i hope the gift has found her happy and well. I hope she loves it and enjoys using it as much as I had enjoyed picking it out for her. At this point I'm a little worried it got lost in the mail.
Went to a playpoint product launch today - free flow prosecco, vodka, and wagyu sliders are always a good invitation. Met a girl who had a landscape architecture diploma. Years later and here she was doing interior design. Same field of work, opposite sides of the coin. Personally I'm hoping to delve into the field of sustainable design or disaster relief design during the course of my career. Currently doing an in-depth research on net-zero buildings and high efficiency HMAC equipment and systems put in place to achieve net-zero energy consumption; hopefully I'll complete it by the end of the year to add to the list of side projects I'm currently working on. This net-zero research is part and parcel of the pre-design analysis for the sustainable modern office in a tropical setting that I'm working on, which in an ideal case scenario would be a grid-independent building with passively reduced energy consumption rates and great yields of renewable energy, of which excess can be stored within a local energy grid to be tapped on during peak consumption periods.
Just to play it out a little, the modern office needs to be flexible yet highly accessible, people are constantly on the go yet require a central system for them to be connected to their colleagues. It has to be dynamic, meaning movable partitions to turn office cubicles into conference rooms within minutes. It has to promote social interaction, meaning social bases for ideas to be displayed and communal spaces with 24/7 access to burn the midnight oil. It has to have an ideal physical environment, meaning great ventilation, lush greenery and natural daylighting throughout the large part of the working day. And lastly it has to reach out, creating customs and cultural norms within the office which can bring about great positive impacts upon the environment.
I read that grid-independent buildings don't work too good, because the building footprint is often too small to be able to harness sufficient renewable energy to power the building throughout the day. Was thinking of a localized grid system though, meaning a larger building footprint formed by a cluster of blocks powering a local grid system serving that particular block. A localised grid means less energy is lost through transmitting the energy over a shorter distance and a central power bank can be put into place to serve the needs of higher demand buildings through the collective energy harnessed. However, the problem still remains that because the cluster is within the same area, times of high grid demand will be similar (bad weather, evenings and mornings), resulting in a heavy strain on the grid during those peaks.
We also talked about the harnessing of kinetic energy. Various buildings have introduced lifts which serve alternate floors, meaning people would have to walk up/down should they need to reach floors not accessed by lifts. By providing ramps every two floors retrofitted with kinetic/static-energy harnessing technology (carpets etc), a considerable amount of energy could be harnessed to power the building.
Ideally, a central system should be installed to monitor the energy usage of individual spaces within the building at any given time. With this, we can pinpoint the individual equipment demands and adjust accordingly based on on-the-ground needs of the occupants. For example, in a typical 9-5 office setting, lighting and air-con are amongst the highest energy consumers within a building. Regulations may be enforced based on the needs of the occupants, such that perhaps, access to upper office floors are only permitted between 9-5 (unless booked beforehand) but two common hot-desking floors remain open for use; this herds remaining occupants of the building past a certain time into one location, so energy consumptions for all other floors can be greatly reduced.
Gonna work more on this tomorrow. Net-zero is a tough one.
Edit.
I want to be the person who writes about your hopes and dreams alongside my own, so when either one of us feels lost, alone, or meaningless, I could turn the pages to show you how far you've come, and you'll see that line by line, I'll always be by your side.
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