Ideas Lab

Thomas Gentry approached one of the biggest problems of anyone we have talked to so far. The goal of making buildings more sustainable has been a research goal for a while now, with each researcher taking a different approach to the problem. For Thomas, this meant breaking the problem down into three different focus areas, economic, cultural, and technological. While this doesn’t make the problem any smaller, it allows Thomas to orient his research to one of those areas, and make it much less abstract than just the overall goal of green architecture. With each individual project that the IDEAS lab pursues he can hack away at a small part of the problem with the ultimate goal of contributing to a greater solution. The only disadvantage to this approach is that it makes any summation of the individual projects seem disjointed.

I appreciated that his approach focuses on solving small attainable problems, such a low income housing as an alternative to the unified “fix all our problems” theories that architectural research usually seems to pursue. Unlike most design problems that typically revolve around the better way to make spaces the research of the IDEAs lab is measurable, quantifiable, and can thus be optimized. With each project Thomas focuses on optimizing the problem just a little bit, to get people to pay closer attention to how much energy they are using, or reducing the potential energy usage by spending a little bit more on appliances. It’s all much easier to swallow then the usual hand waving that goes along with solar, wind, geothermal solutions.

Ideas Seminar: Thomas Gentry

Date: September 13, 2013

Thomas Gentry is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Director of the Laboratory for Innovative Housing, a multidisciplinary research laboratory operating within the IDEAS (Infrastructure Design Environment and Sustainability) Center. He briefly explained about IDEAS Center projects ranging from complex infrastructure systems and residential housing developments, to innovative material design and ecosystem impact studies.

He presented how sustainability issues can be addressed more comprehensively and how a similar common understanding of social sustainability. Economic, environmental and social are interrelated. Economic vitality relies on the integrity of healthy ecosystems, which hold the Earth’s resources. Likewise, economic and social well-being is linked, as illustrated through the recent recession. Environmental and social well-being are similarly connected, as seen in cases when people who live in poverty and are socially marginalized end up living in places with environmental issues that are caused by people who are more affluent and less socially marginal. Despite its critical connections to the other two pillars, social sustainability is the least understood and defined. Broadly speaking, social sustainability looks at relationships, interactions and institutions that affect and are affected by sustainable development. People often hold a wide variety of perspectives on what social sustainability is and how it can be discussed, implemented and assessed.

The IDEAS Center has established with several other entities, including representatives from civil, mechanical, electrical and systems engineering; architecture, biology, business, chemistry, geography and earth science, psychology, public health, and sociology. Especially Professor focuses on building code I think, this unique and highly collaborative environment research is important, because the team would include all the disciplines and stakeholders relevant to the project. These people would approach the work with an attitude of optimism and excitement to contribute their skills, perspectives, resources and knowledge to the group.

Stable, Sustainable Building. Thomas Gentry

9-13-13

Thomas Gentry has been working with the IDEAS Center at UNCC developing a method to help architects and engineers design structures in a more energy efficient and conservation minded manner.  They are basing their research off of a three-pronged approach to sustainable design through equal focus on the economic, cultural, and environmental factors that the building project influences.  By taking these three ideas and focusing our attention on how architecture affects each one, we can determine areas in which to change our design processes and improve the sustainability of our buildings in all three areas. 

Implementation of this process begins with pedagogy, in both the professional and academic environments.  Here is where the challenge lies.  Teaching students these methods is far simpler than teaching professionals already set in their ways.  In order to combat this setback, Professor Gentry and his team are looking to implement changes into building codes to implement the various methods that they have designed.  By changing the codes, the professional dimension of architecture would have to change across the board and in a way that would start to implement the change a lot faster than if we were to wait for the next generation or two of freshly graduated architecture students.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Visual.ly - Drew Skau

In our talk with Drew the one thing that struck me the most was his description of the visualization tool that he was working on. While I expected a more ambiguous answer, he definitively said that it was designed for someone with knowledge about the meaning of the data. While at first this statement seems like a clear focus on one particular user group, I think there a few things going on in this statement. As a tool focused on scientists that have domain knowledge it can either be a flexible presentation tool, or an exploratory visualization tool like Tableau. While the difference between softwares is not a black and white distinction, Drew’s tool doesn’t not seem to be exploratory. Instead of interacting directly with the data, the user applies visual filters to a dataset data. Thus, it seems that Drew’s software is focused on consolidating the workflow between scientist and visualization, where the scientist can make their own visualizations instead of relying on a designer to construct the visualization.

On the other hand Bret Victor’s software seems clearly focused on the designer and not the researcher. While it may seem to occupy the same space as Drew’s software it allows for much more manipulation of the visualizations that is probably outside the scope of knowledge of a researcher. Take his flexible grid example, where the entire grid is based off of the dimensions of a rectangular primitive. Researchers may be able to take advantage of this, but the thing that is more important to them is control of the scale of each side of the graph. If it were truly focused on visualization production from the research perspective the grid would be constructed from two variables that each define the scale of the x and y coordinates.

Both Bret and Drew approach the challenge of constructing visualizations but come as the problem from opposite ends of the problem. Drew focuses on the production of visualizations from the perspective of the researcher and Bret focuses on the ability to create flexible, parametric visualizations without a specific user in mind.

Ideas Seminar: Drew Skau

Date: September 13, 2013

Dr. Drew Skau focuses on real-time visualizations and digital media. And also he interested in new digital fabrication methods. I think, his research is primarily concerned with my research. I’m studying with Prof. Mary Lou Maher recently on Envision Charlotte. The uptown community can see data about collective real-time data on energy usage via digital displays throughout the center city. This allows businesses and individuals to keep track of their energy usage and to conveniently see how much power they are consuming or saving via social media alerts. They expected that with broader energy consumption awareness, all will be empowered to make better personal energy saving decision which will collectively add up towards the 20% reduction goal for the community. Unfortunately, it did not going well, no one used this digital display. In this sense, we focus on creating interactive display models about sustainable issues to communicate with people and to change or evaluate human sustainability behavior for energy savings. In order to encourage people’s participation, we’ve been looking for useful example of infographic and visualization.  

I think, Infographic and visualizations are more powerful and effective way to literally catch people’s way. With the constant hustle and bussle of modern life, people have short attention spans. And it is no wonder people experience information overload. With smartphones, tablets and the ubiquity of the internet, people are constantly receiving, analyzing, sharing and creating new information. Due to this overload we need to stick out to get people’s attention. Creating a compelling visualization of data or information can make it really stick out from all of the other noise of day-to-day life. Moreover, by creating something that is visually compelling, people are more likely to be engaged and creating visualizations can make complex information easier to understand. In this sense, I thought the examples and website he provides make me more convincing and interesting.

 

Ideas Seminar: Richard Souvenir

Date: August 23, 2013

 

Prof. Richard Souvenir and his students focused on computer vision and machine learning in particular, exploring ways to coordinate multiple cameras, processing the information in one or more computers to understand human motion and behavior.

First of all, Computer vision is concerned with modeling and replicating human vision using computer software and hardware. It seems combines knowledge in computer science, and many other disciplines such as electrical engineering, mathematics, physiology, biology, and cognitive science. It needs knowledge from all these fields in order to understand and simulate the operation of the human vision system. I think Images and movies are everywhere, computer vision is becoming more popular as the power of computers increase. Computer vision is concerned with the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of useful information from a single image or a sequence of image. It involves the development of a theoretical and algorithmic basis to achieve automatic visual understanding. And they have been studying how to reconstructed, interpret and understand a 3D scene from its 2D images in terms of the properties of the structure present in the scene

Especially, during the lecture, they showed us to present computer vision to detect and track the face and hands of a human being in real time from a video sequence captured by a webcam. Tracking people in video enables applications in surveillance, traffic monitoring, and video conferencing. They said, recent multi-camera methods have helped to overcome some of the issues associated with object tracking, such as drift and occlusion that arise in the single-camera case. However, the integration of multiple cameras introduces new challenges in terms of resource consumption and algorithm complexity. Moreover, while tracking accuracy tends to increase with the number of cameras, the potential also increases for poor measurements from individual cameras to negatively act aggregate tracking estimates. Of course computer vision and machine learning will be definitely helpful to understand spatial cognition and people reaction.