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).
________
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.