Saturday, June 14, 2014

Treps As Designers


Take an intern, an entrepreneurial intern, and turn them loose with new technologies.  New technologies are emerging daily.   A generation of young treps (entrepreneurs) are finding new applications for every great technology.  I’m amused and inspired by Entrepreneur’s Editor in Chief, Amy Casper.  In her June Editor’s Note, She talks “about giving fear the middle finger.  Actually it is about giving everyone the middle finger because, well, sometimes that’s necessary.” 

Questions and concerns spinning out of a local AIA meeting centered on “Have architects lost their importance in society?”  That question sounds like fear.  Where has our courage to speak out and take chances gone?  How about innovating with the plethora of emerging technologies?  Consider what these entrepreneurs are doing.    

Nest Labs1 has re-invented the home thermostat with the “Learning Thermostat.” They’ve cobbled together cell-phone parts, open-source software and other technologies.  Connected to Wi-Fi, this device becomes the brain for a smart house and you don’t have to program it.  Expanded uses include a dehumidifier, a smoke detector and the ability to adapt to direct sunlight.  Buy it and you get free updates.  A best seller in the home market, Google bought them for $3.2 billion last January! 

Under the leadership of Aydogan Ozcan in UCLA’s engineering labs2, affordable smartphone add-ons are being developed as state-of-the-art diagnostic tools to test blood, evaluate the quality of water, etc. on a global scale.  If just a portion of the world’s three billion mobile subscribers can beam up health and environmental data, the spread of disease and other invisible threats can be followed in real time.  If scientists can develop this useful technology, can designers develop an app or modify devices that improve our ability to synthesize complex determinants in our quest to find better solutions?  Better analysis, better solutions! 

Our biggest challenge today, and what could be our biggest opportunity, is to make sense of environmental regulations and design accordingly.  AIA’s Architecture 2030 aggressively addresses the amount of energy used by commercial buildings in U.S.  California’s goal is to reach net zero for new non-residential buildings by 2030.  Achieving sustainability is an urgent issue for economic, social and environmental reasons.  Do your MEP engineers get it?  As the lead designer, are you participating with energy simulation software?  Life cycle cost analyses find that over a 60-year life cycle, operating energy accounted for 95% of the buildings’ life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions3.  We need simple, affordable, easy-to-use energy tools to help us evaluate our designs, and optimize our solutions.  Maybe one of our trep interns will find the answer (and get rich in the process).   

Lance Bird, FAIA

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1.  “Man of the House”, by John Patrick Pullen, page 40, Entrepreneur, June 2014.
2. “Inventing the Real McCoy”, by Ariel Sabar, page 70, Smithsonian.com, May 2014.
3.  “Use Phase Dominates Environmental Impact”, by Emily Lorenz, page 8, Ascent, Spring 2014.