This post is the last of four posts about Participatory Sensing (projects and research) that we have been publishing weekly on Fridays in January.
In this post I’m introducing the Air Quality Egg project which is currently in process. It is designed for measuring air quality levels and it is being developed collaboratively in an open process by people all around the world.

The European Union, through the FP7 EU program, invests large amounts of money on citizen sensing projects generally from a techno-centric perspective. Meanwhile a community of hackers, air quality enthusiasts, architects, activists, entrepreneurs, anthropologists, etc are getting involved holding conversations about the Air Quality Egg project and searching for a more humanistic approach.

The Air Quality Egg project is announced at the home page of its wiki as “a project aiming to give citizens a way to participate in the conversation about air quality. It is composed of a sensing device that measures the air quality in the immediate environment and an on-line community that is sharing this information in real-time. It is a community-developed, open source project that is driven by people who care about the air they breathe.”

The Air Quality Egg prototype consists on a Nanode board with air pollutant sensors attached to it. A Nanode board is an Arduino-based board with integrated Ethernet with a built-in application for storing and querying the data at Pachube directly.

The idea of developing an air quality egg was born in the Internet of Things meetups in New york, Amsterdam and London, which are being sponsored and promoted by Pachube. It seems that Pachube is interested in promoting citizen’s initiatives that would improve the government’s data with a citizen-distributed open data set stored in Pachube’s site. The Air Quality Egg is a starting platform for future work to come after it. The goal is to achieve data so that the conversation on air quality can be started.

People approach this Air Quality Egg project with enthusiasm or distrust but in general, as Ed Borden wrote at Pachube’s blog “people want to know.”
We have already seen other air quality measuring and monitoring projects in previous posts and having a look at the Internet we can find more, such as the Copenhagen Wheel Project, SensorMap, OpenSense, or IDEA.
So, why is the Air Quality Egg project catching every one’s eyes?

People are getting engaged. Open process.
There is a very interesting complex mixture in these meetings where we can find activist and entrepreneurial motivations for developing citizen-driven sensor-networks. Entrepreneurs know that people care about health and see this citizen driven sensor networks as a possibility for new business and enterprises. Measuring devices and wireless sensors are being mentioned in journals like the New York Times as they are starting to be widespread technologies and industries. In this electronics weekly magazine we find a post about “Wireless sensors tap ambient energy” that introduce the concept of the actual deployment of this wireless device.

People are collaborating globally. The online conversation.
Internet allows for global scale conversation and reflection using tools such as wikis or google groups. This conversation is putting in touch people, building a community of developers and air quality enthusiasts.

From the beginning conversation turned around the “why, the how and the who” of the project. There was a call for reflection about the situation of the egg within an specific local context to make it important for users in their daily lives. The possibilities of the owner’s relation and interaction with the Egg have also been discussed. Which interaction could the egg have with the owner and the egg’s owner community? Concepts as gamefication or customizing the egg as a living being (“incubating data”) had been debated. Conversation was also revolved around the evaluation of available technologies regarding batteries, sensors, calibration processes and their costs.

The thinking and prototyping of systems are happening in parallel: the conversation is on the Internet and workshops are being developed during the meet ups along two different continents.

People are collaborating globally. The Meet ups.
Face to face collaboration on the project is also taking place at the IoT Meet ups and workshops.The first and the second meetings were in held New York. The third one which I attended to was in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam workshop was one step forward to the air quality prototype, being held at the Waag. The aim of the workshop was to start building a prototype, trying all types of pollution sensors and facing the problem of calibration for building a global project that might work both in Europe and in the United States. More information about the development of the workshop can be found at one of the attendant’s blog.

To follow and be aware about the current process of development of the Air Quality Egg project you can find more information in Pachue’s blog.

Kickstarter campaign and conclusion
Some Internet of Things projects had been successfully funded by crowd-unding platforms. Among these projects we can find “Ballon Mapping Kits”. It is an Open Hardware kit in a balloon that has been helping residents of the Gulf Coast to map the deep water oil spill.

Some of the common traits of these successfully crowdfunding projects are the empowerment of users and the fact it is a simple interface where people don’t have to be a tech-person to understand it. These initiatives are framed as promoting the public interest and are complemented with a well managed communication campaign. Open process projects to prototype an object can be funded by their future users and owners promoting the participation and engagement of people. I have my hopes pinned on this kind of funding that could allow interesting bottom-up projects to be successful.

Sources
Pachube’s blog.
Air quality Egg wiki.
The green egg from the main picture is inspired on the egg’s design by Albert Chao. All images were taken at the IOT Meet up in Amsterdam on the 17th December 2011.

Finally I am grateful to JP de Vooght, César García, Sara Perez Thomsom, Dorien Zandbergen, Martina Minnucci and Javier Esquillor for the feedback and conversations on citizen and participatory sensing.

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

In the previous post I presented an overview about the relationship between citizens and data. Data means nothing without interpretations. As Amber Frid-Jimenez explained in this conference at Visualizar 11 at Medialab-Prado Madrid, we make sense of data extracting information from it, and building knowledge and wisdom from that information. Therefore, it is fundamental to ensure that data is collected with enough rigour to construct reliable knowledge.

Next we will have a look at two examples of 2009 Participatory Sensing projects: Glob@s and MIMAQ. The first one is a project designed and developed at a medialab in Madrid, and the second one is a project supported by a dutch foundation.

Glob@s (2009)
Globl@s is a project which was developed in less than a month’s time during the international workshop-seminar INTERACTIVOS’?09: Garage Science, that took place at Medialab-Prado in 2009. During this workshop Glob@s was collaboratively developed by volunteer participants both professional and amateur.
                                            Images retrieved from Glob@s wiki

Glob@s is aimed at children and has a strong educational focus. The project started by making a “do it yourself” mobile air monitoring device for children to explore their local environments and to raise awareness of pollution. The aim of Glob@s was to build an interface in a web platform that children could easily understand, and where the data visualizations displayed could show relationships between our behavior and the air quality levels.

Globl@s would be the first step through a bottom-up participatory sensing project. It nearly fits on the “Collective Desing and Investigation” Participatory sensing model which is described in the UCLA’s paper. In this model “a group of individuals collaborate to define what, where, and why to sense and then collectively design a data collection system, conduct an investigation, interpret the data, and act on the results.”

glob@s-the making of from susanna tesconi on Vimeo.

Unfortunately this ambitious project appears as an uncompleted experiment outlined in a short time at those hacker space meetings. Anyway it brings to the table most of the questions and issues that are being worked nowadays in other air quality monitoring projects like the air quality egg. I invite you to have a look at the wiki project where more technical information is available. I would like to emphasize on its do it your self approach that makes possible the reproduction of the idea and the project anywhere and learn during the implementation process.

Mimaq (2009-2010)
MIMAQ is “Mobile Individual Measurements of Air Quality”. MIMAQ has been supported by Kennisland fondation as part of the Digitale Pioniersregeling. Kennisland is an independent organization from The Netherlands which doesn’t receive structural funding. Its mission “is to make our society smarter”, where people has “the ability to learn and to continue to innovate at a personal level “ by interacting with others and working together.

In MIMAQ, the project data is collected by citizens at all times and places during their outdoor activities. A senspod mobile device (with environment sensors) carried by a citizens collects data and transferees it to a mobile phone via Blue-tooth. Every second, a sample of temperature, relative humidity, and noise level (dBA) is taken with a GPS location. A smartphone with Internet access allows data visualization in real time using using Layar Augmented Reality browser, where “NOx levels are rendered as clouds in the air”. There is also a google application which allows data to be stored and values can be visualized over time on google maps.

MIMAQ’s pilot took place in Leiden, The Netherlands in 2010. Mobile sensing devices were carried by aproximately 60 volunteers during 9 months from April to October.

 
Image retrieved from http://mimaq.org/resultaten/ NOx levels (red=hight) Red track corresponds with traffic congestion.

Nearly all air quality measuring and monitoring projects had had the same limitations due to the use of low-cost components to build low-cost prototypes. In the case of MIMAQ, there were limitations related to the sensor calibration; the effects of the temperature, humidity and O3 on NOx levels; and the location accuracy (GPS). Regardless of limitations, it seems, according to what we can read on the Mimaq site that the pilot was quite successful.

Even though MIMAQ pilot has been meaningful for citizens, participants haven’t defined the research objectives. Neither data can be considered open and nor citizens will decide on the future use of the collected data. MIMAQ could be classified between the “Public Contribution” and “Personal Use and Reflection” models exposed on the UCLA’s paper.

Next post, we will explore other Participatory Sensing projects, how these projects are funded and what’s their current development process.

Bibliography
Goldman, J., Shilton, K., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Ramanathan, N., Reddy, S., et al. (2009). the patterns that shape our world, (May). Retrieved from http://participatorysensing.org/participatory_sensing_vision.pdf

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

This post is the second of 4 posts about Participatory Sensing (projects and research) that we are publishing weekly on Fridays.
In this post I’m introducing relationships among citizens, sensors and data as preliminary stages towards participatory sensing projects in the context of smartcities.

Citizenship and data.
In the industrialized countries every city has official sensor monitoring, promoted by governmental bodies. Governments use expensive and high-technologies in cities in order to estimate the values of citizen’s exposure to many different phenomena. All data collected is supposed to make new phenomena visible and observable to improve governmental decision-making that can fit better into the reality of the city. A very concerned citizen could come upon this data and would probably find a great big pdf document with a non legible amount of data. This is the context in which the open-data movement and especially the open-data government is being developed. Nowadays we can find some very interesting initiatives: next a six minute video of Tim Berners-Lee at TED (conference) 2010 showing examples of open data.

Citizen sensor networks.
Amit Sheth in his Citizen Sensing, Social Signals, and Enriching Human Experience paper (2009) refers to the term citizen-sensor network as “an interconnected network of people who actively observe, report, collect, analyze and disseminate information via text, audio, or video messages”. It announces the advantages of introducing citizen-sensors in the normal data collection process, that was previously run by stand-alone sensor networks. A citizen sensor will use technologies like mobile devices and web 2.0 services to share their observations in real-time. As an example of citizen sensing, Amit describes how the microblogging information flow on the 2008 Mumbai attacks provided “enhanced situational awareness“, that a machine-based sensing system could not offer alone. Humans can contextualize and decide what is interesting and filter data collectively. Citizen-sensors will also adapt what they observe in real time and generate contextual knowledge from data collection.

Data is Political.
                                                  Took of from Australia. Landed in China.

I received this link in my inbox a week ago. This picture was uploaded at es.reddit.com. What if citizens shared more than observations and started sharing trustworthy data about the air quality or noise pollution? What would happen if citizens started sharing data related to public health issues?

Data can influence public policies because “data is political”. All data collected on environmental phenomena has consequences on our health and on our every day life. If we had data about noise pollution in a neighborhood we would take this into account when deciding where to buy a house. An example of this kind of visualization project is In The Air: “which aims to bring to light the microscopic agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc) and make them visible, to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.”

Participatory sensing.
Participatory Sensing is described in wikipedia as “the concept of communities (or other groups of people) contributing sensory information to form a body of knowledge”. In 2006 a team in UCLA wrote this research paper on Participatory Sensing to introduce the term “mobile devices, such as cellular phones, to form interactive, participatory sensor networks that enable public and professional users to gather, analyze and share local knowledge”. They developed a software called Partisan designed “to support a new model that places users in the loop of the sensing process and aims to maximize the credibility of the data they collect”. Protecting privacy and encouraging participation are important issues that were raised by the research team.

Participatory sensing research is mostly taking place in universities but also in other contexts.
Often such other participatory sensing initiatives are framed as promoters of the public interest. Professional researchers, amateurs and air quality enthusiasts meet in places like Medialabs or Hackerspaces and start-up a projects on participatory sensing. In the next post I will mention some participatory sensing bottom-up data collection projects that place citizens not only as sensors but also as actors.

Bibliography:
Burke, J. A., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Parker, A., Ramanathan, N., Reddy, S., & Srivastava, M. B. (2006). Participatory sensing. Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/19h777qd.pdf

Sheth, A. (2009). Citizen Sensing, Social Signals, and Enriching Human Experience. IEEE Internet Computing, 13(4), 87-92. doi:10.1109/MIC.2009.77

Goodchild, M. F. (2006). CITIZENS AS SENSORS: THE WORLD OF VOLUNTEERED GEOGRAPHY 1 Michael F. Goodchild, 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

In these posts I will share my research on participatory sensing, open data and smartcities that I started about 6 months ago.
The first post is about The data-citizen driven city project which I developed with César García, Jorge Medal and Sara Thomson on September 2011. With this project, produced by a multidisciplinary team consisting of an IT System Administrator, an Industrial Designer, an Artist and an Architect, I really started considering how data can empower communities and catalyze social change.

We presented The data-citizen driven city project for the 4Th ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE CONTEST “CITY-SENSE: Shaping our environment with real-time data” by The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia on the 26Th September. Our proposal focused on a technological, social and urban process would take place over ten years time. Citizens would get deeply involved into expanding the Internet of Things, adopting an active prosumer role, instead of perpetuating passive postures. In the end, data-citizen driven cities would enable local direct democracy processes that could enhance their sustainability and efficiency.

Below I present the original texts and images of our proposal where main ideas are discussed along a whole decade timeline:

Understanding reality with data, changing personal habits.
Using open source technologies, like Arduino-based sensor units or mobile apps, data-citizens will be able to gather their own real-time data regarding issues they are really concerned about, such as air quality, noise levels, street deficiencies, plagues, etc. All data will be shared in open public repositories, like Pachube, available for everyone. Long term data archival will allow citizens to gain a better understanding of the urban environment and to improve their daily personal habits.

Collective intelligence and critical mass. Social Cohesion.
Once there is a critical mass of participants, distributed citizen sensor networks will reveal new emerging patterns that will lead to a new collective intelligence. Citizens will soon become aware of the political power of data and they will begin to get organized in local work groups to develop new strategies to improve their neighbourhoods. The massive adoption of sensors will bring their price down, allowing anyone to participate in the extension of this smart city data layer, regardless of their income.

Renovation of the Social Contract. Collective emerging actions.
Involvement and commitment will be part of a new social contract in which the rights and obligations of the citizens and the institutions will be redefined. The maintenance and development of local resources will be delegated to neighbours that will feel engaged in the improvement of the urban ecosystem. Alarm warnings will not be accounted for in an isolated way; an holistic approach based upon data modelling will provide a global solution taking into account all the gathered data. Open data governance and accountability will be enforced through civil actions. The mission of local institutions will consist in supporting these local processes and developing long term plans.

Conclusion: A more sustainable and democratic city.
By the year 2020, citizens will participate indirect democratic processes at a local scale to transform the city into a more sustainable and efficient environment. Data will enable new uses of public spaces offering streamlined solutions. People will feel highly engaged towards their neighbours and surroundings in contrast to their previously detached postures. The success of radically open transparent processes will constitute a genuine milestone in the transformation of 21st century public institutions.

On the 5th December results where made public and we obtained an Honourable Mention. Anyway the most interesting part of The data-citizen driven city project started once the proposal was submitted. On October we decided to start-up a study group to continue working on the DCDcity and its physical implementation at the “ViernesOpenLab” at Medialab-Prado. We have already got in touch with the “air quality egg” project members to collaborate into this global network of air quality enthusiasts. But this is another story that might be written on a future post.

2nd December Arduino programing workshop at Medialab-Prado at the “ViernesOpenLab”

Bibliography:
Getting Started with the Internet of Things by Cuno Pfister.
The value of open hardware is in the empowerment of communities by Usman Haque.
Program Your City: Legal and Governance Issues of an Urban Integrated Open Data API by Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology.
Smart People, Dumb Objects, Networked Environments by Usman Haque.
Notes on the Design of Participatory Systems – for the City or the Planet by Usman Haque.
Talking back to your intelligent city by Saskia Sassen.
Participatory sensing by Burke, Jeffrey A; Estrin, D; Hansen, Mark; Parker, Andrew; Ramanathan, Nithya; Reddy, Sasank, UC Los Angeles: Center for Embedded Network Sensing.

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

Nikolas Weinstein Studios is a glass sculpture studio in San Francisco with worldwide installations and a penchant for combining art and technology into site-specific glass installations.

found via Rhino Blog

We strongly envourage you to visit nikolas.net to discover their amazing works.
You can also follow them via their blog.

The video below is an amazing explanation of how they use Rhino and Grasshopper for their sculptures:
“We use Grasshopper in three fundamental ways: as a “try this” design tool; as a helper for complex, tedious, or repetitive drawing tasks; and as a tool to harvest, organize and manage data (dimensions, positions, etc.). Here’s a short video tour about Grasshopper and how we’ve been using it. Get your geek on…”

This video has been posted by Dave. Here is his a very original description of his profile:
Dave Johnson trained to be an engineer but has made his living in everything but, including movie special effects, juggling, modelmaking, writing and editing, computer programming, dog training, and electronic design. When he’s not figuring out how to fabricate, mount, and light difficult glass installations, he can be found watching the glassblowers. 

More posts by Dave at blog.nikolas.net
Thanks to Nikolas Weinstein Studios for sharing this great contents.

PHOTO ABOVE: Dynamic Solar Shading sketch model. Advances in Architectural Geometry 2010 / SOURCE : robofold.com

We often wrote in this blog about developability of complex surfaces.
In one of our post about geometries of bending I said:  developability is a key concept you have to understand if you are trying to construct very complex forms that are easy to draw but difficult to build.

But why? Because if you can develop a surface, then you can build it.
Now, robots from ROBOFOLD are saying something similar: if you can fold it, we can build it.

FOLDABLE = MAKABLE

This is the very clear slogan of curvedfolding.com, a social network created by ROBOFOLD where you can “work towards an open CAD standard, initially based on a quad-mesh geometry, for representing and modeling curved folding geometries…and show what we have crafted in paper, modelled in CAD and then fabricated.”

PHOTO ABOVE : RoboFold at 100% Design, October 2011. Their video interview with RoboFold / SOURCE: robofold.com

It’s very interesting to note that ROBOFOLD thinks about innovative production as something strictly related to the learning process. That’s why they develop a strong departement for learning with workshops and other events.
The structure of the workshop is clear as their slogan:

A 3 steps process: folding paper by hand all the way to folding metal with robots – with some simulation in software along the way. 

Watch the videlo below to see a robot in action.

PHOTOS AND VIDEOS ABOVE FROM robofold.com

A special thanks to Vanessa from McNeel to send me this information, in relation to a research for one of our project.

The first time I “met” Ion Cuervas-Mons was on twitter, when he still was in Shanghai to direct the construction of Madrid Pavilion for Shanghai Expo. The second time I’ve heard of him it was because he was working on relationships between parametric design and games and we started exchanging a lot of interesting ideas - here is an article in French .

Once Ion invited me to a meeting to discuss a project called OPENARCH.
He absolutely wanted to design and build a house to create a new model of living, strongly connected to the Internet and inspired by the open-source philosophy.

That idea has now turned into a real appartement, located next to Bilbao – map.
The project has been officially launched last friday 25th of November at openarch.cc

Do you want to visit this prototype ? Just ask Ion at info@thinkbig-factory.com

Openarch is a real prototype of a smart home.
The first home designed from scratch to incorporate a digital layer connecting the house and its elements to the Internet.
Its inhabitants lead a new digital and connected life. It is flexible and thanks to its ability to transform, it can adapt to any condition that the user requires.

The digital layer – which from now on we will call D. OS (domestic operating system) – includes a series of components that allow users to stay connected to anyone or any place; control the house’s components by the movement of the body; hold conferences from home; know the power consumption at any time; activate any electrical household appliance from work; share a live video of your cooking recipes with the rest of the world; create your own TV set in the lounge, and so on.

Openarch is a platform based on open software and hardware philosophy.
An inhabited playground where technologies can be tested. It is an open-living lab where other companies, artists or organizations can evaluate their products and services through the infrastructure and the participation of the house’s inhabitants.
D. OS updates and the incorporation of new technologies will be documented and registered under creative commons licenses and available to download as KITS.

It sounds like living inside the Internet…
What do you think?
Would you like it? 

·

OPENARCH is the first project by Thinkbig Factory, an innovative architecture and design consultancy.
The project is directed by Ion Cuervas-Mons and it is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

web : openarch.cc
blog: thinkbig-lab.com

After several months of blood, sweat and tears, we are very happy to share with you a free download of our CAD Standards, the Electronic File Naming Convention and the Project Folder Organisation we will be using at HDA, with immediate effect.

We are a hybrid team of architects, designers and engineers. Even though we strongly believe in this interdisciplinary approach, we understand that it presents difficulties in achieving coherence and clarity in our management systems. The files we are sharing today with our readers are the first outcome of a thorough review and coordination process intended to make our different design tools and activities more coherent.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, at HDA we believe in an open culture, that sharing content can be useful, productive and not anti-economic, and therefore offer these free to download in the hope that they may be useful to others.
As noted earlier, HDA is a French company. Therefore the naming of folders, files, CAD layers, etc. were prepared originally in French. The document text however, was prepared in English (due to that being the author’s native language). For these downloads, all document text, file names, folder names, layer names and abbreviations have been put into English.

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Document 1/3 | HDA – CAD Standard
VIEW or DOWNLOAD CAD Standard (741)

Document 2/3 | HDA – Electronic File Naming Convention
VIEW or DOWNLOAD HDA - Electronic File Naming Convention (425)

Document 3/3 | HDA – Project Folder Organisation
VIEW or DOWNLOAD Project Folder Organisation (435)

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It is hoped that soon we will produce a full set of documents in French also. Each document is designed to be printed out A4 portrait, double-sided (duplex).

Here is a text by Phil Barrett, who has been mainly involved in this process and who produced these documents for HDA

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CAD Standard

The management of CAD standards is an area that is commonly neglected as small companies expand and grow.
This is due in part to it being an area of work that is not directly ‘chargeable’ (with companies preferring to concentrate their resources on fee-paying project work), and partly due to its importance and effect on company efficiency not being fully understood by those not directly involved in it.

Like many architectural/engineering/design companies HDA had a basic CAD standard in place at the company’s inception. As the company grew this standard was updated intermittently in line with the progressive releases of existing design software programs (primarily AutoCAD), the introduction of new software (particularly for HDA the introduction of Rhinoceros), and the natural rotation of company personnel.

Just as with the evolution of design as a whole, there arrives a point at which it is no longer viable to further revise and ‘patch up’ an outdated model. The introduction of a new CAD standard can be a disruptive and time-consuming process, but the risk for companies is that the longer they continue with an inefficient system, the more disruptive, time consuming, and ultimately costly it becomes to replace it when they later have more staff and project work attached to it.

With the securing of several new projects, and the consequent arrival of new personnel to HDA, the decision was taken earlier this year to conduct a review of our existing system, and to design from scratch a system to properly suit our current (and expected future) requirements.

It was accepted from the outset that there is no one perfect system that will suit all companies and all projects, and that there is no single, globally accepted standard. HDA is particular too in the sense that it is a French company, with a mixture of French, Italian and British/Irish staff, and working on projects worldwide in French, Italian and English. As part of the research undertaken for the design of our new standard, a variety of existing standards have been consulted, including ISO 13567, BS 1192, AIA, Uniclass and AEC (UK), and whilst we have incorporated ideas into our standard where applicable to aid the compatibility of standards as a whole, trying to fully implement any one of these standards wholesale would be impractical, and largely unworkable. HDA CAD files are worked on by architects, designers, drafters and engineers, and it is accepted that most architects, engineers and designers do not have the same skills as experienced drafters. Therefore our standard has been designed to be as minimal as possible in certain areas, to make it more accessible to less experienced users and to lessen the scope for errors and differences in presentation styles.

As noted earlier, HDA primarily uses AutoCAD and Rhino software at present. Our previous CAD standard was designed exclusively for AutoCAD, therefore when Rhino was introduced there was no particular standard to be adhered to. This resulted in a variety of organizational styles arising, and a lack of uniformity and coherence in our project files. While still focusing primarily on the preparation and presentation of drawings in AutoCAD, much of this standard is designed to be applied to both AutoCAD and Rhino (and possibly other design software programs which may be used), with the aim of increasing compatibility between the two.

Document 1/3 | HDA – CAD Standard
DOWNLOAD CAD Standard (741)
VIEW on SCRIBD

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File Naming Convention and Project Folder Organisation

In addition to a new CAD standard, HDA has also produced two further standards documents.
The design of a file naming convention, and the re-design our existing project folder structure both arose from the questions posed by the design of our new CAD standard. In order to implement an effective CAD standard, it was necessary to have a more logical and effective folder structure in which to put the CAD files, and likewise a systematic and logical file naming convention to enable them to be located and identified.

Document 2/3 | HDA – Electronic File Naming Convention
DOWNLOAD HDA - Electronic File Naming Convention (425)
VIEW on SCRIBD

Document 3/3 | HDA – Project Folder Organisation
DOWNLOAD Project Folder Organisation (435)
VIEW on SCRIBD

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Thanks

Thanks to Craig Miller, Alex Jones and the London CAD team at Heatherwick Studio for their assistance with the issues of compatibility between AutoCAD and Rhino, your input was much appreciated.
Thanks to Ecosistema Urbano for sending us their standard for reference, and to all the people and companies who have published their standards online which have aided us during our research.
Thanks also to the number of online CAD forums that we have searched through for answers (CADTutor.net, CADforum.cz, CADForums.net, themadcadder.blogs.com, 3Dcadforums.com, CADDManager.com, autocadeverything.com).

From Wednesday to Sunday we were in Turin to coordinate one of the group of international Smart Building Workshop.

In this post we share the proposal developed by the participants of our group: we have called the project RESPONSIVE PARAMETRIC INFRASTRUCTURE.

Thank you very much to the city of Turin for inviting HDA, and thanks also to the whole organization team for the great work of coordination. Thanks also to the partners of the event and, above all, thanks to Federico Borello, Grazia Carioscia, Aurelio David, Chiara Rizzi, Giuseppe Roccasalva, Antonio Spinelli, Edoardo Trossero for working so hard for the project.

RESPONSIVE PARAMETRIC INFRASTRUCTURE

Turin Smart Network - a proposal for Ambito Pollone

A sustainable city is one where all the citizens share a global and collective responsibility towards their environment. A Smart City needs to provide means of awareness of every individual of the community of what the impact of their own piece of the city has on the environment, in the way they live work and play. The citizens need to have their needs and desires addressed to create their own quality environment. It is a question of Information. Information of the performance of the environment and information of the citizens requirements.

A sense of community provides social cohesion and a feeling of belonging. Each individual cares about his own world and can share together to build a quality environment.

Smartphones and personal computers provide a means for every citizen to interact and record their needs and desires and to participate in democratic improvement of the environment.

Today’s ICT tools are developing to become more and more capable of collecting and processing the complex mass of information that is involved. Data on consumption and emissions can be collected. Parametric optimization processes are capable of planning urban systems such as transport, energy, communication and space management in response to specific local environmental constraints to design the future city in response to each citizen’s needs and desires.

The proposal involves the creation of a system of data collection and interactive parametric processing based on a series of community nodes. The specific environment of each community is recorded and communicated through information screens in a central agora.

- A complex model of the physical area is created.

- The built context and environment is simulated.

- Energy performance data is collected and communicated.

- citizens interact and participate in the development if their community, their quarter, their city..

Iconic presentation screens, and signals in each community tell the story of each one, creating awareness and showing the process of interactive communication.

Like plants with a rhizomatic interconnection of roots, each community node is interconnected at different levels, first in the local quarter, then the city, nationally and through Europe to create a smart interactive parametric network to form a sustainable future built environment.

PresentazioneSmart citiesDEF1_10

The working group has been directed by Hugh Dutton and co-directed by:
Gaetan Kohler | architect, co-founder of OZ collective
Sebastien Perrault | engineer and architect, sebastienperrault.com
Francesco Cingolani | freelance architect, collaborator of HDA and Ecosistema Urbano

The following references has been used for the workshop:

HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés portfolio

TOWARDS A PARAMETRIC ARCHITECTURE – a talk by HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés

URBAN APERTURE(S) >< POROSITY AS A NEW MODEL FOR HYBRID PUBLIC SPACE - Conference in Milan at Urban Hybridization – The paper is the result of a collaboration and it’s written by: Francesco Cingolani, Domenico Di Siena, Manu Fernandez, Paco Gonzalez, Cesar Reyes Najera and Ethel Baraona Pohl

SMART STREET PROCOMÚN , a urban operating system designed by Ecosistema Urbano

AIR TREE COMMONS, a design by Ecosistema Urbano

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The event has been also a great opportunity to discover a lot of interesting project around architecture and the city of  Turin.
Among them, Transmitting Architecture Organ is an interesting blog and we are going to collaborate with it.

A creative and technical team from HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés will be in Turin next week to direct and coordinate one of the group of international Smart Building Workshop in the context of Turin’s nomination for the European Smart Cities project.

The following key people from HDA are composing the team for the workshop:

Hugh Dutton | architect and designer, director of HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés
Gaetan Kohler | architect, co-founder of OZ collective
Sebastien Perrault | engineer and architect, sebastienperrault.com
Francesco Cingolani | architect, communication and urban strategy consultant, immaginoteca.com

The workshop will focus on contemporary key concepts such as smart buildings, new technologies, sustainability and new issues for public spaces. You can find more information (in italian) about the workshop at smartbuilding.oato.it

We will share as much as possible real-time information during the workshop. If you want to follow us, keep an eye on this blog and follow us on twitter at @HDA_Paris