee satisfaction.  Alternative 1 will cost 4% more than alternative 2, but the employee satisfaction will go up ‘a lot’.  How to balance..?  So, of course, since she did this on a day where she was feeling particularly socialist, employee satisfaction won out, and everyone was happy. She’s got a good reputation, after all, and she intends to keep it.