Today, I was invited to a design charette hosted by SIAT’s Ron Wakkary. It was a 2.5 hour gathering with about 15 talented designers and thinkers from SFU. The goal of the charette was to come up with interaction design concepts for a solar powered house. The focus was partly on raising occupant awareness of their power consumption habits, but most importantly to enrichen the experience of living in the house.
The project is a big one, with 2 other universities in Canada joining SFU to form “Team North”. The concept house is called “North House”, and will be one of 20 entries to the 2009 Solar Decathlon, put on by the US Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The end goal of the competition is to prove the marketability and livability of solar powered homes.
The Solar Decathlon is … a public event designed to increase awareness about energy for residential use and transportation. The competition demonstrates that a beautifully and well-designed house can generate enough electricity to meet the needs of a household, including electricity for lighting, cooking, washing clothes and dishes, powering home and home-office electronics, maintaining a comfortable indoor temperature and air quality, and powering an electric car. The Solar Decathlon shows the nation and the world that clean and plentiful sources of energy—solar energy—can provide the power for healthy places in which to live, work, and play.Winners of the 2007 SD was German Technische Universität Darmstadt with their house made of German oak. The house seems to be enveloped in windows, covered by shutters that double as photovoltaic cells, to generate power and at the same time shade the interior of the house. I would love to live in it!
[via Inhabitat]
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