Hydroskin
Company Hickok Cole Architects
Introduction Date May 1, 2018
Project Website https://hickokcole.com/ilab-microgrants/hydroskin/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Hydroskin addresses the building façade beyond its traditional use as a barrier between “in” and “out” and into a multi-functioning, living, breathing object. Designed by Mercedes Afshar, this prototype hydroponic module design addresses three needs: 1. attachment to an existing façade, 2. horticultural life cycles in urban settings, and 3. building embellishment through illumination. 1. Façade enhancement: Research has shown that modularity of form is paramount for future replication and for a consistent aesthetic when installed on a building façade. The outward facing form mounts to a grid which is attached to an existing building façade and contains nutrient feeder tubes and reservoirs for the planters that line cavities within this grid. The outward metal form allows plants to receive the nutrients they need while keeping the delivery system hidden. The hydroponic form itself consists of layers of paint, resin, fiberglass, a gel coat, and a mold which conceal the façade’s functioning parts (air pumps, water pumps, grow mediums, vinyl tubing, and electrical components). 2. Horticulture in urban settings: Hydroskin acts as a vertical farm while it reduces pollution and energy consumption and is fed by rainwater. The plants grown in the structure can be harvested most of the year, from early Spring to late Fall. Hydroskin can be considered a building amenity for tenants for their own food production purposes. Growing space could also potentially be leased out to tenants for maintenance and harvesting. Additionally the plant serve as air cleaner for urban setting, removing pollutants from the air. 3. Lighting embellishment: The structure is also a building design feature as incorporated led lighting at the perimeter of each opening enhances a building’s façade at night. The structure adds a dynamic element to the exterior of buildings and appears in illuminated organic lace-type design after dark. Utilizing rain harvesting, a living wall, louvers, and operable window systems, this sustainable skin employs a variety of “green” technologies that help to reduce the consumption of natural resources and curb the negative impacts of human involvement. The living skin reacts to the seasons, blocking light and heat while insulating the building in the summer and allowing light and heat the enter during the fall and winter, thereby reducing energy consumption. Currently Hydroskin is in limited production through a partnership between Hickok Cole and Metlaworks; prototypes are being formed at Boose Aluminum Foundry in Pennsylvania.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
This design came out Hickok Cole's internal microgrant program which allows employees to devote between 100-200 hours over the course of 6-9 months to pursue a passion project. Microgrants exist to promote disruptive innovation. The winners of the grants are crowd-source the most compelling proposals from staff, proposals are presented, and employees vote on the winners. Through this exploration, we aim to stretch conventional notions about architecture, fabrication, work styles, and entrepreneurship. The result is a body of research that exemplifies our most forward-thinking ideas. Hydroskin in particular is unique as it solves environmental problems while being a piece of pure design. It is not only a façade attachment and source of illuminated decoration but actually serves to shade building faces and block excess sunlight while growing plants that can be a food source. That's a lot of functions for one building façade!
Who worked on the project?
Mercedes Afshar, Sam Robinson, Mike Hickok, Yolanda Cole, Mark Ramirez
View the project video: https://youtu.be/yAL1aLDnjHE
Ideal Choice Homes™
Company KieranTimberlake
Introduction Date June 1, 2013
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
A growth in population of 181 million people in India over the past decade has led to a critical housing shortage for middle- and low-income people as well as a sharp increase in demand for water and energy. However, existing material supply chains, construction technologies, and utility systems cannot keep pace with this new reality. In many cities, water and energy supplies are discontinuous, with water access limited to as little as thirty minutes per day in some places. Construction of a single-family housing unit typically employs wet masonry techniques, prolonging completion up to twenty-four months. At the same time, home financing and household incomes have increased, making home ownership viable for a greater portion of the population and giving rise to a need for a new housing type that relies on a more efficient construction method. Ideal Choice Homes is both a product and a process by which homes may be mass customized and mass produced through a managed supply chain, offering an environmentally responsible residence that is affordable and swiftly constructed. This novel construction system relies on efficient methods that significantly reduce construction time and conserve resources throughout all building phases—from material supply chain to construction and habitation. Not only is construction time reduced, but Ideal Choice Homes can also adapt to a range of conditions—from urban infill, to multi-acre rural sites, to smaller parcels of land. Ideal Choice Homes is a holistic solution that satisfies a cultural preference for solid “pukka” housing that allows owners to manage thermal comfort, increase self-sufficiency, conserve water, and decrease or eliminate the use of air conditioning. The house responds to a wide range of seasonal variation by minimizing solar gain through overhangs and shading during the summer, encouraging air movement through cross ventilation, and minimizing air infiltration during the winter. The primary structural component is a concrete wall panel, shaped to self-shade in eastern and western orientations. We investigated several concrete mix designs using combinations of aggregates and fibers available for manufacturing in India. Mockups and prototypes were built to ensure that components met multiple goals, including thermal comfort and easy transportability, eliminating the need for material handling equipment for single-story construction. This new methodology significantly reduces construction time—from 24 months to an estimated three months.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Partnering with an Indian asset management company and Indian developer, we developed a system of precast components that leverage established knowledge of concrete materials to provide affordable, solid, quick-to-build, customizable, and thermally comfortable housing. The system is comprised of concrete wall and roof panels engineered to be easily maneuvered on construction sites. A minimum number of parts are used to allow assembly methods to be clear and quickly learned by builders and eliminate the need for mechanical equipment and promote swift construction. Shorter construction time leads to a significant reduction in costs associated with material transport, labor on site, and interest costs. Housing components need to be lightweight while meeting the preference for construction that looks and feels solid. To keep the concrete components light, we tested different lightweight aggregates, and a series of mixes using conventional and lightweight aggregates. Each mix was cast to determine workability, finish, and dry weight. The testing confirmed that we could significantly reduce the concrete material's dry weight up to 30% while maintaining the structural properties needed for durable precast components. A full-scale prototype was built in Ahmedabad in 2013 to test fabrication, loading and packing components in a truck, safe travel distances, component maneuverability, lightweight aggregate concrete mix designs, overall system legibility, speed of assembly, and manufacturing and construction tolerances. In 2016, the prototype was tested for horizontal and vertical expansion and the addition of stairs.
Who worked on the project?
A joint venture of KieranTimberlake, Sam Circle Venture, and Bakeri Group
View the project video:
Intel’s Self-Learning Chip Promises to Accelerate AI
Company Intel
Introduction Date September 25, 2017
Project Website https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/intels-new-self-learning-chip-promises-accelerate-artificial-intelligence/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Imagine a future in which complex, large-scale computers could solve problems with the speed and efficiency of the most efficient computational system ever designed—the human brain. It’s a future where we could unlock exponential gains in performance and power efficiency for the future of artificial intelligence. One where societal and industrial problems can be autonomously solved by computers leveraging “learned” experiences. It’s a future where robots are more autonomous and performance efficiency is dramatically increased. Intel Labs has developed such a system, a self- learning neuromorphic research chip, “Loihi,” which includes digital circuits that mimic the brain’s basic operation. Neuromorphic chips draw inspiration from how neurons communicate and learn, using spikes and plastic synapses that can be modulated based on timing. This game-changing technology could help computers self-organize and make decisions based on patterns and associations. The Loihi research chip includes digital circuits that mimic the fundamental features of real neurons, including their remarkable ability to continuously adapt and rewire, in order to make machine learning faster and more efficient. Future iterations of Loihi may ultimately provide breakthroughs anywhere real-world data needs to be processed in evolving real-time environments. For example, the technology could enable smarter security cameras and smart-city infrastructure designed for real-time communication with autonomous vehicles. By combining training and inference into one chip, Loihi enables machines to autonomously adapt to changes immediately instead of waiting for the next update from the cloud. In early assessments of Loihi’s performance, researchers at Intel Labs have demonstrated up to 1 million times faster learning compared to prior neuromorphic implementations (as measured by total operations to achieve a given accuracy when solving MNIST digit recognition problems). Further, for the right kinds of problems, Loihi is over 5,000 times more energy-efficient than the best general purpose computing solutions.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
As AI workloads grow more diverse and complex, they will test the limits of today’s dominant compute architectures and precipitate new disruptive approaches. Looking to the future, Intel believes that neuromorphic computing can harness insights from the latest advances in neuroscience to provide a path to exascale performance at dramatically lower power levels. The Loihi test chip features a total of 130,000 neurons and 130 million synapses, integrated into a fully asynchronous neuromorphic many-core mesh that is scalable to many thousands of chips. Loihi implements a wide range of novel features, such as hierarchical connectivity, dendritic compartments, multi-variate synapses, and, most importantly, programmable learning rules. Each neuromorphic core includes a learning engine that can be programmed to modify network parameters during operation, providing support for supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement and other learning paradigms. While it’s still early days for Loihi software and application development, the Intel team and partners have already demonstrated several algorithms on Loihi including adaptive robotic arm control, path planning, constraint satisfaction, sparse coding, reinforced learning of simple strategy games, and supervised object recognition. Intel developed a novel event-driven design methodology for the design of its neuromorphic chips that captures the essential asynchronous nature of neural computing while remaining compatible with Intel’s leading 14 nm FinFET process technology. In the first half of 2018, the Loihi test chip and toolchain have been shared with leading university and research institutions. Intel is nurturing an open development community supported with its own academic grants directed to compelling research proposals. Intel hopes these efforts will lead to a broader understanding of how to program this new computational architecture and will accelerate progress in neuromorphic computing. As stated by Sumi Helal, editor in chief of IEEE Computer, "The Loihi chip and its toolchain kit come to finally move neuromorphic computing from being a promising yet algorithm-specific concept/prototype to a fully-programmable learning architecture. Programmable neuromorphic learning will increase utility and will empower other key technologies such as the Internet-of-Things, which could eventually lead to democratizing AI for all."
Who worked on the project?
Intel • Michael Mayberry, Intel Corporation • Mike Davies, Intel Corporation • Narayan Srinivasa, Eta Compute • Gautham Chinya, Intel Corporation • Nabil Imam, Intel Corporation • Prasad Joshi, Intel Corporation • Tsung-Han Lin, Intel Corporation • Andrew Lines, Intel Corporation • Jonathan Tse, Intel Corporation • Andreas Wild, Intel Corporation
View the project video: https://youtu.be/EgCRwZw4p8c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDKnt9ldXv0&t=14s
iN: The World’s First Cognitive Patient Care Assistant
Why is this project worthy of an award?
iN is a wall-mounted IoT device that fights patient neglect while aiding staff to improve the quality of patient care. Developed by practicing nurses and clinicians, iN is currently being implemented and deployed by two of the largest healthcare systems in the United States - including a top six hospital - with other major medical institutions to follow. Using computer vision, deep learning, and natural body-movement recognition, iN detects staff presence and assesses environmental safety risks while simultaneously collecting and aggregating data from other medical devices such as EKG/vitals monitors, ventilators and more. The byproduct is an intelligent system that gains insight into the care environment and mitigates the risk of human error. With purpose, privacy, and elegance in mind, iN’s design is one of a friendly and intelligent assistant that is ever watchful, never tiring, and always mindful. Placed on the wall behind the patient’s bed, iN communicates with medical staff via four intuitive colors through an interactive LED display. -Blue - Initial detection of staff presence or medical device in use -Green - Successful rounding event and a safe care environment -Orange - Safety Alert/Action Required -Purple - Care Team Presence/Collaborative event More than just an interactive feature, these colors are a visual depiction of our powerful data analytics engine that uses A.I. to: -Create predictive algorithms to prevent injuries and medical errors; -Assess patient workload to enhance staffing; -Integrate with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). In doing so, data capture becomes truly automated, and the burden of charting is lifted from the clinician, allowing them to spend more time with patients at the bedside. To enhance the patient experience, iN is also equipped with an array of environmental sensors that detect temperature, brightness, noise, and other aspects of patient comfort as they directly impact the healing process. Believing firmly that patient engagement begins with staff engagement, we made the data fun! We custom designed the care teams’ mobile platform utilizing nudge theory and gamification. Recognitions and virtual trophies are awarded to staff in real-time for patient care excellence. Individual as well as unit level successes are celebrated and encouraged. With iN, patient care doesn’t have to be a thankless job. With its intuitive design, practical application, and powerful analytics capabilities, iN is one of the first technologies to serve as the gateway for all IoT connectivity in a patient care setting while forging the unbeaten path to a true A.I. ecosystem. iN for intelligence. iN for insight
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
There is no greater feeling of vulnerability than to be lying alone in a hospital bed. Yet, there are few healthcare technology solutions that were deliberately conceptualized, designed, and created specifically to alleviate this vulnerability. There are even fewer, who are successful in doing so. For one of the first times, a group of practicing clinicians are leading true technological innovation in healthcare by assembling and directing an international team of engineers, data scientists, software developers, and industrial designers from renowned institutions such as NASA and MIT. This new technology has been embraced by care providers across the country for use with diverse patient populations from oncology to cardiac surgery, and its clinical impact is also being researched and published by a top Ivy League University. Working side by side, this diverse team has designed a complete end-to-end solution encompassing hardware, software applications and analytics. The majority of healthcare companies and products are created with only one or two of these domains at the forefront of development. Hospitals are then forced to buy multiple hardware, software, and application solutions to meet their needs from various vendors. There is then an attempt to implement these disparate solutions into their workflow, through additional purchases of analytic and interface technology to attempt to connect them all together. When integration efforts and data discovery prove futile, the hospital then purchases even more solutions to meet their needs, further perpetuating this cycle of fragmentation. iN immediately stops this cycle of suboptimal return on investment inherent with a non-integrated technology stack and delivers value on day one of installation. Not only is it a stand-alone product, but it also functions as a force multiplier to other existing devices - from the call button to advanced life-sustaining equipment - within the patient’s room. With the lightest infrastructure footprint of any hospital technology, iN installs in seconds. By deviating from the traditional triangulation and trilateration methods for object and human positioning used by traditional RFID, iN does not require multiple pieces of hardware to be installed inside the room. Instead, iN uses computer vision with domain-specific models that require only a single point of data capture, leading to one device that analyzes, not only object and personnel position but the entire physical and electronic environment. All other products require cumbersome setup, architectural changes, and costly integration efforts that require months to years of fine tuning for accuracy. Even if the implementation is executed flawlessly, the end result still only delivers a small fraction of the insight gleaned from iN. The iN hardware, software, web/mobile applications, and analytic platform were created and will continue to be developed cohesively. While this concept of simultaneous developmental consideration for impact to multiple domains exists in other industries, such as automotive and consumer electronics; nothing has achieved this level of sophistication in healthcare, until now. Paul Coyne, DNP, MBA, MSF, APRN, RN, AGPCNP-BC President and Co-Founder, Inspiren Senior Director of Clinical Informatics and Advanced Practice, Hospital for Special Surgery
Who worked on the project?
Michael Wang -Founder/CEO, Inspiren Paul Coyne - Co-Founder/President, Inspiren Vin Cocito - Co-Founder/COO, Inspiren Jeff Morelli - Co-Founder/VP of Technology Implementation, Inspiren Marcel Botha - Design Lead/CEO, 10XBeta Berk IIhan - Industrial Design, 10XBeta Christina Sicoli - Industrial Design, 10XBeta Ellen Crane - Industrial Design, 10XBeta Simon Ellison- Industrial Design, 10XBeta Andy MacDonald - Technical Director, Normative Anthony Bennett - Lead Developer, Normative Scott Wright - Senior Developer, Normative Lane Buie - VP Client Services, Normative Laura Shaw - User Experience Designer, Normative Devon Williamson - Graphic Designer, Normative Heather Thomas - Growth Director, Normative Ahmed Elhusseiny - Product Design Lead, AESuper Lab Ryan Melony - Video Director, medialuv.com
View the project video: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ghnj37mwrmx2lsm/AABvA_e1oPrRWjZaif6cLhPua?dl=0&preview=INSPIREN-FASTCO-v11.mp4
Invisible Highway
Company Jam3
Introduction Date August 29, 2017
Project Website https://experiments.withgoogle.com/invisible-highway
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Google never stops expanding the invisible roads that lead technology to surprising new places. With their game-changing ARCore platform, every Android user can now experience instant, barrier-free AR. To showcase the possibilities of this new tech and get developers excited about an augmented future, we knew we had to create an experiment that was fun, friendly, and futuristic. We developed Invisible Highway with MIT PhD students Anna Fusté Lleixà, and Judith Amores Fernandez, based on their prototype. We took their idea – an experience that lets users draw a road in virtual space and have a physical robot interact with it – and brought it to life using ARCore.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
To make Invisible Highway more than just a tech demo, we knew we had to take that initial ‘wow moment’ and extend it into a 360-degree interactive wow playground. We treated our augmented layer like another world, with a life of its own, that’s only fully revealed through user interaction. From the initial theme of Canadiana, we built a tiny landscape complete with clouds, mountains, forest, and even a virtual moose. As you move through the experience, the physical and virtual become delightfully entangled in more and more ways. It’s a lot of boundary pushing for one tiny road trip. Our user experience combines three main integrations of the real and the virtual. First, we’ve got you waving your fingertip across your screen to define a miniature AR road that sticks to your floor. Then we have a robotic car that actually follows the path you’ve created. Finally, we dress up our virtual world with charming low-poly 3D scenery and characters. Because we’re living in the future now, and augmenting reality is no big deal, It was important that the UX feel so simple and intuitive that a child could use it. The end result is a futuristic toy that makes AR feel natural, playful, and real.
Who worked on the project?
Concept Creator(s): Anna Fusté Lleixà, Judith Amores Fernandez Executive Creative Director(s): Pablo Vio, Adrian Belina Executive Producer: Sarah Arruda Producer: Shannon Kennedy Creative Director: Dirk van Ginkel Associate Creative Director: Daniel Luna Motion Designer: Sonia Bashash Technical Director: Aaron Morris Developer(s): Matt Deslauriers, Brendan Neufeld, Ari Lotter, Colin Yao Client: Google
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/238621374
