Two topics coming up for February timeframe on AECCafe Voice:
Collaboration platforms and the Cloud
Reality Capture
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Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
Call for Participants: February Topics – Collaboration and Reality Capture
Tuesday, January 26th, 2016AECCafe’s Trends Report 2016
Thursday, January 7th, 2016Trends that are shaping the built world are powered by the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, institute BIM mandates across the globe, the need for convergence or collaboration of AEC teams, the need for the “smart city,” emergence of the owner/operator extending the lifecycle of a project into operations and maintenance, and provision of tools that are right for the job. These trends are linked, as one will benefit and nourish the other.
1 Merchant Square, London, Robin Partington & Partners Architects
Contribute Ideas to AECCafe’s Trends/Predictions article
Monday, December 14th, 2015Greetings, Readers!
The first week of January AECCafe Voice will publish a Trends/Predictions article, looking forward toward what might be the big trends for the new year, as well as the next five years.
21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11) to Convene in Paris Monday
Tuesday, November 24th, 2015France will chair and host the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The conference is crucial because the expected outcome is a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below 2°C, a level that would ensure safety of the planet’s fragile resources. If that level is not achieved, it could have devastating consequences on world populations and survival.
One of the challenges of the Paris agreement, where heads of state will all gather, will be to establish a periodic – ideally five-year – review mechanism to raise the ambition of each Party and progressively improve the collective effort toward keeping global warming below 2°C.
Each country represented will obviously have reasons to participate but also issues, largely economic and political, that may create a climate of resistance to the review mechanism.
Royal Insight from Prince Charles
Prince Charles of the UK, The Prince, a tireless climate change campaigner for the past four decades, will deliver a keynote speech at the opening of COP21 next Monday.
He gave an exclusive interview to Sky News three weeks ago (well before the Paris attacks) about his ongoing concerns about climate change, saying he believes there is evidence to suggest that the reason for the Syrian conflict and resulting terrorism was drought. “We need to deal with the problem of the movement of people as a result of not being able to survive,” he said.
AIA 2014: The Story from the Exhibit Floor
Thursday, July 10th, 2014The Exhibit Floor tells a part of the story of any architectural conference. At the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Conference in Chicago two weeks ago, you walk in, and the first booths you see contain windows, doors, facades, all necessary features of a built environment. Toward the back are the software vendors, which provide the design and conceptual tools to make the building a reality.
Zero fossil fuel CO2 emissions on the horizon
Friday, April 25th, 2014Zero fossil fuel CO2 emissions for the entire global built environment are expected to be achieved by the second half of this century, according to climate change meetings held in London, Bonn and Paris.
The Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, projected a number of scenarios, each plotting amounts of carbon emissions and the resulting future global average temperatures. The bottom line is, there is only one scenario with a good chance of averting irreversible climate change: one that caps global cumulative industrial-era carbon emissions at under one trillion tons, according to the report. (more…)
Sefaira’s performance based design platform now includes daylighting analysis
Wednesday, February 19th, 2014Sefaira today announced that its performance based design platform includes daylighting analysis in their Sefaira for SketchUp product. With the addition of daylighting, Sefaira combines two critical design metrics in the same tool.
Top AEC Predictions for 2014 – AECCafe Voice
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014Last year’s predictions for the year, Top AEC Predictions for 2013 – AECCafe Voice, were somewhat different from this year’s. Although those predictions are still useful to note this year, I am focusing on some product directions and initiatives since there is a continuing, pressing need to address critical infrastructure, fueled largely by climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and failing infrastructure and economy. Products developed and industries becoming more collaborative all shape the predictions of the year 2014.
“Best ever” address on Climate Change by President Obama
Wednesday, June 26th, 2013Obama’s address on Climate Change was the “best ever” according to Al Gore in his blog.
Obama Climate Change Speech – Huffington Post
Geodesign Summit 2013 Summary
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013Geodesign is a set of techniques and enabling technologies for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation (among other stages). “Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts.”[1] – Wikipedia
Geodesign is yet in its infancy and as the conference made clear, many are just on the dawn of using it while others might be exploring its inner workings. The focus on the first day did seem very geo-centric, as of course the event was hosted by a GIS company. Ideally, Geodesign will pull datasets from geographic information systems as well as computer aided design and BIM software and other datasets to tackle big world problems such as sustainability, ecology and building tomorrow’s cities.
Bran Ferren, co-founder of Applied Minds LLC and keynote speaker for the opening session at the Geodesign Summit held at Esri’s Redlands, Calif. Campus, set the tone for the Summit that commenced Thursday, January 24th, 2013.
The Geodesign Summit, introduced by Esri in 2009, explores the concept of merging geography and design, and being able to access various datasets through the “CloudGIS,” Esri’s version of the Cloud. According to Ferren, it is a way to begin to build the cities of the future, using technologies such as geographic information, planning, building information modeling and much more.
