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.
The human crowd simulator tool is a way for designers to measure, track and formulate understandings behind human crowd patterns and relationships. It maps and generates human movement patterns based on a series of parameters given to the tool via the script. The script parameters run on behavioral movement and science analysis, these parameters have... Read more »
Glare can cause annoyance and discomfort when it becomes the source of vision problem. Although discomfort glare has been studied extensively as an academic topic, evaluating the risk of glare and its mitigation strategies are limited in the architectural design process due to the lack of an established workflow. From building design perspective, architects tend... Read more »
The past 30 years has produced growing documentation of the numerous health benefits of nature. While this has reduced the demand for “proof” of the value of green space in healthcare settings, there remains a critical need for research that focuses on the design elements that can best serve specific patient populations. In the United... Read more »
Before stepping into the virtual world we needed to start in the physical world. This Incubator began by experimenting with different types of models and different methods of photographing these models. We discovered several things which would be usual to know for future photogrammetry work: Less is more – more photos do NOT give you... Read more »
The healthcare sector in Brazil usually does not use any kind of technology or software to change the experience of the client. During the Use and Occupancy Program discussions, an Excel spreadsheet with all the calculations and metrics or a Word document report are presented. The entire process of defining a hospital program and its... Read more »
So often our imagination is captured by the concept of unseen forces behind the workings of the world. Of course, we often think of the living environment when imagining these forces, but the cycle of decomposition is equally as graceful and important. In this case, the unseen hand behind the entire process is the simple... Read more »
The primary focus of this study is to determine how design decisions may influence human behavior. Specific characteristics of four recently built student residences at the University of British Columbia (UBC) will be evaluated. Each residence is a tower typology of roughly the same size and scale. Different design characteristics are present in each tower... Read more »
Our educational system is designed to provide age-appropriate learning from kindergarten through graduate school recognizing the human brain development cycle from birth to age twenty five. Age-appropriate education is critical at a young age, but as a student matures specific goals of attainment begin to blur with the recognition that some students are more gifted,... Read more »
Immersive Virtual Reality and Telemedicine is already in use by several Healthcare Institutions, but Architects and Designers, Governing Bodies, and Regulations may not be all in sync with the evolution of treatment methods. Some States and Countries are more prepared than others. However, we are still designing centralized Clinics and Hospitals for physical interaction with... Read more »
This Innovation Incubator focuses on the role of Thermal Bridging in the performance of the building envelope and its mitigation through good detailing. The trend towards performance-based standards means an increased focus on the building envelope. This in turn places an increased focus on the effects of thermal bridging in the performance of the building... Read more »
This project proposed to develop the next generation of net carbon negative, low embodied energy wood composite structural elements. The interest in mass timber construction is what brought a resource librarian and two project designers together to work on this project. During the first phase, the project team created composite fibers composed of a bio-based... Read more »
