Bob Hsiung's Design Portfolio

The Sustainable Connected Home is a multi-million dollar research collaboration between the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Fondazione Bruno Kessler. The extensive research integrates renewable energy systems, sustainable architecture, social sustainability, and connected information systems and culminates with the construction of a full-scale prototype Connected Sustainable Home in Trento, Italy.

I was brought into the project in the final 9 months to manage the final push to build the physical prototype home. I oversaw all final technical decisions and assisted in ttrimming the project scope to a manageable level. I managed a diverse group of MIT graduate students, consultants and Italian vendors/partners in both hardware and software development. I personally designed control boards for the dynamic windows and designed the tablet-based UI.

The prototype home combines both passive and active sustainable architecture features. The modular, transportable structure is built from locally sourced, high thermal mass, cross laminated wood panels. The most visible active feature is the southern facade of windows which open and close automatically to control ventilation. The windows have a layer of electrochromic glass which allows them to electronically regulate the solar thermal gain. A second controllable PDLC layer of glass controls opacity for privacy.

The control system for the house manages windows and the hybrid solar and high efficiency pellet burner HVAC system to regulate thermal comfort.  It uses real-time data from multiple internal temperature and humidity sensors, occupancy sensors and an exterior weather station.  This live data is combined with historical weather data and both explicitly inputted and inferred user preferences

The MIT/FBK Green Home Alliance Website