I noticed two articles today that are kind of linked in my mind. The first article if from inhabitat (“3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock“) is about what is basically a rapid prototyping machine for large stuff, like sculptures or possibly even buildings. This 3D Printer is built by Enrico Dini and basically  uses a print head moving about on what boils down to a scaled up version of a rep-rap style gantry system to precisely spray a magnesium glue over a sand substrate to essentially create rock. When I saw this I immediately began thinking about how a comprehensive pattern language for buildings, design software and A.I., and a building scale scaffolding/gantry system could lead to automated building construction. Assemble your scaffolding over the site, much like the protective scaffolding systems used to protect houses during re-roofing, add on the required print-heads, I am also considering a head for blown insulation to fill cavities purposefully left in exterior and selected interior walls, then just let the system run for 24 hours a day. There are other things to consider, like electrics and plumbing, but I wonder to what degree routing spaces could be left by the construction head, or whether a separate head could be developed to lay cabling and flexible piping and hosing from various reels. Maybe this is quite different to the way that we currently build houses in the U.K. but it is not so far fetched to imagine that there are different way to do so which are just as good as the current approach.

Considering this lead me to another article about researchers at M.I.T. who are developing self assembling computer chips (described in this Nature paper: doi:10.1038/nnano.2010.30). This is the important next step that we need at the other end of the 3D printing scale, from the macro-scale of constructing buildings to the micro-scale of constructing small electrical devices. Rapid-prototyping systems still need people to create the electronics to fit into the shells created by the printer. For a few years we have been pinning our hopes on the idea of printers that lay down conductive paths to form electrical circuits but we still needed the integrated circuits that the conductive paths joined, now we have an approach that might lead to hardware that can create the fully integrated electrical device, shell + circuit + Chips & I.C.

It looks like the future might be more of the same in some respects – everything gets automated. For the moment though, even with intelligent software to help manage the complexity of the task, we still need people to design the aesthetic aspects of products, whether they be houses or the next generation of MP3 player.

Well the results of the power down weekend that I posted about before are in and it is the Queen Mother Building that has won by a significant margin. The results are available on the Estates & Buildings page describing the endeavour and are republished here.

Considering the technology-centric activities of the QMB, it is gratifying that we still managed to significantly reduce our power consumption. That said though, I think that in the case of the QMB we are nearing our base-load for the building and to further reduce our power consumption beyond this point would begin to impact those activities that are the raison detre for the QMB in the first place.

I am not sure of the true value of this experiment but it piques my interest nonetheless. Over the weekend of the 4th-7th December users of a number of buildings on the Dundee University campus are being asked to turn off non-essential equipment so that the energy consumption of a powered down building over a weekend can be compared to a number of average readings for those same buildings over previous weekends.

It will be interesting to see what savings, if any, there are from the Queen Mother Building (QMB) as there has been a constant drive over the last few years to reduce energy consumption in the building where possible. Machines in student labs are automatically powered down overnight and weekends because of decreased usage compared with daytime during the working week. For a computing school we already have the bare minimum of hardware in the server room (which could and should be termed essential) compared with many of the computing departments at other universities that I have visited. Many of the desktop machines in research areas are shut down by their users at the end of every working day, I think partly due to many of those machines being windows boxes and hence their users being less accustomed to logging in remotely. In this instance I think that it is the *nix users who might be less environmentally friendly than the windows users. There has also been a concerted effort to replace all of the CRT screens with LCDs (although again I keep an old Iyama connected to my servers because it just works with everything whereas some LCDs can be a little pernickety with more exotic hardware in my experience). Lights within the building are already on automated systems that turn them off automatically when a certain duration of non-movement is detected — pity the Ph.D student working late at night who has to lean away from their desk periodically and wave their arms to get the lights to come back on after they automatically shut off.

To be honest I think that very little, in the way of little things like switching off IT equipment, can be done in the QMB to further reduce power consumption, although the results of this experiment may yet surprise me.

Hot on the heels of a recent post about living bridges comes this story of architects in Germany who are looking at the use of plants as support structures in buildings so that houses and cities can grow “into the sky”. Their website discusses a number of projects involving using plants, often Willow trees, to build living architecture. Whereas the living bridges used the trunks of other trees to provide initial scaffolding, the Baubotanik group use steel scaffolding to provide the initial load bearing function which is replaced over time by the strength of the plant material as it matures. More photographs and commentary can be found in this german information centre article.

Whilst away in the states earlier this summer I met a representative from the nascent Institute for computational sustainability (ICS). Computational sustainability is defined as an interdisciplinary field that aims to apply techniques from computer science, information science, operations research, applied mathematics, and statistics for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for sustainable development, with a focus on developing computational and mathematical models and methods for decision making concerning the management and allocation of resources in order to help solve some of the most challenging problems related to sustainability.

This dovetails quite nicely with some of my interests in the area which are in the application of computer science techniques, such as argumentation, defeasible logics, intelligent agents and multiagent systems, and ludic theory, to the problems experienced when attempting to balance societal and environmental needs with the aim of fostering a sustainable world.

There have been two events this year on the topic of computational sustainability, a workshop (CROCS-09) and a conference (CompSust09) and it looks as though there might be a burgeoning sustainability society starting up at Dundee with the aim of fostering interdisciplinary research in the field. We shall have to see.

The root bridges of cherrapungee in Northeast India are a perfect example of man working with nature to produce harmonious and useful societal artifacts that are inherently sustainable. These bridges are grown over an extended period of time by training Ficus Elastica roots along channels made from betel nut trunks.

“The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong – strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time – and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunjee may be well over five hundred years old.”

Resources

• Atlas Obscura Entry
• Living Root Bridges Blog Entry

The photo to the left illustrates one of the nice things about cycling, the bikes take up much less space than cars.Although we obviously wouldn’t park bikes like this under normal circumstances, the photograph does illustrate how must space could be saved, or used differently, that is currently used solely to park cars. Huge spaces that could provides pleasant green spaces around our working environments.

When I see this photograph I also think about how great it would be if there was a pool of Bromptons at Dundee University that were free for general use by staff, free for the taking as required, and in an ideal world could be used for commuting.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets

Not our first harvest of the year but the first crop that I have managed to get a picture of:

We now have a whole list of sites that we visit each year, beginning around the start of August, where we can gather Chanterelles. The nearest site is a 100 metres away from the house, then they range to roughly five miles, 30 miles, and 60 miles. We also have a number of places on the west coast around Gairloch where we have found them. It is nice whilst on holiday there to sit outside the tent cleaning mushrooms that you have just gathered ready to eat for breakfast.

During my recent trip to the U.S. I was surprised at how much better their public transport systems were considering the U.S. is meant to be in thrall to the personal automobile. Whilst I didn’t see very much in the way of dedicated cycle paths, and the pedestrian and cyclist are definitely still looked down on by the card drivers, I see a number of things that I like:

1. Cheap ubiquitous public transport – Whilst locals might think that the subway in NYC is expensive, or smelly, or dirty, and their are many problems with it, I think that the NYC subway is a wonderful way to get around the city. It is quite cheap to get to where you wish to go to and you can travel and transition between many lines for a flat fee. It is also a simple matter to get from bus to subway to train to airport, and everything in between. Contrast that with the decades old arguments for and against having a rail link to Edinburgh airport, the reintroduction of tram systems in Edinburgh and Manchester and other places to deal with traffic congestion after we sidelined out public transport systems for too long, and the sheer expense of taking a bus anywhere because of the profiteering by privately owned bus companies.
2. Bike racks on the front of buses in California – These are excellent, you can use the bus to get you part of the way to your destination, or past tricky or dangerous areas, then you debark, pull your bike off the rack and cycle to your destination. Brilliant. Why can’t we have bike racks on the front of buses in the U.K.?

I found a decent discussion of the history of bike racks on buses in California.

Building is a process of imposing some sort of “order” on the world. This is done on a grand scale but we don’t really understand the order we create on any kind of deep level. However from the scientists perspective we do have a narrow understanding of some aspects of order as it occurs in nature and this understanding molds our understanding of the world.

“Human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course, there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same thing. So from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. That is what the pattern language is — a record of that stuff in us, which belongs to the ninety percent of our feeling where our feelings are all the same”

– Christopher Alexander (2002) The Nature of Order, book one, pp. 3-4.