House Jasmina: World’s First Smart Energy House by Arduino – Part I

Presentation

Lorenzo Rubino – CuE

On June 6^th 2015, the doors opened in House Jasmina, a unique example of a connected apartment with open-source ideals, promoted by Arduino and curated by the futurist writer Bruce Sterling. The connected home is hosted by Toolbox Coworking in a former industrial building in Turin, north of Italy. The space is already shared by Officine Arduino (the Italian Arduino headquarter) and FabLab Torino. This is the first of three articles, which will focus on the description of it.

Lorenzo Rubino – CuE

House Jasmina is a space of confrontation, an incubator for concepts and examples, created for design and business in the field of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The new space has been opened publicly for the first time, with some local maker furniture, an Italian selection of kitchen appliances, household works by International Open Sources designers (OpenDesk, Jesse Howard, Aker, Open Structure) and a small display of various connected objects and artifacts. Along with the IoT projects, they have displayed home electrical products from Energy@Home consortium, IoT artwork from Torino Share Festival, and designs and prototypes from the first House Jasmina “Call for Projects”.

In the forthcoming months, House Jasmina will host residency programs, workshops and talks. This “house of the future” is not restricted to technicians but it has meant for people interested in everyday life under near-future conditions. House Jasmina will also be available on AirBnB for futurist weekends in Torino. The opening of House Jasmina coincided with the second edition of Turin Mini Maker Faire: a manifestation that gathers local Makers and outside guests for a moment of reflection and dialogue on the Maker Movement (here more than 50 projects were presented).

Design

Lorenzo Rubino – CuE

The OpenStructures (OS) project initiates a construction system where everyone designs for everyone. That ongoing experiment wants to find out what happens if people design objects according to a shared modular grid. A common open standard that stimulates the exchange of parts, components, experiences and ideas and aspires to build things together. The ultimate goal is to initiate a universal, collaborative puzzle that allows the broadest range of people to design, build and exchange the broadest range of modular components, resulting in a more flexible and scalable built environment.

An open modular system of this kind has the potential to:

• Generate flexible and dynamic puzzle structures rather than uniform modular entities
• Introduce variety within modularity
• Stimulate re-use cycles of various parts and components
• Enable collaborative (and exponential) innovation within hardware construction

Another example is the Parametric Furniture Studio. The latter explores the connection between advanced computational design techniques and the engagement of reality in the productions of a piece of architecturally embedded furniture. Processes inherent with contemporary models of digital design to production including parametric exploration, performative design, solid modeling, computer numerically controlled fabrication and material studies will be used to generate a full-scale template for manufacturing.

Contemporary involvement in CNC and parametric techniques has facilitated the potentials of the user to become more involved in the process while simultaneously collapsing the traditional designer and craftsperson duality. The studio explores the complete process of the design of a piece of architectural furniture from its conception to its realization through the production of a full-scale prototype.