+ * Hacking Urbanity: Downtown Fort Worth’s Plan 2023. This article originally appeared at Post404.com on August 6, 2012 Every decade, the traditionally-laconic city of Fort Worth, Texas rolls up its sleeves and puts together a ten-year urban development and renewal plan.
Citizen participation has been a key factor for the success of many projects in those plans, and this year the city took advantage of modern collaboration technology to make that even easier. + * MindMixer — Engage Your Community. + downtown-fort-worth-inc-launches-new-community-engagement-website-developed-by-mindmixer-161916635. FORT WORTH, Texas, July 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Downtown Forth Worth, Inc., in collaboration with the Fort Worth Transportation Authority and the City of Fort Worth, are pleased to introduce the launch of FutureDowntown.org, a new online community engagement website which allows both residents and planning experts the ability to learn about the Downtown 2023 Strategic Action Plan, propose ideas for downtown Fort Worth, and provide feedback that will be reviewed and considered for implementation into the project.
Participants can also second ideas, expand upon existing ideas, and collaborate online with officials on a variety of project issues anytime, from anywhere. "No matter the topic, our FutureDowntown.org is able to engage a far more diverse audience of participants than can attend traditional planning meetings," says Allan Howeth, Chairman of Plan 2023. According to Nick Bowden, CEO of MindMixer, "We believe in building connected and contributing communities. + Engage Denton by MindMixer. + APNHR 2013 Asia Pacific Network for Housing Research Conference 2013: Plenary Speakers. [ Smart Homes For Resilience ] ** + Telematics for Home Anthemis #partner. [ Home automation ] - Impatient Futurist: Your Domestic Robot Servant Has Finally Arrived (in a Fashion) To be fair, PR2 and HERB are research robots, and I wouldn’t trust any research that didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail to be useful in the real world.
In their further defense, the seemingly simple things we’d like robots to do around the house—like towel folding—turn out to be surprisingly complicated. Because towels are floppy, it’s difficult to program a robot to recognize their shape or to know where the corners are so it can spread them out flat. When you pick up a mug, you rely on the ability to recognize exactly where the handle is and how it’s oriented, in spite of the fact that mugs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be oriented to you in dozens of different angles.
Then the mug problem gets even harder, notes Sven Wachsmuth, a computer scientist at the University of Bielefeld in Germany who helps run an annual worldwide competition in feats of home robotics. - Gillian Shaw: Invasion of the domestic robots (with video) Frederic Boisdron and his wife run their home with the help of 12 robots.
The robots do everything from cutting the grass to washing the windows. They even keep the cat’s litter box clean. What they won’t be doing is looking after the couple’s first child when the baby is born in October. But by the time the Boisdrons are grandparents, their children could be enlisting robots to help look after them. + Willow Garage. Coordinates: Willow Garage is a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications.[2] The company is probably best known for its open source software suite ROS (Robot Operating System), which has been rapidly and widely becoming a common, standard tool among robotics researchers and industry, since its initial release in 2007.
It was started in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, an early Google employee who helped develop Google's technology.[3][4] Steve Cousins is the president and CEO. Willow Garage is located in Menlo Park, California.[5] - Robots. - Robots. - index. * + Apple's home automation tech taps iPhone, Mac hardware for intelligent user tracking. By Mikey Campbell In an interesting and somewhat exhaustive patent awarded to Apple on Tuesday, the company outlines technology that can adaptively track a user's location and use the data to intelligently control secondary devices at another locale, such as home appliances.
Source: USPTO Many believe home automation is the next tech frontier; a marriage of hardware and software that can make an incredible impact on our daily lives. Already, companies like Nest and Philips are automating tasks with their respective Nest Learning Thermostat and Hue light bulb products. While some firms offer all-encompassing home management solutions that can control everything from turning on lights, to remotely closing a garage door, these systems usually require some type of user interaction. Apple's invention is rooted in location data. In some embodiments, the first devices are tasked with feeding location data to relay servers when a predetermined condition is met.
- building-toward-the-home-of-tomorrow. Photo The home of the future — complete with helper bots and automated appliances — has long been the stuff of science fiction.
The tech world is determined to make it a reality. Soon, the vision goes, everything from garden products to bathroom appliances will be controlled by the touch of a smartphone. Without setting foot in the door, a person headed home could turn off the security system and turn on the shower, and begin preheating the oven. - Gestural Interfaces. Gestural user interfaces may be the future, but we’re not quite comfortable with them yet--as users or designers.
Their tactile simplicity makes them efficient once you get the hang of them, but their affordance-less, "pictures under glass" nature can make them inscrutable to first-time users. Meanwhile, how can designers fully grasp the possibility space of these interfaces without anything to, well, grasp? + Canary - Smart home security for everyone. + SmartThings. * + Amiqual4home » Innovation Factory. + io - Features. - Telematics: Connecting the car to the home. Greg T.
Spielberg reports on how telematics is helping create a connected home-car environment. [ Industry Bodies For Resilience ] * + Building Resilience #opportunity #partner. - Insurance Council > Home. - Finalists for the 2011 Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction showcase durable solutions in resilient urban planning. Geneva – Four cities and two organizations have been shortlisted for the Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction, worth $50,000, with winners to be announced 10 days from now at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, on 12 May.
The Award is given to an individual or organization for outstanding and internationally recognized action that contributes to building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters. It is designed to stimulate wider application of the Hyogo Framework for Action, the key instrument for implementing disaster risk reduction, adopted by the Member States of the United Nations in 2005. The finalists include the cities of Bhubaneswar, India; North Vancouver, Canada; Santa Fe, Argentina, and San Francisco, Philippines. Ms. Wahlström heads the Geneva-based United Nations secretariat for the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), which manages the award.
- Centro de Coordinación para la Prevención de Desastres Naturales en America Central. * + The Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. "The international community must "risk proof" development because disasters are taking a heavy toll on rich and poor countries as well as outpacing their ability to respond" + 2011 ANNUAL RESILIENCE AWARD. [ Resilient Design Institutes ] + Resilient Buildings Group - The Jordan Institute. + Resilient Design Institute. [ Habitats ] + Simon Velez - Bamboo Architect.
- Panchoran Retreat. For years we have held festivals of Balinese dance and music, we held workshops and housed environmentalists for the bamboo foundation which I started in 1990. We have hosted Balinese buffets with local dances, barbeques and romantic dinners to an unforgettable level. Planting in the tropics is so rewarding as everything grows 10 times faster. We have a mature garden of giant bamboos, an enormous Bodhi tree, avenues of tree ferns and flamboyant heliconias, gingers, spices and fruits and therefore we have a great variety of butterflies and birds. We have 7 houses, a yoga pavilion, a “Big Bale” where everyone meets and a large country kitchen, a world of its own. Apart from the private pools in the houses, there is a 26 meter lap pool filled with spring water.
The rooms are comfortable. + NOMAD MICRO HOME - EASILY ASSEMBLED, UNDER $30K. The NOMAD Micro Home With a cool factor set at maximum, this groundbreaking tiny house is flat-packed in a box that's ready for shipment anywhere on the planet and is easily assembled by our purchasers. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, stair, and sleeping area are all seamlessly integrated into a 10' x 10' space. Priced at $25,000 for the base model, NOMAD’s goal is to reduce consumerism and focus on an affordable and sustainable housing option for the largest portion of our society: hard-working individuals who can't make ends meet due to the high cost of living. + Build Your Own Flat-Pack Micro Nomad Home for Less than $30,000. Fancy building your own home? This cozy micro dwelling from Nomad could make that a much easier reality, and it will only set you back $30,000.
The flat-pack house resembles a compact cabin from the outside, but the interior is sufficiently spacious for a single person or couple. Both attractive and affordable, this sweet little house also boasts a few other features that will allow its owner to live entirely off the grid. + Green School. Future Cities Laboratory. + Towards a digital building culture. + Department of Architecture. + ETH setting the tone for Swiss research. Digital architecture, biomedical groundwork, molecular engineering and mathematical physics: ETH Zurich has become established in these research topics in the latest series of National Centres of Competence in Research and is leader or co-leader at these centres.
The Swiss government and the Swiss National Science Foundation have launched eight new NCCRs to which Swiss Government will be giving approximately CHF 30 million in funding. Federal Councillor Johann Schneider-Ammann, head of the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research (EAER), announced this today at a press conference. - News in Architektur, Planung und Design. + Fabric Project. + Toolbox for CO2-free buildings. Motor with turbo compressor. + The adaptive robot. Future Cities Laboratory. Dirk Hebel is currently holding the position of Assistant Professor of Architecture and Construction at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. Prior to that, he was the founding Scientific Director of the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The Cities of the Future. Future Cities Laboratory. + DALE: Brilliant Solar-Powered Micro Home is Set on Rails for Mobility. + DALE: SCI-Arc/Caltech. + Copenhagen Climate Adaptation Plan. Copenhagen Unveils Comprehensive Climate Adaptation Plan To Reduce Flooding And Boost Local Economy. Storms, sea level rise, and extreme drought are only predicted to accelerate in the decades ahead. Combined with unprecedented urban population growth, this unpredictable weather is a recipe for costly, life-threatening disaster in the world’s biggest cities. Rather than quibble about why climate change is occurring, the city of Copenhagen has decided to take action. The city recently unveiled a comprehensive Climate Adaptation Plan. Using both blue and green design strategies, the plan will prevent heavy rainfall from crippling infrastructure while increasing natural habitats within the city. - El Hierro. [ Disaster Proof / Resistent ] ** + Gunter Pauli. + Simón Vélez DeBoer Architects. + Shigeru Ban.
Japanese pavilion at the Expo 2000, Hannover (2000) In 2014, Ban was named the 37th recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious prize in modernist architecture.[3] The Pritzker Jury cited Ban for his innovative use of material and his dedication to humanitarian efforts around the world, calling him "a committed teacher who is not only a role model for younger generation, but also an inspiration.
+ Fire and Flame Control with Citrus? The organisation The Blue Economy presents the following article on its home page about an innovation under the heading "Fire and Flame Control with Citrus? " + TAIHEIYO CEMENT. ** + Blue Economy. + Home - Watrec Ltd. + Breakthrough Green Power. - Earthstone International, Inc. - Household cleaning & sanding products that are safe for the environnment. + Pittsburgh Corning. + Remodel Bathroom Los Angeles Specialists - + Homepage Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. + Interface Global. + Levande Filter. + H&P Architects.