Inside-Out, Design Procedures for Passive Environmental Technologies

lnsideout is organized into four areas of concern: thermal, lighting, warer/waste, and acoustics. Each section has one or more exercises. The thermal section has four exercises; sun penetration and shadows, heat loss, heat gain, and equipment and distribution. Lighting has two exercises, daylighting and electrical lighting. Daylighting precedes electric lighting in order to reinforce rhe notion that passive energies should be exploited before highly processed artificial energies, and that the potential of energy sources to perform work should be marched to rhe task. Because the daylighting exercise follows the thermal section students must resolve such conflicts as glare versus solar gain, and heat loss versus the more even illumination of north light. Electric lighting in most cases plays a backup role and tends ro be task specific.The water and waste exercise asks for the design and comparison of three sys- tems: conventional fixtures with centralized waste treatment; low water use fix- tures, solar water hearing, septic rank and field, and centralized water supply; and, composing toilets, rain collection and storage, grey water filtration and irrigation, and solar water heating. The systems are compared in terms of energy and water use. The acoustic exercise frequently requires the reexamination of decisions made in previous exercises and requires tradeoffs ro resolve conflicts such as the desire for hard surface mass in a direct gain solar system versus the need for sound absorption to reduce reverberation time.Pedagogically, we feel it is important that exercises be presented in consistent context of a particular building and site. Traditionally, the teaching of en- gineering calculations has been presented in a series of unrelated contexcs, to illustrate particular applicability of given procedures. Insideout provides exercises which require design of a building and it's site, an evaluation of that design, and a redesign on the basis of that evaluation.