About

Richard Hindle is a designer, innovator, and educator specializing in landscape architecture and environmental design. He teaches courses in ecological technology, planting design, and topical studios exploring California landscapes. His research focuses on technology in the urban and regional landscape, emphasizing innovation and the design of living systems. Hindle's work redefines landscape architecture as a technological field through detailed analysis of prior-art and contemporary policy, linking the profession to broader sociotechnical processes. A recurring theme in his work is the history and future of technology, city, and landscape, exploring new technological narratives and the material imagination to reframe theory, practice, and the invention of systems that grow and adapt, such as those integrating plants, natural processes, and non-human species into constructed environments. He is a published author with articles in various academic and professional journals, and he received a Graham Foundation Award in 2012 for his work on the reconstruction of vegetation-bearing architectonic structures and systems. Hindle has worked as a consultant and designer, focusing on advanced horticultural and building systems, including green roofs, facades, and large-scale urban landscapes. His recent projects include work with Tom Leader Studio as part of the Resilient Bay Area Challenge.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Geography
• Economics
• Knowledge management
• Economy
• Law
• Economic growth
• Archaeology
• Environmental planning
• Business
• Civil engineering
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Knowledge Infrastructure for Coastal Infrastructure: The Y02A Patent Initiative and Site-Based Climate Adaption Strategies

  The Plan Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Innovation in climate adaptation and resilience practices is among the most critical issues in architecture, design, and planning. This essay explores how coastal adaptation and resilience planning processes may be informed by the Y02A patent classification scheme to design advanced forms of site-specific coastal infrastructure. The Y02A scheme covers the “technologies for adaptation to climate change,” organizing coastal, riverine, and urban climate adaptation innovations into distinct sub-classes, with the aim of building technical capacity and coordinating discovery in related sectors. The mechanisms and processes through which these novel technologies are invented, tested, translated, and implemented within environmental design and planning praxis remain largely unknown, creating opportunities for new methods of knowledge exchange to be developed. To address the unique, and potentially transformative relationship, important aspects of the Y02A classification scheme are introduced in conjunction with a case study analysis from 2017/18 Resilience by Design Bay Area Challenge in California, during which the Common Ground Team utilized patent innovation studies to conceptualize site-based adaptation and resilience strategies for the San Pablo Baylands.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Y02 as Climate Praxis

  Technology|Architecture + Design · 2024-01-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article introduces the recently adopted Y02 patent classification scheme, covering the broader cross-sectoral technologies that “allow adapting to the adverse effects of climate change,” and explores the relationship of this global innovation initiative to environmental design and planning praxis. The Y02 classification includes specific subcategories Y02A for “Technologies for Adaptation to Climate Change” and Y02B, “Climate Change Mitigation Technologies Related to Buildings,” making it highly relevant to the climate adaptation practices of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. The YO2A and Y02B classification schemes (a subclass of Y02) were launched in 2018 and are now implemented by patent offices globally to categorize a range of adaptation technologies across sectors such as coastal systems, flood control, building systems, adaptation of existing infrastructure, green infrastructure, human health, and technologies for mapping and sensing the environment. Tagging and organizing patent innovations in this broad sector consolidates information on the subject, allows for the rapid diffusion of innovation, and builds adaptive capacity by creating a knowledge infrastructure and anticipatory framework for future technological trends. The fast pace of innovation in these sectors and the wealth of readily available information present the allied fields of environmental design and planning a distinct opportunity to integrate Y02A and Y02B into climate praxis. This article explores how innovation in these sectors may inform practices of scenario building in planning and design through discourse on probable, plausible, pluralistic, and performative futures. It elucidates the potential of these newly established patent classifications as an anticipatory framework for technological innovation in the built environment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Translations between Patent Innovation and Environmental Design Pedagogy

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Knowledge management

  Translations between patented technology and the built environment have been ongoing since 14th-century Venice. The coevolution of technology and physical environment, as portrayed in patent documents, provides a robust historiography for research and also a heuristic for design pedagogy and expanded scope for environmental design praxis. When viewed through the sociotechnical framework of patents, cities and landscapes become a bricolage of invention aggregated over time with spatial, social, ecological, and geographical dimension. However, translations between patent innovation and environmental design pedagogy remain largely undocumented in design scholarship. This essay discusses the intersection of patents and environment and describes pedagogical methods that translate patent innovation studies into design projects.

  PublisherDOI

• Inventing Venice:An Urban and Environmental Innovation Model from the Lagoon City

  2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Environmental planning
  • Political Science

  Innovation in physical urban infrastructure is a vital component of city\nmaking in an era of sea level rise, climate change, and rapid urbanization.\nVenice pioneered an urban and environmental innovation model in the 14th\nand 15th century, successfully negotiating the cities complex geography and\nthe sociotechnical processes that characterized Renaissance urbanism. A\nreview of early inventor rights issued in the city suggests that the process of\npatent innovation facilitated urbanization of the Venetian lagoon through\ndevelopment of advanced drainage, dredge, irrigation, and reclamation infrastructure,\nessential to the city’s survival. In addition to granting patents\nfor new inventions, the Venetian government established expert review for\nproposed inventions, supported prototyping and testing for untried technologies,\nand used patent rights to attract experts with novel inventions\nfrom across Italy and Europe. These processes, in addition to the extensive\ndossier of patents issued in Venice, substantiate the primacy of innovation\nin the process of urbanization and revel an urban innovation model. Patent\nlaw later spread along Venetian trade routes through Europe, where they\nwere also employed in economic modernization, and the construction of\nurban and regional infrastructure. Interestingly, similar process can later\nbe observed throughout Europe and the United States as patent rights were\nconstitutionalized.

  PublisherOA PDF

• AS AMERICAN AS BASEBALL (AND CENTRAL PARK)

  University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• The geographical dimensions of patent innovation: history, precedents, praxis, and pedagogy, in an expanded field of landscape technology

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2019-06-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Innovation has geographical dimensions, ranging from site and building technology, to infrastructure and environmental systems. As the allied professions of environmental design expand disciplinary scope beyond aesthetics into questions of territory, landscape infrastructure, performance-based design, and issues related to climate adaptation and the Anthropocene, an expanded concept of technology and innovation becomes essential to address new pedagogical adjectives and praxis. One of the most effective ways to track technological change in a specific sector of technology is through patent innovation. The global patent archive is the world’s largest technological dossier. An estimated 90 million patents have been granted globally, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) alone has issued more than 10 million patents since 1790. A unique subset of these inventions relate to site and building technology as well as large-scale environmental systems such as rivers, coasts, and cities. Since patent innovation is an ongoing process, patent documents provide insights into the ever-evolving sectors of technology, which may be understood as an expanded field of landscape technologies that define site, cities, and regions. This paper explores the histories of patent innovation related to the physical built environment and argues for an expanded definition of “Landscape Technology”. The paper also includes examples of New pedagogical approaches that integrate patent innovation studies into environmental design curriculum, and a discussion of strategies for implementing novel technologies and patent innovation studies into professional design projects.

  PublisherDOI

• Adaptations of the metropolitan landscape in delta regions, by Peter C. Bosselmann, New York, Routledge, 2018, 210 pp., USD 54.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781138551961

  Journal of Urban Design · 2019-03-12

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Deltaic landscapes, and specifically urbanized deltaic landscapes, have long been sites of flux and adaptation. Just as unmodified ‘natural’ deltas are perennially reborn through fluvial, earth, bi...

  PublisherDOI

• Revealing an elemental landscape - A landscape inventory: Michel Desvigne paysagiste, [ed.] Dorothée Imbert

  Landscape architecture · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Adaptations of the metropolitan landscape in delta regions

  Journal of Urban Design · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Hard Habitats of Coastal Armoring

  2018-09-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the scale, scope, and future outlook for the design of "hard habitats" in urbanized marine environments and points toward the productive collaboration between marine scientists, materials research, and designers. Habitat complexity and heterogeneity are central to the recruitment and diversity of marine species. The Green Breakwater at Cleveland Harbor is a pilot project to test the viability of ecological breakwater blocks to function as marine and intertidal habitat. Given the ubiquity in coastal armoring, seawalls and breakwaters also have the greatest potential to positively impact urban marine environments. Patent innovation in hard habitats can be reduced to two main categories: systems and complex assemblages that create novel three-dimensional form to serve as habitat and/or stabilize coastal infrastructure by mitigating wave energy or reducing scouring, and material compositions or production processes that modify the chemistry or physical properties of substrates to catalyze growth of marine organisms.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Carl-Christian A. Jackson

  Tufts Children's Hospital

  1 shared

• Neeraj Bhatia

  1 shared

• Irene J Higginson

  Cicely Saunders International

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Graham Foundation Award for the reconstruction of the “Veget…
• ACSA, Architectural Education Award (2019)