Perkins&Will supports small, focused explorations proposed by staff members with micro-grants of money and time through the Innovation Incubator program. The Innovation Incubator promotes the exploration and development of ideas that improve our work, open new areas of business and stretch our collective creativity. The results of these explorations further our design work, improve our design process and contribute to the knowledge base of our industry.
The program was launched in 2010 and was an immediate success. With more than 700 entries over 20 cycles, sustained interest in the Innovation Incubator at all levels of the firm is testament to its relevance in our ever-growing culture of innovation.
Browse some of the Innovation Incubator projects that have helped grow the profession’s intelligence over the years. Explore more at: innovation.perkinswill.com.
We currently face a third wave of a COVID-19 Pandemic that threatens to incur more devastating losses than the previous two. The need for an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) that is planned for response to an infectious pandemic surge in a manner that is financially and operationally practical to implement is urgent at present. The... Read more »
In response to the current climate crisis, we must establish widespread familiarity with carbon and its cumulative impacts, elevate our critique of sustainable design, and embrace our part in balancing the carbon budget. We set out to understand a project’s global warming potential by looking at inflows and outflows of carbon, and identified key contributors... Read more »
We now live in an era of Quantum Supremacy. This is a primer to guide an Architect through the cutting edge of Quantum Computing. Architecture is extremely complex with a vast number of design and performance criteria that are highly entangled, thus creating computationally intense analytical models that classical computers struggle to overcome. Quantum computers... Read more »
In our endeavour to build equitable, inclusive and resilient communities, collaboration and collective ownership of design is key. Phygital-UP is a co-design environment that supports equitable, inclusive, effective, and dynamic stakeholder engagement in both physical and virtual environments. Phygital-UP offers both the design team and the stakeholders the ability to work together in a synergistic... Read more »
Greywater for use on single family residential yards in Los Angeles County is a great untapped local and sustainable water resource. If implemented more widely with the use of strategic incentives and marketing, residential greywater could yield a higher quality and quantity of shade and fruit trees for homeowners across a wide range of neighborhoods... Read more »
The project is an energy & carbon‐oriented study focusing on human behavior change due to short‐term COVID‐19 epidemic and potential adoption of remote work (telework) policies in the future. By using dynamic percentage of working‐from‐home ratio, a workflow is developed in order to predict the impacts of behavior change on both energy and carbon patterns... Read more »
This report outlines an Infectious Pandemic Surge Space and Functional Program for the ICU to address the great need for Critical Care Pandemic Preparedness witnessed every day during the COVID-19 surge in New York City. The journey documented in these pages wound through countless conversations with front-line workers, designers, strategists, and various experts. It included many... Read more »
In April 2020 it became clear that greatly increased testing was needed to control the spread of the Coronavirus. Under this reality, which brought to the surface strong racial and income disparities in healthcare, our incubator focused on answering the following question: How can we develop a testing solution that is quick and cost-effective to... Read more »
This publicly available website allows K-12 school stakeholders to quickly access evidence-based strategies for reopening and keeping K-12 schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our response focuses on risk mitigation, educational adaptation and health promotion, which creates a holistic framework for schools dealing with the direct and indirect consequences of COVID-19. The findings of this... Read more »
As extended reality technologies become better, more seamless, and more available, our virtual space and physical space will tend to merge into one hyperreal space. When this hyperreality emerges, it will fundamentally transform our human habitat at every scale. This transformation doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Ubiquitous XR activation may actually improve the... Read more »
This research project proposes both an expanded set of “socialized” metrics to complement the physical neighborhood metrics typically used for TOD projects, and a new data visualization methodology for extracting and visualizing neighborhood metrics consistently and dynamically. With the addition of socialized metrics, designers will be better equipped to have conversations with clients and stakeholders... Read more »
