Design As If People Matter: Aesthetic Guidelines for a Wind Power Future

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of aesthetics in its public acceptance. The wind industry challenges its own credibility as an alternative energy source when it does not follow best environmental and operational practice. The chapter suggests pragmatic guidelines for how the wind industry and proponents of renewable energy can present wind energy's best face. These guidelines are selected from more than two decades of observing and photographing wind turbines and talking with scores of people about their views. The guidelines focus on visual aesthetics. These suggestions are not meant as a guide for how publicists can deceive people, or for how promoters can conceal wind energy's defects from scrutiny, but rather as a means to soothe the technological edge of the soft path. The objectives of wind developers should be to minimize the conspicuousness of wind turbines, and to lessen the footprint of wind energy on the land by minimizing the visual intrusiveness of access roads and other infrastructure, as well as by reducing the more familiar environmental impacts of accelerated erosion and the destruction of wildlife habitat.