Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 4

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is the journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

Week 4

Week 4 on the Zinc programme was the beginning of autonomous working after bootcamp taught us about the programme format, the Zinc mission of Health & Environment and how much fun could be had in the Peak District.

Week 4 involved single day 'working sprints' with other cofounders. For each sprint we were tasked with testing working relationships and productivity, as well as trying to make inroads into problem identification and talking to relevant user groups.

I made a decision to use this opportunity to explore different opportunity areas across the built environment with different people, based on shared interests, casting a wide net.

Day 1.

Dee Korab and I explored the topic of enabling Deep Retrofit for the built environment. Despite narrowly missing out on the Retrofit 23 exhibition in person at the Building Centre , we found the virtual exhibition very useful. Our day was mostly spent trying to unpick the weight of the issue and the potential impact and measurability of Retrofit projects, or elemental parts of Retrofit projects, as a tool to achieve decarbonisation. One of the more eye opening findings was this study on the impact on final energy demand based on incremental Retrofit steps.

If this is a subject of interest to you and / or you have knowledge in the field of Deep Retrofit, preferably from a science or building physics perspective, I'd love to have a chat with you about it further. Please DM me and don't be shy!

Day 2.

Nick Donnelly , Jon Besga and I explored the subject of carbon credit markets in the world of climate tech and how these could be applied to problems within the built environment. Key to this it seems is the pricing of carbon offsetting, which the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) very handily published a report on in June 2023. Thanks to Nick for his eagerness to be up before 6am in Colorado to meet us remotely.

Day 3.

Guy Naor and I had a lot of fun exploring the potential for circular waste systems within the built environment. Shoutout to Dave Cheshire for his book on building a circular economy, which provided a useful source of discussion. As Guy and I are both interested in gamification, we began the day taking inspiration from simulators, which seem to be able to do a much better job of dealing with human needs and their processes than the real world...

Looking at buildings and those inhabiting them as a set of continuous systems, we started unpicking the potential of utilising plant spaces for in-house full waste circularity, drawing on Guy's previous work in the field of anaerobic digestion on farms. By not catching enough waste upstream and taking the opportunities inherent therein, we overload our municipal grids and networks, creating potentially avoidable work, contamination and other harmful activities downstream. To be explored further.

Day 4.

stayce cavanaugh introduced me to her world of home hacking, through which we explored one of my favourite concepts - buildings as living organisms - in order to measure, improve the efficiency of and mitigate the health impact upon us of the indoor environments that we spend most of our time in.

After easing me in gently with the case study of automating poop scooping and air extraction from a cat litter tray, Stayce and I found whole communities hacking together what as an Architect I would call a Building Management System, aided by the declining cost of technical sensors and access to open source software. Together we developed A.L.A.N (also the name of my cat), a practical science fiction concept for a whole house smart system.

A.L.A.N is an omnipotent smart home device and ecosystem that measures and corrects your internal environment and provides a real time health check on your building and the effect is has on you.

Day 5.

Reflection day! We did a lot of reflecting.

We also tuned in for a live talk with Mustafa Suleyman , founder of Google DeepMind , about the future of AI, on the same week OpenAI held their first DevDay in San Francisco. Mustafa talked the audience through his company Inflection AI and personal AI assistant Pi, before answering questions from an audience that seemed both curious and terrified in equal measure.

Thanks

Charlie Lees for explaining the data potential from human waste ??

Francisco Morejón for fixing the webinar and sourcing 'The Coming Wave' ??

Suryansh Chandra of Automata and MindDistillery for the encouragement on going rogue.

Mehrnaz Ghojeh for the birthday party alchemy ??????

Thought of the Week

Cofounder courtship is exhausting.