The Duke Smart Home Program celebrated the two-year anniversary of its completion of the Home Depot Smart Home Thursday.
The house, which received a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2008, has provided a place for students to live while they work on innovative technology projects.
The initial idea of a ‘smart house’ was proposed by Mark Younger, Pratt ’03, during his independent study course, said Jim Gaston, Smart Home program director. Although ‘smart rooms’ existed for students where they could showcase inventions, Younger came up with an idea of a place where students would live and work on projects at the same time, Gaston added. After graduation, Younger took his idea to the administration and was hired as the project manager, overseeing construction, fundraising and student teams. The Smart Home, operated by the Pratt School of Engineering, was completed in 2007 and the first student residents moved in January 2008.
Today the Smart Home has 10 residents and approximately 100 students involved in the various projects that are constantly being brought up and worked on, said junior Kelvin Gu, president of Smart Home.
Gaston said Smart Home strives to involve students and faculty not only from Pratt, but also from the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the Terry Sanford School of Public Policy, the School of Law and the Fuqua School of Business.
“One of the goals of Smart Home is to give students project experience outside of the classroom,” Gaston said. “We encourage students to have diversity in [their] teams.... Students aim to tackle problems not just from a technical point of view but from an interdisciplinary perspective.”
Gu said Smart Home currently focuses on two categories of invention—green technology and cutting-edge high-tech solutions. At the present time, there are nine active projects, with anywhere between three to five people working on each, he added.
Smart Home provides a unique opportunity to work innovatively in teams, especially for the residents, said senior Andrew First, vice president of Smart Home.
“At the Smart Home, your home is a huge lab,” said First, who is a current resident. “So many things are going on and it is a convenient place to test out technologies and their practicality on other people and yourself. You can tinker around with the environment that you live in.”
Gu said that for every project, Smart Home guides the students through the organization process. From budgeting to meeting challenges on goals to match-making each project with a faculty or a client who wants the innovative technologies made, Smart Home provides leadership and resources.
This year, Gu said he has focused on improving the fundamentals of the organization.
“[In] previous years we did not have a strong sense of community,” he said. “This year, I’ve focused on having students meet every week for training and workshops. We have also started documenting all of our work.”
Gu said Smart Home has kept true to its original goals, which are to allow a place and opportunity for students to showcase their inventions. First added that some of the house’s other goals include gaining more attention from the Duke community, becoming a model for similar initiatives at other universities, and participating in the surrounding community to apply the technologies in Smart Home to influence ordinary homes.
“We want to become an integrator for inventors and entrepreneurs in technology,” Gu said. “We want to network students to industries so that people who come out of the program know each other and other people in the industry.”
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