Team Las Vegas Solar Decathlon 2013: Technical Proposal

Team Las Vegas is proposing an elegant, sustainable, and innovative home design that aims to be net zero energy as part of participation in the 2013 Solar Decathlon supported by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The home will be constructed and tested at the 2013 Solar Decathlon competition at a location to be determined by NREL. Imagine a home that captures energy instead of reflecting sunlight; one that filters rainwater and sequesters carbon in its vegetation and soils; one that actually gives back to the ecosystem in which it resides, and supports sustainability for all species. The design philosophy imagines a new type of home that could transform the housing market in Las Vegas. The house incorporates all of the high-tech opportunities (smart walls, smart ECS interfaces, solar thermal, PV, etc.) available, without focusing the design on these systems. The systems will support the project’s conception, rather than being its driving force. The conceptual design that Team Las Vegas has developed is the “Autonomy House,” designed to operate independently from all traditional public utility services. It is a self-sufficient structure designed mainly as a recreational or vacation home, while also having the capability to function as a permanent, year-round residence in our arid desert environment. Environmental technologies and renewable energy combine to allow the users to live grid-free in a place of their choosing without having to give up any modern comforts. Careful consideration of accessibility and age-in-place considerations assist in creating a home that can be enjoyed during any stage of life

Design Transactions

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

Design Transactions: Rethinking Information for a New Material Age

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

Design Transactions

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

OurOS: A hybrid physical and digital tabletop game as a tool for rural community members to build sustainable communities

Developmental organizations face challenges in ensuring the sustainability of their interventions in rural communities. Community knowledge and healthy social and political systems are essential in designing effective interventions. In this research, I discuss the issue of limited access to essential technology among women from rural communities and the need to design technology from the end-user's perspective. Over the course of this thesis, I propose OurOS as a tool based on design justice principles that involve stakeholders, including community members, development professionals, and government employees, in co-designing innovative solutions to the wicked problem of sustaining community support. The tool is framed as a tabletop game that is played to facilitate discussions among stakeholders to co-create a plan of action for building a sustainable community. By constructing a collaborative approach that involves all community members, I argue that developmental organizations can create interventions that have a lasting impact on rural communities

Exploring the relative importance of crossing number and crossing angle

Recent research has indicated that human graph reading performance can be affected by the size of crossing angle. Crossing angle is closely related to another aesthetic criterion: number of edge crossings. Although crossing number has been previously identified as the most important aesthetic, its relative impact on performance of human graph reading is unknown, compared to crossing angle. In this paper, we present an exploratory user study investigating the relative importance between crossing number and crossing angle. This study also aims to further examine the effects of crossing number and crossing angle not only on task performance measured as response time and accuracy, but also on cognitive load and visualization efficiency. The experimental results reinforce the previous findings of the effects of the two aesthetics on graph comprehension. The study demonstrates that on average these two closely related aesthetics together explain 33% of variance in the four usability measures: time, accuracy, mental effort and visualization efficiency, with about 38% of the explained variance being attributed to the crossing angle. Copyright © 2010 ACM