University of Louisville Magazine

SUMMER 2016

The University of Louisville Alumni Magazine: for alumni, faculty, staff, students and anyone that is a UofL Cardinal fan.

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S U M M E R U O F L M A G A Z I N E | 11 H A P P E N I N G H E R E News & Impact UofL recognized for controlling energy costs A national trade publication that focuses on the business operations of higher education featured the University of Louisville in an article about creative ways to control energy costs. In its March 2016 issue, University Business praised UofL for opening 11 new LEED-certif ed buildings (which pay for themselves in long-term energy savings) and for partnering with Siemens to make older buildings more energy eff cient. The Siemens project, which improved energy and operational costs in 88 campus buildings, saved the university $12.9 million in just over four years. It also paid large economic dividends for the region. In spending $46 million on the project since 2009, UofL created 613 jobs, supported $33.5 million in wages and produced $25.8 million in business sales in the Louisville metropolitan area, according to a study by the Boston-based Economic Development Research Group. "This study documents how becoming more energy-eff cient can save money, improve the environment and benef t the local economy — all at the same time," said President James Ramsey. UofL was featured in the article, "Some Like It Hot: How colleges are getting creative about energy supply to save money on heating and cooling and to boost building comfort for occupants," along with Stanford University and San Mateo County Community College District, both in California. Amber Kleitz, a student in the B.F.A. program for graphic design, illustrated the brainstorming process for a project in the Industrial Design class. Industrial design class catches wave of the future As part of a class project this spring, Winston Rauch interviewed an elderly woman about the hardships and joint pain she faces doing a load of laundry. The class then brainstormed, designed and prototyped a device that could improve her laundry experience. It was an inspiring exercise that reminded students how important the user is in developing products, said Rauch, who is earning a master of engineering. He's working on his thesis at Frazier Rehab Institute's pediatric division for spinal cord injuries. "This class has conf rmed my desire to pursue a career in this f eld and my passion for design and, more specif cally, medical device design," he said. The Industrial Design Co-creation class, offered for the f rst time this spring, brings together art students from the Hite Art Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences and engineering students from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering for hands-on study of industrial design. "The whole idea of manufacturing used to be, f rst you deal with function, then form. Now everyone — designers, engineers, marketers — is in on it from the beginning," said Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the initiator of the collaborative concept. "Function, design, sales — they all go together." Such classes that promote interdisciplinary collaboration are the future and will bolster the 40-acre Insti- tute for Product Realization being built adjacent to UofL, said John Usher, acting dean of the Speed School of Engineering. The institute eventually will house a number of existing labs and makerspaces, including the Rapid Prototyping Center, Conn Center for Renewable Energy, Logistics and Distribution Institute and pos- sibly a new Center for Computing and Analytics. "It takes input from all kinds of people with different backgrounds and experiences to achieve really good designs," Usher said. "And so the industrial design class is a f rst step in bringing together art and engineering students and teaching them how to design and build something far better than either group could have done on their own. I can only see these types of collaborations continuing to grow and becoming even more important."

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