Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech
Jonas Hauptman is Assistant Professor of Industrial Design and Co-Founder of the Bio Design Research Group at Virginia Tech (VT). Over the past 20 years, he has founded multiple award-winning enterprises and design-based businesses that leverage specialized fabrication with novel material approaches.
Since 2017, he has been a fellow to Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity Arts and Technology and Innovation. This helps to support his bio-inspired design research with robotic freeform 3D felting of recycled plastic fiber and his multiple projects to program bamboo, through growth, as well as both additive and subtractive fabrication of composite building and manufacturing systems.
He has won several prestigious awards, including the University of Michigan's Oberdick Fellowship (2004), the AIA Upjohn award (2018), the Arnold W. Brunner Grant (2019), and Center for Craft Creativity & Design Award (2019), as runner-up, the Autodesk ACADIA Emerging Research Award, and others. Hauptman presently serves as the faculty mentor to a significant Student Carbon X-Prize award for a funded project that seeks to transform the global housing deficit into a gigaton carbon warehouse through developing elegant, human-centered bamboo housing.
His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Venice Biennale 2021, and cited in numerous design publications, including Architect, Interni, Metropolis, Dwell, the New York Times, and others.
Designing Carbon-Sinking Bamboo Building Products
Reducing atmospheric carbon is an urgent prerequisite for planet earth to provide moderate temperatures and enough fertile land to accommodate human nourishment and settlement. Yet the current design of building systems, which are largely made from concrete and steel, are responsible for 11% of total global carbon emissions during their material extraction, manufacture, and construction. This problem is expected to double over the next 30 years as the human population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion people, producing a new need for building stocks that are double what they are today.
In this presentation, the design, development, and production of novel bamboo building products will be explored, as an introduction to the role Industrial Designs can play in helping to solve one of humanity’s biggest challenges.
In this session, you will learn:
