Tuesday, April 6, 2010

United States' First Zero Net Energy Community

You may have already heard about the University of California, Davis' ambitious quest to build the United States' first Zero Net Energy community. West Village, a 220-acre campus development that will integrate student, faculty, and staff housing, will also incorporate sustainable design features including aggressive energy-savings measures and a smart grid to generate, store, and distribute energy.

The $280 million project also provides a perfect learning laboratory for students in Tim McNeil's environmental graphic design course at UC Davis. McNeil, associate professor of design and director of the UC Davis Design Museum (and a member of SEGD), includes a component on communicating energy efficiency, green building, and sustainable landscape features. His students recently completed a project to develop a wayfinding and signage system that would inform people about the zero net energy features of the new community.

The class developed a self-guided visitor tour for the center of West Village to interpret the community's energy efficiency features and goal of zero net energy. This was expressed through the design of a family of six markers to interpret the information, and a wayfinding strategy connecting the signs to a system of logical locations on the site plan. We share some of the (impressive) results here. -- Contributed by Pat Knapp, SEGD


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1 comment:

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really? that's a good news.