MIT holds symposium on urban tool

In early May, we attended an all-day technical event in Boston, the MIT Sustainable Urban Design Symposium. The symposium was primarily organized by Christoph Reinhart, Associate Professor at MIT.
The focus of the symposium was Umi, a new design environment for architects and urban planners who want to model the environmental performance of urban zones and cities, specifically operational energy use, walkability and daylighting potential. Umi is based on the Rhino CAD program and is being developed by the Sustainable Design Lab at MIT. The introduction to the program included a number of case studies.

Researchers from the Sustainable Urban Design Lab explored different aspects of the computational design tool in its evaluation of operational energy (Alstan Jakubiec), accessibility (Tarek Rakha), daylight (Timur Dogan), and embodied energy (Carlo Cerezo).

Umi has already been used extensively in graduate level studios at MIT by Kent Larson, Miho Mazereeuw, and Harvey Michaels.

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This brief overview only provides a glimpse of the system. To register, download and to go through the well-written user guide, go to http://urbanmodellinginterface.ning.com.