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Frog Design entered a charity event this past weekend called Barkiecture here in Austin. Each team had to design and build a dog house. The houses were placed on 2nd street here in Austin and auctioned off for charity through a silent auction. Our dog house sold for $200 to a nice older couple but the Barkitecture judges gave our house "best in show". I built our dog house in my garage last week.

Our house had an Aluminum composite skin, R-13 rated fiberglass insulation, an outdoor deck, and a solar powered cooling unit. Yeap, I wired up a solar panel, lawn mower battery, charge controller, house hold thermostat, and a large computer cooling fan for a crude A/C system. It worked great. You set the temperature on the thermostat just like in your house and the fan would kick on and blow across our area rug on the interior.

I am so thrilled to have some work I have completed at frog that I can show. Most things are under strict NDA agreements there. More photos of the frog barkitecture house can be found on my flickr page including some build and process photos from my garage.

A friend sent me a link to this site, www.stormpulse.com, since we have all been tracking Hurricane Ike here in Texas. It is a great site for hurricane tracking for sure.

Labels: Exo, hurricane, hurricane ike, Reaction, Refugia, stormpulse

Looks like my shelter prototype is going to get a soft test as Hurricane Ike makes a beeline for us here in Austin. Galveston is already getting pounded by massive waves and landfall is still around 24 hours away.

Just to let you know. The entire population of Galveston could be relocated to higher ground and housed in Exo shelter units for around 71 million dollars. That is no amount to sneeze at, by for that price the buyer would have 14,366 Exos that can be reused for the next hurricane. That is enough Exos to house 57,000+ people over and over again. For comparison purposes, 71 million dollars only buys around 1044 FEMA trailers. A thousand FEMA trailers can only house 4176 people. The Reaction system could be hosed out, stored, and pulled back out for the next storm too.

Labels: Exo, FEMA, hurricane, hurricane ike, Michael McDaniel, Reaction, Refugia

Another major hurricane is now entering the gulf. This time however it seems to be headed directly at Texas. Looks like the Exo prototype may get a soft test after all.

I guess the media will not be too interested in this hurricane because it appears that it will miss New Orleans. The media abandoned the story of Hurricane Gustav after the landfall since New Orleans' levies held. Never mind all the damage to Baton Rouge, St. Francisville and southwest Mississippi sustained from it. New Orleans didn't flood so there was no story there. To be fair, the media did have a political convention to cover. Weather the media decides to follow the story of Ike all of the way through or not, the fact remains is that there could be an emergency housing system in place long before Ike approaches Texas.

Labels: disaster hosuing, Exo, hurricane, hurricane ike, Reaction, Refugia

The reaction housing system got dugg today! Please head on over to digg and digg it too. Let's get it noticed.

Labels: disaster hosuing, Exo, hurricane, Reaction, Refugia

As you all know another massive hurricane is making landfall along the gulf coast almost exactly 3 years after Katrina hit the same area. Most of you also know that for 3 years now I have been hammering away in my spare time with my own designs for an emergency housing system to eliminate the mass population displacement and poor aid response we saw after Katrina. I have spent a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and cash on everything from scale models to full sized prototypes built by hand in my own backyard to filing patents.

Most recently (for past month and a half) I have been working on the website for this whole effort. Since I am no programmer, a one man art/marketing department, and have two little girls now, the site has been going really, really slow. Gustav and Katrina's 3rd anniversary made me sit done and outline the must haves fo rthe website and try to get them done anyway I could. So, I just got enough of the Refugia website up to make to do for moment. It is crude and rude but this is what I have now.

www.reactionhousingsystem.com

Labels: disaster hosuing, Exo, hurricane, Michael McDaniel, Reaction, Refugia

After almost 5 great years at fd2s, I will be joining frog design in May as a Senior Designer. I am very excited by the opportunity to learn new skills and face new design challenges.

About frog design, inc.
frog design, inc. is one of the world’s leading strategic-creative consulting firms. By identifying emerging market opportunities and transforming ideas into compelling product and service experiences, frog helps Fortune 500 clients to evolve, expand, and envision their businesses. Founded in Germany in 1969, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with studios in Austin, TX; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA; Milan, Italy; Shanghai, China; and Stuttgart, Germany. With a cross-disciplinary team of more than 400 employees, frog offers a broad range of industry expertise, in fields such as consumer electronics, software, entertainment, finance, medical, retail, and fashion. Clients include Alltel, Disney, GE, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, MTV, Seagate, Yahoo! and others.

After Hurricane Katrina couple of years ago I designed a rapid response, emergency housing system that can be reused over and over again that I named the Reaction Housing System. I thought it was a strong enough solution to actually pursue instead of leaving it to my sketchbook and computer. So for several years I have chased numerous politicians and disaster relief organizations in an effort to secure funding for the project. To make a long story short, disaster relief organizations never returned phone calls and staff at various political offices thought I was prank calling apparently.

Being one that just will not let anything go, I decided to build some rapid prototypes in my backyard to use for testing and demonstration. I have two shelter models that are patent pending currently and have decided to build one of each. So with sparks flying and fumes from various 3M products lofting about, construction is well under way. The big shelter, named the Exo, is the first up under construction. The second model, the Evolve, is still just a frame to be completed after the Exo is buttoned up. It is a thrill to see them coming to life now. Hopefully the project will eventually take off and help save lives soon.

Below: The Exo prototype with exterior walls and power. (Doors and interior walls coming soon.)

Labels: disaster hosuing, Exo, hurricane, hurricane katrina, Reaction, Refugia

I was doing a few updates to my portfolio pages this weekend when I realized that I never uploaded any video of my Otto driving system. So here is the YouTube upload of the DVD I made for that competition. You can see just the portion about the user interface on heads up display here.

I designed/developed the Otto driving system concept for a Cooper Union competition almost two years ago called Driving Forward. The competition wanted to solve traffic congestion, among other things, with new signage design, and if you could think of a use for it – "technology". I thought the only way to truly solve the problem was to make "technology" the centerpiece and treat the signage as secondary devices. Much in the same way that DSL allowed broadband internet connections over cooper phone lines, I thought removing humans from the driving equation on interstates would allow much more bandwidth there also. I found no need to build anything new or have ridiculously complex A.I. driving a car for you either. An automated driving system could be built from "off-the-shelf" technology and the systems already present on most modern cars. Otto would only require RFID tags under the road reflectors on the interstate and small periodic transmitters along the frontage roads to relay weather conditions and current exit information. The rest of the "new" hardware is located on each car – RFID readers, small wifi like transmitters and receivers, and a CPU. The system would use built-in systems such as power brakes, cruise control, and power steering to control the car. (The Otto CPU would drive the throttle controls of the cruise controls system much differently than they behave for you today.)

The experience:
As a driver nears an interstate on-ramp an LCD display mounted above-the-visor or an H.U.D. on the windshield appears with only labeled arrows directing to the appropriate on-ramp. Once the driver enters the on-ramp, the vehicle takes over and begins to drive itself. The driver, or rider at this point, just sits back and watches exit/interchange information scroll by on the display until the desired one slides into view. At that point the driver selects the exit and the car exits when it reaches the off-ramp. Once off of the off-ramp, the car turns manual control back over to the driver. Detailed exit information is available for each exit and long trips can be entered or saved as only a few points. The car monitors its fuel levels and suggest fuel exits within range. I worked out a lot of details for this system but those are the basics of it.

The full Otto video:



The UI segment only:

Labels: interactive, interstate, Michael McDaniel, Otto

The M. D. Anderson Donor Kiosk is finally nearing completion. The fabricator is wrapping up construction of the unit and the software developers have almost finished building the back end system to power the unit. Here are a few images of the physical portion of the kiosk coming together in the fabricator's shop along with a screen shot of the actual application up and running.

Labels: donor, enviromental, interactive, kiosk, M. D. Anderson, Michael McDaniel, software