Posted on April 28th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Technology, more, not 24 hours, education, critical decisions, Markets.
The idea of tailoring architecture to the requirements of a prison is by no means new - most famously the Panopticon design by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham has been the blueprint for many prisons since the late 1800s.
A new Vertical Prison concept is not as draconian in its ambitions with its aim of rehabilitating prisoners by allowing them to remain a part of society and allow them to contribute to it, while using height as a wall to separate them from it.
The Vertical Prison was designed by Malaysian architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, and took first place in eVolo Magazine’s annual Skyscraper Competition. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields, factories and recycling plants that would be operated by the offenders as a way to give back to the community and support the host city below them.
Recognizing that many prisons are nothing more than a school for criminals, the prison design aims to rehabilitate inmates by invoking a sense of community. In allowing the prison to become a part of the community and form a symbiotic relationship with the it, the designers also believe that the social stigma of a prison would be softened resulting in greater acceptance of inmates and a better chance they will be given another opportunity upon re-entering society after their incarceration.
The Vertical Prison employs a modular design to maximize flexibility. A girder box structure is used to house a variety of different units and form a communal space. Inmates are housed in Cell Units that themselves can be customized with different “loopholes” or openings appropriate to the behavior or level of danger of the inmate. Depending on its location within a city the prison could include Agricultural Units to grow food for the city, Industrial Units to help in the recycling of industrial waste or Juvenile Units to scare kids straight.
Transport to and from the prison is via various pods that travel along the frames supporting the prison. Transport Pods are the primary transport vehicle and can also be used for daily surveillance. Heavy Lift Pods serve as vertical lift transport for delivering cargo to market or to transport other pods to the ground. Armored Riot Control Pods are armed with both lethal and non-lethal weapons as well as airdrop capabilities for keeping prisoners in check. Medevac Pods are equipped with airlift capabilities and paramedic equipment, while the Fire Rescue Pod also has air lift capabilities and fire-fighting apparatus.
Given the cost of such a system, not to mention the difficulty any city would face in trying to convince nearby residents a prison with no walls above their neighborhood is a good idea, it’s probably not likely we’ll see any Vertical Prisons appearing on city skylines anytime soon. But kudos to the designers for giving some serious thought into an equally serious problem.
Recidivism rates among prisoners suggest the system – in the US at least and the many countries with similar systems – is not working. In California, which has the highest recidivism rate in the US, seven out of ten prisoners return to prison within three years. That translates to a tremendous burden on the taxpayer. So if the new prison concept was found to be successful, ideas like it might not be as expensive in the long run as they first appear.
Posted on April 19th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, useful technology, more, Screens, control room, corporative, critical decisions.
Ensuring that the workplace is designed for maximum efficiency, accuracy and comfort is particularly important in command and control centres, as Ian McMurray finds out
If Wikipedia is to be believed – and it isn’t always – ergonomics have been with us for at least the past 2,500 years, with Hippocrates describing how a surgeon’s workplace should be designed and his tools arranged. It is defined as the science of ensuring that the workplace, and the tools used for work, provide the optimum characteristics for doing the job.
Given that, in many command/control installations, decision-making is often critical, it should come as no surprise to find that ergonomics play a vital role in room, system and operator interface design. Maximising operator effectiveness requires a twofold approach that not only makes relevant information as accessible as possible, but also minimises the fatigue that can be an inevitable corollary of the control room environment.
It is generally agreed that, of all the information we take in, some 80% comes through our eyes – implying that, while control room design is a complex issue involving a broad range of factors, it is the screens that receive the most attention.
“For years, the focus was on brightness and resolution,” notes Guy Van Wijmeersch, design director, control rooms at Barco, who has written an impressive white paper on the topic of control room design. “But there are limits on human perception, and by the beginning of this century, we had all the brightness and resolution we needed. That’s when our focus shifted to maximising contrast under standard ambient light conditions: contrast is something to which the human visual system is very sensitive.”
Bright future
Brighter images have an important advantage in the control room environment. “Because control rooms now have brighter displays, it means that the rooms no longer need to be operated in low-light conditions – and that’s highly beneficial for operator alertness,” points out Mike Garrido, product manager for Multiviewers at Harris Broadcast Communications.
“We have introduced new high-gain screens that are designed to deliver excellent contrast ratio, and the best possible viewing angle,” says David Griffiths, market development manager for control rooms at Christie EMEA. “They’re designed to allow information to be presented to operators in the most appropriate manner for fast, accurate decision-making.”
Another area of focus for manufacturers is colour accuracy and consistency, and creating what looks as much like a single, large display as possible. “Maintaining accurate colour and brightness performance across the entire display is key in reducing operator fatigue,” says Ron Schouwenburg, product marketing manager, visual display systems at Mitsubishi Electric Benelux. “Even small differences in performance and screen geometry mean that operators perceive the display as individual screens and this has been shown to increase fatigue.”
He goes on to note the advent of LED illumination in cube displays as being an important development, given LED’s ability to reproduce a wider colour gamut: “The difference between orange and red could mean life or death in something like a railway control room.”
Eric Hénique, director of marketing and international sales at eyevis, identifies another advantage of LED illumination. “Traditional lamp-lit systems, especially those featuring a colour wheel, are prone to flicker,” he says, “and that has been demonstrated to be a cause of operator fatigue.
LED-lit cubes have solved that problem.” And, as Griffiths notes, eliminating the colour wheel also reduces the ‘rainbow’ effect for which DLP-based systems are known, and provides higher reliability and lower cost of ownership as well as improving colour accuracy.
Seamless scenes
Colour fidelity and consistency, contrast, resolution, brightness and lack of flicker all play key roles in presenting easy-to-see information without tiring operators. Yet another contributor is to minimise perceived gaps between each cube in the wall. “The best rear-projection DLP videowall displays can now be tiled together with an image-to-image gap less than half a millimetre,” points out Steve Seminario, senior product director for Planar’s videowall products.
“That gives the wall a virtually seamless look – and means that windows can be positioned and sized with less regard for the mullions.” He goes on to point out that configuring more, larger screens in a wall rather than fewer, smaller ones is often preferred in order to minimise the appearance of mullions.
Hénique says the mullions issue is a reason why flatpanel technologies continue to struggle to find a foothold in the command/control market – together with their 16:9 aspect ratio, which does not fit well in applications such as supervisory control and data acquisition that were designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The AV systems also have a key role to play in two other elements of control room design that can have a significant impact on operator effectiveness: heat and noise. A warm room – or, to counter it, the continuous background drone of fans, whether from equipment or from air-conditioning – create conditions where drowsiness will almost certainly occur.
“There are two ways of dealing with those issues,” says Quirin Stamminger, head of marketing and international relations at Hetec. “One is that products like our video and KVM extenders and our multiview KVM switch produce almost no heat, so they only need fan cooling in high-ambient temperatures,” he says. “The second is to ensure that as many of the heat-generating systems as possible are installed in a separate server room with its own air-conditioning system.”
Flexible systems
How and where information is presented on the control room wall is of vital importance. Vital information needs, of course, to have priority, and provision needs to be made for exceptions such as alarms. Because no two control rooms are the same, manufacturers have responded by designing the maximum possible flexibility into their offerings. Manufacturers such as Mitsubishi Electric have broad and adaptable product ranges. “Versatility is the most important attribute we can bring to our display products,” says Schouwenburg. “What we have done is to develop a very flexible architecture to enable a systems integrator to deliver the most appropriate solution.”
“Our job is to provide videowalls that are customisable enough to perform well in the environment,” agrees Seminario, “regardless of viewing configuration, room size, ambient lighting, video source requirements and so on.”
There can be little doubt, though, that the flexibility each end user needs in order to maximise the effectiveness of control room operators mostly lies behind the screens with the wall control system.
Wall control
“The wall controller plays a key role in a productive operating environment,” says Rainer Stiehl, vice president for marketing at Extron Europe. “The wall controller hardware and user interface should work together effectively and be capable of managing the image data efficiently, while delivering high-quality images on-screen. The operator needs to be able to concentrate on the information on-screen and not how it gets to the displays. Ideally, the wall controller will feature a simple-to-operate user interface that mirrors a normal computer operator environment.”
“The ability to resize information, reproduce imagery at full frame rate and instantly select screen presets all help to improve decision making,” says Griffiths. “Flexibility, ease of use and expandability are watch words for our controllers.”
Van Wijmeersch sounds a note of warning, however. “Data has to be shown in the right context and should be related to other elements to become useful information,” he says, “so having a very flexible way of putting content on a large wall has some danger as the information can be cluttered. As such we’ve developed wall management software that can help in organising data and video in a structured way, improving the context, the quality and the usability of the presented information.”
Are there new AV technologies that can further improve control room ergonomics? It seems unlikely, at least in the near term. The rest of the AV industry is talking about 3D, gesture recognition and multitouch – but it’s hard to see how those will find a place in command/control environments. Inevitably, though, much depends on the specifics of the application.
“If you’re talking about a creative environment in a war room context with multiple experts, for example, then touch and multitouch could be a great help,” says Van Wijmeersch. “Perhaps in the future, creating a full virtual environment rather than an overview will provide a place for 3D.”
“Yes, touch displays might be an option for command/control tables in control rooms,” says Hénique, “but touch control of a wall 5m wide by 3m high doesn’t make much sense.”
Stamminger agrees that to have someone standing in front of a wall, obscuring the view of others, isn’t appropriate. And 3D? “After watching a 3D movie, many people complain of headaches or itching eyes,” he says. “That’s hardly conducive to good decision making. The technology would need to improve significantly.” He, in common with others, makes a distinction between what might be feasible on the main wall and what would work on each operator’s individual workstation, where touch control is increasingly used.
“We launched a multitouch option for our Seventy Series cubes at ISE this year,” notes Schouwenburg, “and we feel that its intuitive nature could be useful in certain command and control applications.” He goes on to point out, though, the fundamental importance of reliability. “For that reason, I’m not sure gesture recognition yet has a role to play.”
Interactive operations
But there is one area in which control rooms certainly mirror the rest of the AV world. “The videowall is becoming the interactive wall,” points out Garrido. “With a click of a mouse, the operators in a control room can interact with all devices without having to move to a different workstation or even change screens. They can access servers to replay video streams, access a camera to move or zoom, or even call up any PC in the facility to access important information. The software and processing power in the wall controller is making the operator’s job much easier – and therefore making the operator more effective.”
The picture that emerges is that the AV industry is playing a significant role in ensuring that mission-critical installations and their staff are able to perform at the optimum level. “Control room technologies continue to evolve, including displays, switching, processing, distribution, control systems, and even furniture,” says Stiehl.
“But, while technologies have improved, the best contribution to improving ergonomics in a command and control environment is collaboration between all the companies involved – manufacturers, integrators, architects – so as manufacturers, we’re not in direct control of the many factors involved with proper control room design that has human factors at its heart, but our contribution can be significant.”
www.eyevis.de www.floria.com www.renovatiofloria.com
more info: http://renovatiofloria.com/indra.html
Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Technology, more, media, Home Theatre, Markets.
Westminster Academy, London, England.
Martin Lupton and Luke Smith-Wightman of BDP Lighting explain the art of lighting design in school environments. using their work at Westminster Academy as a case study, they emphasise the important role of daylight, the guidelines associated with it and the need to consider electric light as an holistic element of the architecture and overall visual environment.
The current UK government is a significant way along the road of its plans to invest in the order of £2 billion in building and refurbishing schools. This offers the people who are involved in their design a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Schools that are performing poorly or schools that are housed in aged decrepit buildings are being identified and re-built. Many of the UK’s schools buildings are between 50 and 100 years old and it is likely that this wave of new schools will stand for the same amount of time. In 50 years time education may be delivered in a completely different way so this could be the last opportunity many of us have to design the lighting for a school building.
The City Academies programme has seen new schools designed and completed by several prominent architects including Sir Norman Foster and Wilkinson Eyre amongst others. When the Government began this programme it was on the basis that they firmly believed that better designed environments will encourage more positive behaviour and improved academic performance.
As lighting designers, we are part of a growing awareness of the power of light and its role in design and usability of spaces and places. Our craft is widely recognised in environments where the commercial cost of design and high quality luminaires are seen as valuable investments. In retail spaces the link between brand quality and customer spend is well established – lighting can play a key role in supporting the brand image.
In commercial offices the value of lighting to the workforce is starting to be understood but the power of lighting in creating the right impression in the reception is fully accepted. In urban spaces the links between lighting and crime, the perception of safety and the creation of a night-time economy are completely accepted. In fact, lighting designers are employed and allowed to practise their art and science where there is perceived commercial value. But what about spaces where there is social value but limited commercial value?
It could be argued that urban lighting embraces some social elements and has positive benefit on the community it serves. In schools and hospitals, two of the most socially important spaces, the lighting design is, more often than not, left to the electrical engineer or even electrical contractor.
Lighting Design: BDP Architect: AHMMWith daylight as the primary source of light, the artificial light needs to be developed to support this strategy and maximise the benefits. The opportunities to save energy and reduce maintenance must be embraced with automatic control. However, it must not be forgotten that most schools have a single in-house maintenance contractor – the caretaker – and his responsibilities will be both varied and numerous.
Maintenance must be as straight forward as possible. If a school can be designed with a minimum number of lamp types, that respond to daylight and operate only when required, then it will have a long life and be simple to maintain.
Schools are one of the most socially important spaces that we as designers, architects and engineers can be involved in. These are the places where the thoughts and behaviour of our children are developed and moulded. Lighting, both electric and natural, has a significant role to play in the quality of environment in a classroom. High levels of controlled daylight and good vertical illumination are the key design criteria for the creation of a successful classroom. However in the strive for innovation and creative design we must not forget the how these important buildings work, the length of time they are design to stand and the many different users that will inhabit and operate them.
Simplicity and robustness of operation is a fundamental requirement.
In many spaces we have come to realise that horizontal illuminance is a poor measure of design quality, and in schools in particular this is true.
Modern styles of kinaestic teaching rely on visual interaction between the students and teacher and therefore the visual focus is usually on the vertical rather than the horizontal. High levels of concentration are essential from the students and anything that can detract from this must be eliminated. It is essential that all lighting – natural and electric – is controlled and delivered into the space in a comfortable way.
As the physiological and biological effects of daylight become more widely understood and appreciated the reasons and justifications for high levels of daylight in schools can be enforced. Recent research indicates that high levels of daylight are a very positive contributor to academic performance and behaviour of students. Research in the USA, by the Pacific Gas and Energy Company, showed that students in classrooms with the highest daylight factors (in the order of 10%) progressed up to 20% faster on maths test and up to 26% faster on reading tests. The results of similar research in Sweden showed significant correlation between behaviour and daylight. In broad terms this research has also shown that student who attend “day lit” schools outperformed students from “none day lit schools” by 7%-14%.
Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, dlp, l c d, lcos, useful technology, education, corporative, events, media, Home Theatre.
Event horizon
In his annual round-up, Dr Geoff Archenhold looks back at a momentous year of developments in LED technology and suggests that this is the dawn of a new era.
The lighting community finds itself in interesting times lumbered with the challenges of the economic credit crunch on the one hand and the disruptive change that LED technology is forcing upon established lighting manufacturers on the other. Over the last few years I have listened to many statements from all parts of the lighting supply chain stating that LED technology is not yet mature enough to be considered as a mainstream lighting technology. However during 2009 the numbers of LED doubters have dwindled significantly which proves one thing - 2009 was the year that LED technology was adopted as the future lighting technology for the global lighting industry - it was an event horizon!
Figure : The high performance Cool, Neutral and Warm White LED array from Bridgelux
It is clear that 2009 has been a year of significant change for the lighting industry with many of the major lighting brands producing financial results to send shivers down the spine of most analysts.
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Figure 1: The Xicato module based on remote phosphor technology
Figure 2: Cree’s online Product Characterization Tool
Figure 3: The Sharp Zenigata 6.7W LED array
However the economic crisis has offered significant opportunities with large numbers of smaller companies focusing specifically on LED technology. These companies have taken advantage of the technology disruption and brought highly innovative solutions to end-users. I believe many of the smaller and more innovative lighting companies will develop the skills and understanding of the new technologies faster than traditional brands and the market will see competition that makes for an exciting time for end-users and the lighting market in general. Competition means both lower prices and higher innovation.
There are several reasons why LED lighting have become more readily accepted:
• Consumers are aware of the climate change issues with significant weather events that were supposed to happen once in a 1000 years happening within decades.
• Energy prices are high and set to go much higher so return on investment is key on customer priorities.
• LED performance has significantly improved in both efficiency and colour quality making them the light source of choice.
• LED fixtures are digital and the integration of controls is straightforward compared to traditional light sources.
• Standards for LEDs are now in place.
• The cost of LED emitters have dropped significantly during 2009 making LED fixtures more affordable.
• There is a greater choice of LED manufacturers and LED component suppliers.
others LED projects:
What to expect in 2010.
Steve Landau, Philips Lumileds suggests the following:
• Power LED products are still not generic and what’s true for one product is not necessarily true for those from other manufacturers. This means that there’s significant due dilligence that must be done by the engineers to understand how each product will perform in an application before making an LED selection. The LED manufacturers must continue to provide more, better information that allows this work to be done as easily and quickly as possible. Without that effort and understanding of the differences, it’s likely that some will make the wrong choice and the impact on their business success and customer perception could be impacted.
• Understanding system reliability will take centre stage. Without truly understanding system reliability, warranty, TCO and payback, assessments cannot be accurately calculated. System reliability does not equal lumen maintenance of the LED. It is actually a calculation that considers the following elements: electrical, connections, LEDs, optical, thermal, and mechanical. Strongly related to this is the notion that LEDs don’t fail. They do, as do all electronic components. In LED solutions, the typical approach is to use an array of LEDs. Understanding the lumen maintenance and catastrophic failure probabilities will become critical. Lastly, a clear understanding of these metrics allows systems to be optimised.
• From a product perspective we expect to see significant expansion of the product offerings available to the illumination markets where light output, CRI, and CCT are more finely defined, binning continues to improve and shrink and colour uniformity and quality get significantly better.
Conclusions
2009 has been a stunning year for Solid-State Lighting that has witnessed LED technology leapfrog CFL lighting in terms of performance and LED driver technology become even more sophisticated and flexible. LEDs have again increased the performance bar with a record 249 lumens per watt efficiency in the Nichia laboratories and CREE achieving over 132 lumens per watt for production LEDs.
2010 will be a significant growth year for LED lighting manufacturers, despite the economy, and we will see a major proportion of traditional lighting companies begin to adopt LED technologies as consumers decide to move to a greener lighting solution.
Next year will see a whole raft of colour tuneable white light products launched on the market enabling users to command the lighting environment. The use of LED technology will also see the incorporation of intelligent controls within fixture designs without significant cost surplus making the energy efficient gap between traditional light sources and LED based products extend significantly.
Of course, LED emitter technology will continue to be enhanced but this is now a secondary concern as focus shifts to high CRI LED products and lower cost systems.
Geoff Archenhold is an adviser to the UK Government on LED technology and helps LED companies raise investment from the finance community. He is an investor in an LED driver company and an LED fixture company, a Lighting Energy Consultancy and euroLEDs Events LLP.
Posted on January 14th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Technology, useful technology, corporative.
Triple Bridge Gateway, New York City, USA.
Lighting Design: LENI SCHWENDINGER LIGHT PROJECTS Architect: PKSP
Leni Schwendinger has helped to transform a desolate area into a destination.
After more than ten years of community planning, design and construction, the bus ramps above Ninth Avenue at 40th Street have been transformed into an infrastructural public-art illumination installation that is delighting residents, visitors, passersby and motorists. Created in collaboration with the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) by the design team of PKSB Architects and Leni Schwendinger Light Projects (LSLP), a formerly desolate stretch of Hell’s Kitchen roadway - shadowed by exposed steel and concrete overpasses - now shimmers with colour-infused light.
Notes lighting artist and designer Leni Schwendinger: “Instead of a place to rush through, our team has created a destination - a dynamic urban oasis for the eye and a visual landmark for the community.”
In 1994, Community Board #4 convened the Triple Bridge Task Force. Leni Schwendinger joined in this volunteer effort to solicit neighbourhood input and create design guidelines for aesthetic renovation of the bus ramps. In collaboration with the PKSB team, Leni Schwendinger Light Projects LTD won the PANYNJ-invited competition to design architectural improvements to the overpasses. Recalls PKSB lead principal Henry Stolzman: “We saw this project as a rare opportunity to celebrate infrastructure and mass transportation – transforming both into art and architecture.”
As the job grew in scope, facades on both the west and east side of the street were incorporated - including replacement with titanium panels of the terminal’s brick façade, creating a new entry marquee and opening commercial storefronts to enliven the streetscape.
The design process for Triple Bridge Gateway began in 1996. A series of mock-ups and installations continued from 2001 through 2008. The design choices - metals, lighting and color pattern - were conceived as emphasis for the bridges’ I-beam engineered structure. A chain-link containment system wraps the sides and underside of each ramp. This highly-detailed stainless-steel metal mesh works to reflect and diffuse light, as well as providing full-time maintenance access.
The lighting fixtures were selected for their capacity to withstand vibration and extreme weather conditions. Unique mountings were designed to achieve site-specific effects from industrial fixtures. Multiple light sources illuminate the bridge structure and the area under the bridges without interfering with ramp-roadway lighting.
Linear fluorescents emphasise the I-beam webs and bolted plates. Metal-halide CSI sources graze the mesh scrim, and wallpacks wash the bridge coffers with light.
A sculptural addition creates ‘a luminous room’. Pendant-mounted, high-polish, adjustable reflector panels pierce the scrim. Metal-halide light sources on the east and west walls of the underpass focus onto the panels that, in turn, cast reflected light patterns onto the street. The reflections unify the existing lines and spaces of the bridges, and accentuate movement and animation as cars pass underneath.
A computer-sequenced illumination scheme brings this urban sculpture to life with a weekly rotating schedule of visual compositions:
* Chambers of Colour - This formal composition focuses on the beam structure and corner shapes.
* Spectacle - A bright and bold composition.
* Reflections - Creates a connection of the street and the bridges’ underside through volumes of reflected light on the roadbed.
PKSB TEAM:
Wayne Berg, Kentaro Tsubaki, Henry Stolzman
LIGHT PROJECTS TEAM:
Leni Schwendinger, David Lander, Jodi Geroux, Charles Cameron, Eric Chenault
LIGHTING SUPPLIERS:
ETC, Kim Lighting, Hess America, Holophane, Insight Lighting, Let There Be Neon, Lithonia, Thorn
