News
Lucid's Building Dashboard® cited in Fast Company Magazine
June 23, 2008
New York, NY - Lucid Design Group's Building Dashboard® is cited in a Fast Company Magazine July issue article, titled "The Green Housing Boom: Forward-thinking architects and real-estate developers are already envisioning the post-bust cycle of home building. And smaller is better." From the article:
"It's a long way from the tony precinct of MoMA to New Orleans's devastated Lower Ninth Ward, but the housing going up in the Holy Cross neighborhood there would not be out of place in the museum's show. In August 2006, Berman and Kotchen's architecture firm, Workshop/apd, won a competition sponsored by environmental activist group Global Green USA and actor Brad Pitt to design a zero-energy affordable-housing development in the most ravaged part of the city.
"Workshop/apd's 'GREEN.O.LA,' which is currently under construction, will include five single-family houses and 18 apartments, powered by solar panels and equipped with rainwater-collection systems. The buildings are sited for maximum cross ventilation and rigged with louvers to minimize heat and capture breezes. Trellises will help keep the interiors cool.
"Much of the project will be prefabricated off-site, with sustainable materials. But the feature that most animates the designers is Lucid Design Group's Building Dashboard®, a digital meter installed by the front door of the model home that uses sensors to provide a continuous digital readout of the energy being used. It can even translate the cost of that energy into real-world terms -- to show how the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity used, for example, translates into gallons of gas or hair-dryer hours. 'So you leave the AC cranked up while you're gone, and it will show you that it cost you the equivalent of gas for two weeks,' Kotchen says."
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About Lucid
Founded in 2004, Lucid Design Group, Inc. ("Lucid") is a privately held cleantech software company and a pioneer in providing real-time information feedback to teach, inspire behavior change and save energy and water resources in buildings. Over the past seven years, Lucid's team has endeavored to make resource use visible, accessible and engaging so that building occupants have the data visualization and communication tools to manage and reduce their consumption.
Today, tens of thousands of people live and work in schools, companies, community and commercial buildings and homes enhanced by Lucid's web-based Building Dashboard® technology. Now in its fourth generation, the intuitive Building Dashboard® user interface allows occupants to connect personal electricity, water and natural gas consumption with the actions and events that take place within buildings.
