Lucid Design Group | Building Dashboard®

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Lucid's Building Dashboard® interactive websites and touch-screen kiosk displays for primary and secondary schools and colleges and universities are designed to make resource use in academic buildings, student centers and residence halls visible and easily interpretable by students, residents, faculty and visitors.

Universal connectivity

Connects to virtually all building automation systems and energy management systems. Lucid's own data logger can be used in buildings without sophisticated control systems or in standalone technology applications such as photovoltaic systems.

Real-time display over the web

Enables easy, reliable and fully automated data collection, processing, storage and real-time display over the web. Lucid's off-site servers eliminate the need for on-site hardware and allow Building Dashboard® to be broadcast to any web-enabled device.

Tip: Building Dashboard® facilitates your ability to earn credits toward LEED® certification and dynamically showcases the performance of LEED®-certified buildings and green technologies.

Resource use in context

Translates resource consumption and production data into everyday units so that it is accessible and engaging to a non-technical audience. Express usage in dollars, equivalent hours of lightbulb use, pounds of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere and more.

Comparisons and competitions

View how your current consumption stacks up to last month's consumption, or how you are performing relative to other floors or buildings. Compete in real time within a building or across an entire campus to reduce consumption while tracking individual performance.

Tip: Energy and water use competitions through Building Dashboard® engage students outside the classroom, stimulate prospective students and create exciting learning opportunities.

Add-on applications

Further enhance your Building Dashboard® with a variety of add-on applications including Events Calendar, Weather and Green Features, and Data Downloader for quickly and easily downloading archived data into an Excel® spreadsheet for carbon accounting or research.

Touch-screens and websites

Supports display on widescreen monitors, interactive touch-screen kiosks, websites and web-enabled devices. Showcase Building Dashboard® to occupants and visitors in your lobby and access it on a personal computer, cellphone or PDA everywhere else.

Tip: The password-protected Data Downloader enables building operators and students to download variables over any timescale for classroom exercises, benchmarking and research.

Real-Time Competitions

Elon's Building Dashboard® Competition module enables students to compete in real time to reduce electricity consumption. In a matter of weeks, competing residence halls averted 24,000 pounds of CO₂ from the atmosphere and saved $1,260.

Featured Clients

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UVM's Dudley H. Davis Student Center uses Building Dashboard® to show real-time energy and water use in different parts of the building

Building Dashboard® displays solar electricity output, net electricity use and water use at Williamstown's state-of-the-art green elementary school

Emory's LEED-certified freshman residence hall uses Building Dashboard® to display and compare electricity use across all five floors in real time

Publications

Testimonials

I’ve hired Lucid as a consultant to help me realize a public art commission, 7000 oaks and counting; the company is amazing, and they do wonderful work.

Tiffany Holmes
Eco-visualization artist and Associate Professor and Chair of Art and Technology Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Harvard University's Building Dashboard®

Harvard's new 5 Cowperthwaite graduate student residence hall is equipped with a Building Dashboard® that monitors electricity, water, heating energy, and cooling energy consumption in real time. Accessible via a touch-screen kiosk located in the main lobby, the display is intended to inform student occupants and visitors about the continuous patterns of consumption within the residence hall's living spaces.

Energy use can be instantly converted into dollars spent or equivalent number of lightbulbs used, while water use can be expressed in bottles of water and minutes of shower use -- either per person or for the entire building. In addition to real-time resource use information, Harvard's Building Dashboard® features live weather conditions and daily forecasts, a community events calendar, and up-to-the-minute bus route information.

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Make buildings teaching tools

Building Dashboard® makes energy and water use in dormitories, student centers and other academic buildings visible and teachable. This transforms a school's living and working environments into laboratories of stewardship that enable visitors and occupants to develop a more sustainable relationship between the built environment and the natural world.

Launch dormitory energy competitions

Rival your peers to reduce energy consumption in competing residence halls and other buildings. Residents can instantly compare a dorm's performance to competing floors and other dorms, and track individual peformance – all in real time. Previous studies by Lucid team members have shown that real-time feedback on electricity use can facilitate reductions of between 10% to 56% in residential settings.

Enhance research with Data Downloader

Building operators, researchers and students can quickly and easily download archived data over any time scale into an Excel® spreadsheet using the web-based Data Downloader. Data can be manipulated, evaluated and used for monitoring and verification and in the classroom. Password protection provides access that is limited to specified variables within the database.

Make smart people in 'dumb' buildings

Green buildings are intended to demonstrate sustainable design practices and features, but most schools and campuses consist of non-green, environmentally 'dumb' buildings. Building Dashboard® monitors and publicly displays performance in older, 'brown' buildings that lack existing building automation systems using an autonomous, network-based data logger.

Monitor the performance of green technologies

Building Dashboard® makes the performance of photovoltaic systems, solar thermal systems, rainwater catchment systems, geothermal systems and other green technologies visible and interpretable by the public. By demonstrating the feasibiliy and importance of green technologies through real-time environmental and financial payback information, the greater campus community can tangibly understand the value of going green.

Improve LEED® ratings

Benchmarking and improving the performance of buildings, as well as engaging the public about resource flows and the operation of green technologies, is contingent on high-resolution feedback. Building Dashboard® facilitates your ability to earn Measurement and Verification and Innovation in Design credits toward the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® certification for both LEED® for New Construction and LEED® for Existing Buildings.

Featured News

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Oberlin College named #1 among America's greenest schools by Sierra Magazine, citing real-time Campus Resource Monitoring System

Lucid showcases Building Dashboard® at 7th Greening of the Campus Conference, themed "Partnering for Sustainability: Enabling a Diverse Future"

Lucid announces it will provide Building Dashboard® for Sierra Nevada College's new world-class Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences

Q & A

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Can Building Dashboard® monitor per-floor consumption or individual end uses in addition to whole-building use?

If your building has resource use metered per floor, or if different end uses such as lighting, air conditioning and plug loads are metered separately, then you can display it on your Building Dashboard®. This enables interesting comparisons of where and for what purposes energy is being used in your building.