Conserving Energy at OCAD

As you all know, me and Ehryn are doing our big idea based on energy conservation at OCAD. We have decided to change the desktop for all the computers so that it tells the user to simply shut down the monitor when they are done, because even though they are put to go to sleep, it still wastes energy when they are not in use. We talked to Allister and Andrew about this, and made a mock up of how the desktop will look. By next week this project will hopefully be well under way and all of the monitors will have this desktop!

-Ehryn and Andra

One big idea for you

Basically we are having an idea of recycling empty print cartridges.
As we have not seen that OCAD has concern anything about recycling the print cartridge for the faculty and the student, then we think it might be a good idea to encourage people in OCAD to recycle empty cartridges. Due to many people don’t know they actually are able to return or refill their empty cartridges, and they just throw them into garbage.

The goal:
To encourage people in OCAD recycle their empty print cartridges, in other the improve OCAD’s green grade, and keep our environment greener and less pollution. Feel free to give some comments to us. It is important, because this idea is for you!

Arash, Carrie, Tony

BIKE RACKS

BIKE RACKS

ONE BIG IDEA

From the How green is OCAD project, I discover that it OCAD have a good number of students who do use bicycle as their form of transportation. For that project, I observed that the bike racks are always full. It is clear that there is great demand
for the bike racks in front of the 100 McCaul building. For now, the bike racks are not as demanding compare to the time in September because the weather is changing, but there are still a number of student who are using the bike racks. My one idea is to promote more students to use their bicycle to school as much as possible. From this idea I have e-mail Peter Lashko, Director of Facilities Planning & Management to ask if OCAD has any interest of purchasing more bike
racks. He said that they are asking for further racks in the furniture and equipment budget to locate on OCAD's property. This is exciting news for students who are bicycling to school, there will be less problem getting a location to lock their bike.

I hope to push this idea further, I want to form a petition and have the support from students. I hope the petition will make purchasing more bike racks higher up on the priority list. I want OCAD to know that there are many students who are using the existing bike racks. I have e-mailed Peter Lashko again because I want to know as to how many new bike racks they intent to buy. This is his respond to my e-mail.

The architects will tell us where and how many racks will fit onto the property.

As for the idea, bike racks, recycling centres, all sorts of items are repeatedly asked for each year under Furniture & Equipment requests. We receive possibly one million plus dollars worth of requests and while it varies from year to year, we only fund about a quarter of it.

Each year different priorities are addressed and taken care of.

From the information given in his e-mail, it appears that purchasing new bike racks are not a top priority. Once I get the petition filled out, I will submit it to Peter Lashko and I hope that the petition will address purchasing bike racks a top priority.

Green Computing

Someone is listening! I received this email today from Alastair Maclead, Director of IT Services at OCAD:

"It is a good idea to shutdown your computer daily in the interest of energy conservation."

If 250 OCAD computers were set up to enter sleep mode after a brief period of inactivity, AND turned off during non-work hours, OCAD's electricity consumption would drop significantly, resulting in the following benefits:

annual reduction of 120,000 kWh electricity consumption
annual reduction of 36.25 tonnes of CO2 emissions
annual savings of $12,000

He also submitted a good resource on green computing from Trent U, which I have linked to the title of this post!

ONE BIG IDEA PROPOSAL (for recycling bins)

ONE BIG IDEA

Proposal

Re-designed Recycling Bins.

My goal:

• Re-design and improve recycling & waste management bins at OCAD.
• Rise awareness about the importance of recycling in our school in order to achieve the green grade.
• The bins should be easy to understand and use.
• There should be enough bins around the school so that people who use have always one close to them.
• It should be cheap to make

Results:

By the end of the term I hope to have designed an effective bin. That is appealing to the eye and that helps the overall waste management environment around the school.

Method:

I will first of all put together a questionnaire so that I can interview some students and staff members to find out what people think about the current recycling bins and so they can give me some ideas of how they would like it to be improved both visually and functionally. Then I would study the methods to see what would be the easiest and most effective way of designing the way that the garbage bag would be changed, also the exterior look to it. And decide how the recycling sections would be labeled so that they can be noticeable and easy to understand (maybe using figures instead of words).
Then I would also try to figure out the best places to locate the bins around the college so that they are not in hidden places but in places where they are more probable to be used.

Vandalism Proposal

Hello Everyone,

This is the proposal which I have forwarded to Lance Straun, Head of Plant Services regarding this issue......

My name Oscar Patzan and part of second year Think Tank class. I have spoken with plant services and other faculty members regarding the vandalism problem at our school. We've all agreed to the notion that there is bad art on the walls in the staircases and other areas of the building. It costs the school a lot of money to remove and we need to see how we can begin to put a stop to this. My proposal regarding this issue is to have artists from OCAD submit artwork that can go up on our walls. One of the most affected areas is the staircase. ItÂ’s usually empty so students don't have the fear of getting caught. If we created murals in those spaces, taggers may think twice about vandalizing that area. I hope to have a poster ready within the next couple of weeks to inform the students on how they can take part in this project.

Breakdown:

- We are asking students to submit work or ideas on what they would want to create on our walls
- We need to specify what areas of the building can be worked on ie: the staircases
- We need to specify who will decide what submissions will get chosen ie: panel of judges, the students
- We will need to know who to submit the work to
- We will also let the artists know what materials cannot be used for producing the final work.
- Will there be a deadline for submissions or will it be ongoing

Goal:

- Our goal as part of a collective called "BIO" is to bring some change in the schools regarding the issue of vandalism.
- To get the students involved in taking part in making the interiors of our school beautiful and respectable
- To produce artwork in the most affects areas in the building that will discourage taggers to vandalize there.

With your approval and direction, we can get going with this project and hope for the best results.

One Big Idea [Recycling]

1) Goal
- Bring up the importance of recycling and grow the awareness of how recycling can change our environment.
- Starting a recycling campaign in the school.
- Get people to recycle!

2) Results
By end of the term I will have more people participating in recycling activities. They will be reminded how important recycling is to our environment and learn the importance of recycling.

3) Method
I will start an awareness campaign by creating posters and putting them up around the school. I will have the big.ideas @ ocad blog address on the poster and will put up all the information about recycling.

Our Big Idea!

Hello all,
as you all might know me and Ehryn are doing energy consumption at OCAD.
our big idea was to help conserve energy being used in our computer labs.
We then decided to change the desktop on all the monitors to simply tell the users to shut it off after they are done and also incorporated our Bio logo into it. We created a template and emailed Andrew to get permission.
by next week we will have this well on it's way and hopefully all of the monitor desktops will say this.


- Ehryn and Andra

One big idea to save energy at OCAD


SUMMARY

After my research on energy savings on lighting about OCAD buildings I found out that there isn’t a solid system used at OCAD to save energy from lighting. Because of the tight budget our school has, it is not going to be possible for now to built a sensor system which helps saving a lot of energy. At the moment energy savings from lighting at OCAD is mostly possible through user education. Plant services is aware that they should do something about user education but no plans has been made yet. Therefore I have come up with an idea to educate users at our school with almost no cost.

MY GOAL

Educate the users about using lights at school.
Get the users attention to turn the lights of when not needed.
Reduce the amount of energy we use for lighting at OCAD through this plan.

HOW AM I GOING TO DO IT ?

I will design a poster that reminds people to turn the lights of when they don’t need it.
The poster will be 5”x5” or smaller.
The poster will be placed on the doors instead of near the light switch so that people see the reminder right before they step out of the class. This gives a chance to the person who is leaving the room last, to remember to turn the lights off since it’s not need it anymore.

WHAT WILL I BE DOING ?

Step 1. I will design the poster 5”x5”
Step 2. Get a permission from school to place the posters on the doors.
Step 3. Get the school to cover the printing costs which is the only expense. The poster is not going to be bigger than 5”x5” which helps to reduce the cost.
Backup plan : If I can’t go through this process I will collect donations or use my own money (since it’s not going to cost much) to get the printing done.
Step 4. Place the posters on the doors facing inside of the classrooms.

Transform AGO Parking Lot into Public Greenspace

Background
Our team research showed evidence of OCAD’s exterior problem of the fence that separates Butterfield Park and parking lot of the Art Gallery of Ontario. This has been a long-time issue and the debate has centered around how to open up the fence between Grange Park and the adjoining Butterfield Park into one large contiguous park. Turning the AGO parking lot to the beautiful park space and joining it with the Butterfield Park would be a great solution to this ongoing issue.

Objective
Taking into consideration limited timeframe for this project, our main goals would be to increase awareness within OCAD community about the exterior problem of the AGO parking lot.
Victoria & Dominique

laptop program

Students in the OCAD laptop program:

This One Big Idea is for You.

In this class, we are also concerning about the fees towards the laptop program.
After doing the research for purchasing policy at OCAD and comparing the prices outside of school, we find that it may be possible that students can get more discount on the laptop itself, and hopefully that school can provide students with more brands of choice.

Our Goal:
- more student discount
- more choice of brand on the PC laptop program

What we have been doing:
We did the research on price comparing in different stores, and right now we have been distributing surveys among student bodies.
After this, we will be examing at the survey and write a porposal the person who is in charge.

Please feel free to give us some feed back on the following question:
- what do you think about this idea?
- do you think we can do it?
- any other suggestions?

Thank you for your time.

This Blog is our Blood and Guts

The postings on this blog are the most powerful proof we have.
The more posts and comments we get, the more we have to show to the higher-ups.
More voices, gives us more momentum, for more change!

So feel free to post any comments you have on the green issue at OCAD, as well as your own ideas and/or plans that you feel are important to the cause.

Make like a lamp and, POST! (a comment)

Hi, there!

This blog is hosted by the students of Prof. Martha Ladly's 2nd Year "Creative Think-Tank" class at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

We are working to realize a series of BIG IDEAS: simple ideas that will challenge the status quo, and make the College a more sustainable, healthier, better place to work, create and study. And we want your help to make them happen...

Here's one of our ideas:

We want to convince the OCAD Administration to create green plantings throughout the College, and to install a green roof on at least one of the College buildings.

INSIDE THE COLLEGE
Plants release valuable oxygen into the atmosphere, and help absorb and filter pollutants. The OCAD Campus is occupied for long hours a day by students who are over-worked and stressed, and who use a wide range of solvents and other harmful materials.

Green plantings throughout our Campus will improve AND beautify our studio environment. Who needs good air in our work/study space? We do!!

OUTSIDE THE COLLEGE
More and more schools, businesses and governments are including planted "green" roofs in the design of their new buildings and the renovation of existing ones.

Not only does a planted roof add valuable green space to the community, it also:

- reflects sunlight, cooling the building & surroundings in summer
- adds insulation, warming the building in winter
- retains rainwater & snow, reducing load on the City water system
- protects the building's roof & lengthens its lifespan

To plant the roofs of all the OCAD buildings is a pricey proposition, one that the College found too expensive for the new Sharp Centre building. But what about a small pilot project, on the original OCAD building at 100 McCaul?

We want to hear what you think about this "big.idea @ ocad":

- Do you support it?
- Where would you like to see plantings?
- What would YOU change to make OCAD more sustainable?

At the end of term, we will present this blog and all your comments to OCAD Administrators, as part of a Class Submission designed to convince them to make a greener, healthier Campus for everyone that studies and works at OCAD.

Let us know what you think! Comment on our posts, let the Administration that you want a "green", healthy College!