Sustainability Project

hes-water-consumption-pictureAs part of the Humanitarian Engineering Scholars program, my project group was given the task of exploring the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and then finding a way to promote that goal in our daily lives. After some deliberation, the team noticed that because we live in a residence building with hundreds of other students, the goal of Sustainable Cities and Communities was especially relevant to us.

In order to promote sustainability within our building, Torres House, we discussed ways to encourage people to take shorter showers. The lighting in our community restrooms is based on motion sensors, so we explored how we could use lighting to provide visual cues for when a resident has been in the shower for 10 minutes. We hoped this simple switch would encourage the building’s average shower time to reduce by at least 1.5 minutes, which would save around $1,300 and over 800,000 gallons of water per year! We then met with our Hall Director, who is working on discussing the idea with the head of maintenance. In the meantime, the team designed the poster displayed above that we put up near every bathroom in order to promote sustainability through shorter shower times.

This project was important to me because I feel very dedicated to humanitarian engineering and sustainability. Organizing meetings, putting up flyers, and promoting awareness was meaningful to me because it helped to advance my own passions of teamwork, positivity, and conservation.

CATIA V6 Project

hes-lego-figure-artifact

Pictured above is the final rendering of a month-long “personal project” from my junior year in high school. In the beginning of my junior year, I started a CATIA V6 cadding course through my school. We began learning basics, like sketching, padding, intruding, and rotating. After some time of learning this by going through tutorials, we were given the opportunity to create whatever we wanted. I wanted to create something fun but also challenging for our skill level, so I decided to make a replica of a Lego mini-figure. Referencing several online schematics, the figure is very close to the exact dimensions of an an actual lego. Its hands, arms, and head were all created separately and then assembled in CATIA. This project is definitely one of my favorites even though looking up information about dimensions and assembly functions provided a large learning curve.

This project is significant to me because I believe it shows my willingness to work hard and learn new things for a project with high goals. Although the figure is simple is CAD terms, it was a meticulous (yet enjoyable) process for me. This project also represents me because I enjoy creating physical projects, and seeing the form of the figure coming to life before me was an exciting endevour. Being able to actually 3-D print the figure was also wonderful because I was able to teach my peers more about 3-D printing and how it works.