Sustainagram is an interactive architectural configurator. Pick a program and a priority. The combination produces an emergent typology: the architectural form that results when a building of that program is designed with that priority above all others. Sixty-four hand-drawn axonometric sketches on cocktail napkins, the medium architects use to think before committing, sit behind sixty-four selectable combinations. Dhaka is the first grid; Lagos and Lima will follow.
The central argument is that typology is an output. Architects treat building types (courtyard housing, cyclone shelter, vernacular market) as choices from a menu. Sustainagram inverts this: program and priority are the inputs; typology emerges, and it carries consequences. Housing plus Water yields a Wet-Edge Courtyard House. Housing plus Density yields a Vertical Walk-Up: concrete, minimal courtyards, few people on the ground. Housing plus Ecology yields a low-rise garden compound. The trade-offs show in each sketch's color: anything alive or once-alive (people, plants, water, vernacular materials) gets soft watercolor; industrial materials stay as fine-pen ink on napkin paper.
Sustainagram is a launch project from the Sustainable Design Network, for a new studio working at the intersection of design and public engagement. A community member, a developer, and a city planner can sit in front of the same configurator and have a real conversation about what they want their neighborhood to become. The grid gives them a vocabulary.