Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm is a 2-day workshop.
What: To investigate pressing energy issues facing the Phoenix area and the US Southwest, and to use research and design thinking to generate ideas for potential sustainable solutions. This workshop is designed for interested conference participants and an interdisciplinary group of college students from ASU and the University of New Mexico.
Who: The workshop will be facilitated by Megan Halpern (ASU), Dan Collins (ASU) and Andrea Polli (The University of New Mexico)with students from ASU and The University of New Mexico
Day 1
Research: Participants take on the role of “energy investigators” with the goal of building a visual “energy ethnography” for Phoenix and the Valley. In the morning session, interdisciplinary teams are formed (participants remain in these teams for the rest of the workshop), and sent on a visual and other-data-gathering scavenger hunt. Using smartphones, teams walk through parts of downtown Phoenix, taking photographs, gathering data and making brief observations, which they share over Twitter and other databases. Tweets relating to the workshop will include #BunB2015, and participants will be given a list of predetermined hashtags such as #waste, #surplus, or #scarcity, and “collect” images and observations with these tags. This exercise is designed to help participants build their observational skills related to ethnography and visual ethnography, and to help the larger group to build a catalog that can be used as inspiration during the rest of the workshop. During the scavenger hunt process, groups will also be able to observe and work with student technicians and organizers to use a Leica LIDAR system to rapidly capture sections of the downtown area as 3D point clouds. These images will be among the images tweeted with the hashtag #BunB2015, and may also include thematic hashtags from the hunt. At the end of the day, teams share their results with the larger group of participants.
Day 2
In the morning, participants choose a topic area or problem with which to engage, and begin their design projects. Design Storm: Teams will undergo a series of three structured creative design-storming exercises (or design ‘sprints’) that incorporate the catalog of materials gathered during the scavenger hunt. After each of the three activities, participants will briefly share their progress. During the afternoon session, groups will work independently to complete a proposal or prototype for a solution to their energy-related issue. Finally, the workshop will reconvene for reporting from each group on their project results.
After the workshop, the results of Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm are presented by participants in a poster-style session at the Balance/Unbalance conference.
Registration Link coming soon
Participating Courses:
ASU Visualization and Prototyping
UNM Computational Sustainability