An expert jury will review and evaluate submissions. The winning team will receive a cash prize of $5,000, the first runner-up will receive $3,500 and the second runner-up $2,500.

The designs that result from this process will illustrate ways in which it’s possible to minimize the energy and water use in a typical sports facility, while providing a platform for employees, athletes, and the community to experience how sustainable building practices can enhance everyday life.

Registration opens in September. http://www.evolvecompetition.ca.

• Academic excellence
• Extracurricular activities and demonstrated leadership within the campus community
• Extracurricular activities and demonstrated leadership within the general community
• How the applicant plans to continue contributing to the betterment of the engineering community after graduating

WHO CAN APPLY?

Students entering or in their fourth year of undergraduate study in engineering or pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree in engineering at an Ontario university recognized by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board are eligible to apply for The Personal Scholarship.

Applicants must be members of OSPE in good standing to be considered. 

HOW TO APPLY

Application forms are available online in the fall of 2013. Students are required to complete the application and return it to the dean of their engineering school with a copy of their most recent transcript. Each dean may recommend a maximum of two undergraduate and two graduate students. Visit www.ospe.on.ca/scholarship

Team Ontario has seen the future of housing and believes it includes an ECHO. In fact, the team of students from Carleton University, Algonquin College and Queen’s University is so confident in ECHO — the ultracompact, net-zero, solar-powered home they’ve designed and built over the past 18 months — that they’ll soon be trucking it all the way from an Algonquin parking lot to California for the biennial Solar Decathlon competition.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the competition runs for 10 days in October. For the first time ever, Ontario institutions number among the 20 teams, winnowed down from dozens of applicants worldwide, that are vying for first place. That honour will go to the house that best blends affordability, consumer appeal and design excellence with optimal energy production and efficiency.

The competition is meant to introduce clean-energy products and technology into the mainstream while educating students and the public alike.

At just 940 square feet, the ECHO “was designed for people like us, our generation,” says Chris Baldwin, Carleton’s student project manager and, at 24, a member of the so-called Echo Boomer generation.

By that he means people eager for home ownership but on a far more modest scale than the McMansions that may have addicted their parents.

The name ECHO (it was originally called the Aurora House) also plays on “eco,” reflecting the home’s ecologically conscious design.

The modular structure was built in two parts by students in the advanced housing program at Algonquin’s Perth campus and shipped to the college’s Woodroffe site this spring. There, the two parts were joined by three mammoth, 13-foot bolts. It’s since been outfitted with a deck, painted and furnished.

That whole process will be reversed later this month so it can be loaded aboard a flatbed truck and shipped south, where the team will reassemble it for judging.

“There were a few issues along the way, but we figured them out and now it’s easy to snap together,” says construction manager and Algonquin student Jacob Morgan.

Such bumps along the way are valuable, according to Carleton faculty adviser Cynthia Cruickshank. “They’ve learned that it’s not like in class, they’re not always dealing with ideal conditions so they have to learn to create flexibility in the
design to deal with that.”

As part of the competition, each team (there is another Canadian one, Team Alberta from the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University) also has to host a dinner for eight to prove the house is functional. Says Baldwin, “We’ll do a Canadian menu, maybe Atlantic salmon.”

The small, comfy home in which they’ll do so boasts a devilishly clever design.

Outside, there’s 585 square feet of decking and, in front, a post-and-beam exostructure that serves as an architectural focal point while supporting a large array of solar panels. The solar array in turn provides shade for the interior.

Those panels will generate 7.8 kilowatts of electricity for sale to the grid. That’s as much electricity as the home will use in the course of a year, giving it net-zero status.

A tight building envelope includes insulating foam as well as state-of-the art vacuum insulation panels with 15 times the thermal resistance of conventional fibreglass-batt insulation. In all, ECHO’s building envelope has twice the insulating value of a conventional home.

Photo: Chris Roussakis
ECHO’s open and compact kitchen and dining area.

Inside, there’s an open-concept kitchen/living area with generous, south-facing windows to provide natural daylight and maximize solar gain during the winter.

There’s also a master bedroom with direct access to the deck and a small, second space for an office or child’s bedroom.

“There’s not a lot of storage,” says Morgan, “but our generation has to learn to live with less stuff.”

Multi-use furniture like a desk that becomes a bed in the second bedroom will help maximize space.

ECHO was designed using an in-out approach to architecture. That means that the interior layout, including the separation of living and sleeping areas and the flow inside the home — both especially important factors in a small space — are first established. That layout, along with engineering needs, dictate the floor plan and building shape.

Building materials were either donated or paid for through sponsorship. In selecting materials, the team used a “cradle-to-grave” approach that, for example, accounted for embodied energy and emphasized locally sourced, reused, and other
ecologically friendly components.

ECHO brims with emerging technology, including an advanced solar-assisted heat pump (SAHP) system to meet space heating/cooling and domestic hot water needs. There’s also a predictive shading system. It uses daily weather forecasts to raise and lower south-facing window shades automatically, reducing cooling needs on summer days.

ECHO, which would cost roughly $300,000 to build commercially, has involved more than 100 students from the proposal stage two summers ago to the completed project now. Says Baldwin, “It’s really nice to look out and see all the work we put in come to fruition.”

Visit http://www.id.carleton.ca/undergraduate/minor-in-design/ for more information.

It all started at Startup Weekend Ottawa, an event that brings together entrepreneurs and their ideas. In the weeks leading up to the event, Tannahill fused the two things he likes most into a workable idea, he says.

“I like tattoos and I like doing tech, so the combination sort of came together,” he says. “It wasn’t my life’s goal to start a website about tattooing, but it worked out that there’s a real need for it.”

This need was demonstrated by his first place finish at Startup Weekend. After the event, Tannahill joined forces with two other entrepreneurs, including Carleton alumnus and designer Minh Dao.

After months of work, Tattoo Hero recently launched at the International Startup Festival in Montreal. The team hoped the reveal would generate some buzz around the website, Tannahill says.

Instead, Tattoo Hero was covered by TechCrunch, a popular website within the IT community. This exposure has brought thousands of unique visitors to the site every day, Tannahill says.

“(Tech Crunch) is something that we wanted down the road,” says Minh Dao, the website’s designer.  “To have that on the first day that we launched – it couldn’t have gone any better.”

As of now, Tattoo Hero makes finding an artist easier for people who aren’t linked into the tattoo community, Tannahill says. Because some great artists can work solely on referrals, they simply don’t have a need to build a good website to attract new clients, he says.

Tattoo Hero is working towards bringing these artists to the forefront and “doing the work for them,” he says. In the future, this will develop into bringing in a scheduling system operated through the website to allow people to book appointments with artists online, Tannahill says.

Carleton has prepared both Tannahill and Dao for the challenges of running a business.

“Being a software engineer, it’s given me good insight into the theories around software structure,” Tannahill says.

“My other two partners aren’t very tech savvy, and I’ll try to explain some things to them, and they just don’t get it. So I definitely learned something in school,” he laughed.

As the person in charge of branding and design, Dao also feels as though Carleton has prepared him for some of the challenges associated with running a website. He says one of the strengths of Carleton’s Industrial Design program is that it’s well known for producing well-rounded students.

“What Carleton Industrial Design does is give you a good broad spectrum of skills and knowledge – not just on design, but on marketing, on engineering, on psychology,” he says.

Even though Tattoo Hero only launched recently, the team is already proud of what they’ve done.

“We’ve created something that we all believe in,” Dao says.

Visit the Tattoo Hero website at tattoohero.com

They are looking for product concepts or ideas that solve a real problem, either designed from a university project of designed in the entrant’s own time. The best entries will demonstrate the iterative design process, and include sketches, images of models, prototypes, and videos.

Key dates

• August 1 – Competition closes
• September 12 – National finalists announced (chosen from a panel of notable designers in each country)
• October 10 – Dyson top 20 shortlist announced (chosen from a panel of 4 Dyson engineers)
• November 7 – Winners announced (selected by James Dyson)

Hard work paid off for the Carleton Ravens Racing team, which took home special honours at Canadian and American Formula race car competitions this year.

Ravens Racing includes two teams: one is comprised of 27 fourth-year undergraduate engineering students who receive a credit for creating and testing their components on a Formula Hybrid all-wheel drive car; the other team includes more than 40 volunteer students from all academic backgrounds who create and test their components on a gas-powered Formula race car.

“I think we did very well this year,” says Kenneth Chow, Ravens Racing team leader. “This is the first year our hybrid competed after we developed the car for three years. When we went to compete, it got first place.”

Chow says the team created improved parts and processes for the race cars this year – which helped them succeed when the Ravens Racing Hybrid team competed in the 2013 Formula Hybrid competition in New Hampshire between April 20 and May 2. The team took third place in design, second in marketing, and sixth in endurance – placing sixth overall.

Carleton’s next victory took place at the 2013 Formula SAE Michigan competition from May 8 to 11, where the volunteer team faced off against 122 international teams.

Chow says the volunteer team did an outstanding job – coming in ninth place in the cost event, 34th place in marketing, and tying 68th in design.

“We went from four to five people on the team last year, to more than 40 this year. So this was a huge step forward,” says Chow.

Both Ravens Racing teams competed at the 2013 Formula North competition in Barrie, Ont., from May 23 to 26. The Hybrid team members earned first place overall in their category, and in the acceleration and endurance events. The volunteer team placed 23rd in the competitive combustion class – facing the top teams from the Formula SAE Michigan competition.

Ravens Racing members will be demonstrating their cars at various events this summer, including at the Ottawa Ferrari Festival, which takes place June 15.

For more information on the teams, visit: ravensracing.com.