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The Stanford star home project was Stanford's first ever entry into the US Department of
Energy's Solar Decathlon competition, which for those of you who don't know, is a bi-annual
competition hosted by the US Department of Energy in which they select twenty collegiate
teams, internationally, to compete and build net-zero solar homes. So this is actually
a photograph from the 2011 competition, which was the competition that actually inspired
Stanford to apply. The last competition took place this past October, just in Irvine, CA,
actually. So just a couple of miles away if you're ever interested. And from the very
start we were kind of different from a lot of the other teams. To give you an idea of
what it was like to work on this project, we had over one hundred and fifty students
- undergrad and graduate - come through the doors of the project. For many of us, it was
the most incredible opportunity to really apply what we learned in our textbooks to
the real world and actually constructing a home that can actually be lived in. When we
were first approaching the project, we were kind of different. We didn't want to think
of it in terms of just the two year time frame of the project itself. We wanted to think
of it on a much larger scale. So we thought about the housing industry, about technology,
and what kind of an impact we as students could make. To start out with, we were actually
really inspired by the car industry. Modern cars are ever and ever more efficient. Every
year, they're held to higher and higher standards of affordability and sustainability. We thought
about, well, how did this happen? And why hasn't the housing industry ever seen anything
similar? So we went back to the very first cars, to assembly line manufacturing, and
it turns out that Henry Fords first Model T actually wasn't really a complete car. It
was actually built around a common chassis or frame. And what's interesting about this
is that this really let customers at that time build their car around this frame. And
we thought, "Why can't houses do the same thing?" Maybe not a frame so much as more
of an engine - something that can really power your home. Which is exactly what we did with
the core. Hopefully, if you've heard of the Star home you've heard of the core and what
it is - we've taken the most complicated electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems and put them
in a single unit that can be mass manufactured. It could actually be spec to fit your needs
in a factory - put on a standard flatbed truck, shipped directly to your site where you can
actually build whatever kind of a home you want around it. So you can do something more
traditional like a eichler home. Or you can do something more modern, which is exactly
what we did for the start home. So this is actually an early rendering of the house - you
can see the core as that silver box in the middle. It actually includes your mechanical
room, your kitchen, your bathroom and your laundry room. And this is a photograph of
the house in Irvine. You can see we got pretty close to theory, it was really exciting! And
to give you an idea of what it's like inside the home, this is a view from the living room
and this is the dining and kitchen and the outdoor space. And looking at these photographs
you kind of begin to think what it would be like to grow up in a home like this. That's
incredibly technologically advanced which actually made us start to think about technology
itself. It's role in how we live, how we grow up, how we interact with each other and the
world and how we learn. In the age of google glass and iPhones, the digital world is at
our fingertips. A world that has been tested, designed, and manufactured to be automated.
But, the thing is that life isn't about automation. It's not about effortlessness. It's really
about agency. It's about taking control and accepting responsibility for your role in
a larger narrative. Whether that's the energy narrative or something broader like education
or something else entirely. So we really wanted to bring the home owner into the life cycle
of the home instead of just designing out the user. We wanted people to really be aware
of where their energy comes from and realize that energy is not limitless. It's finite.
And it comes from a source and also has to go somewhere. To this point, the first thing
we designed was just this kind of app - a way to check in on your homes performance.
This is data taken from different sensors scattered throughout the house and really
compiled on a really easy graphical interface. You can imagine that with this kind of data
infrastructure, one day, energy affordability and sustainability actually becomes a social
thing. So you can compare your performance with your neighbor and if your neighbor uses
more water than you do one week, they have to buy the next round at the bar. The other
thing that we designed, or the other thing that we thought about was how we interact
with energy - from the way you turn on and off your faucets to the way you turn on and
off your lights. Right now, lights switches are a very binary thing. They're on or off
and it's really easy to just leave them on. So we really didn't use light switches in
our house. We used these things called room switches. And what these are actually a touch
interface - just like your trackpad on your computer - and just with these simple finger
gestures you can actually control your lights, control your outlets, you control everything
inside of your room that draws energy and that kind of cues you in to where this energy
is coming from. And this idea of agency is perhaps the greatest thing that I took from
the project. Whether that's in the way that we build homes, in the way that we interact
with each other and learn, or if it's just in the way that we live our lives. Thank you.