Making the complexity of energy infrastructure digestible. Envisioning new opportunities for cities and communities. Fast Company 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards honoree.
Microgrid as Civic Infrastructure
An experimental prototyping project relying heavily on the Anatomy of Infrastructure design model developed by IIT Institute of Design PhD, André Nogueira, this project asked the team to rethink how we generate and deliver energy, and how much disruption our current energy systems can withstand. What if we thought about energy as information, currency, or resource? How could it be measured, tracked, or used?
Through analyzing contexts, situations and experiences from the point-of-view of complex adaptive systems, IIT Institute of Design graduate students conceived sustainable solutions to impact livelihoods, serve and strengthen communities. Ultimately, the final outcomes from this work can empower industry leaders, organizations and sustainability advocates to envision new pathways toward sustainable energy infrastructures.
Read about Fast Company's 2022 World-Changing Ideas here
Partners: IIT Institute of Design graduate students, ComEd
“How do you operationalize purpose? In some ways, the project was an exercise in imagination, yet grounded in reality. Our project teams were organized like computational workflows, and we produced over fifty prototypes in ten weeks.”
Zack Schwartz, , IIT Institute of Design Master of Design
Infrastructures for the Circular Economy
A circular economy decouples economic activity from consumption of resources. In order to create a circular economy, the full scope of dynamics in a system must be considered. This means not solely evaluating the often considered types of capital (natural, manufactured and financial), but also the often ignored other types of capital (human, social, political, cultural and digital). By expanding the notion of “system,” acknowledging different actors and their interests, types of capital in the system, and interactions between the actors and capital stocks and flows, leaders can begin to create the circular economy. The project team used Chicago as a case study to apply these new ideas and considerations. Governments and communities may reference the subsequent report as they build circular economies.
Partners: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Stuart School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Plant Chicago, André Nogueira
“How can design help us think about the future? What is wrong with the tools we are using? The economy is nothing more than you and I deciding what the future is.”
Jordan Ostapchuck, IIT ID PhD candidate
Images source: Zack Schwartz
“The Anatomy of Infrastructure design model allows organizations to see their strategy framework, anchored amongst the many other elements that circulate but are hard to attend to. For my clients this allowed for provocations such as “What if healthcare services operated like an Apple store?”
Wendy Manning, IIT Institute of Design Master of Design Methods