GE funds UK LED-lighting design competition
Students across the UK invited to submit LED-lighting proposals for city regeneration
General Electric (GE) is funding a UK-wide Intelligent Community Challenge (ICC), inviting British students from architecture, design, engineering and computer science to generate innovative ideas using intelligent LED lighting for council regeneration schemes.
The competition aims to bring local authorities and universities together, looking for innovative ideas and collaborations that will improve urban areas. The winning prize will be a ten day global learning tour of GE Lighting's new Software Centre of Excellence in San Ramon, California. The runner-up is offered work experience with Citi Logik, the UK mobile analytics company.
The Intelligent Community Challenge, backed by London Councils and Urban Design London, hosted by Transport for London, invites students to submit design proposals for projects from across the UK including London (Bromley, Camden, Enfield, Royal Borough of Greenwich and others), Glasgow, Birmingham, Coventry, Peterborough. Students must submit applications to IntelCommChallenge@newmedia2dot0.co.uk by November 14. An independent panel of judges will select the winner and runner-up to be announced at an Awards Ceremony on November 20.
Zoltan Koltai GE's Lighting EMEA technology director, EMEA said: "We are looking for ideas to help us identify how future cities can become more intelligent using lighting technology. Our mission is to find students who understand the challenges of urban design and can translate this into a technical solution with their specific knowledge, capabilities and skills."
Bromley Council's transport and major projects manager Chris Cole, has received £100,000 from TFL's Incubator Fund to solve the area's traffic problems and is thinking about dynamic road markings generated through light. He said: "I need technical advice and innovative thinking from the student with the right expertise for my project, to use light instead of paint for road markings. So if I detected that traffic would be very dense, I could create additional road capacity anytime simply by changing the road markings and without expensive road building. I can figure out safety as a transport planner but need help to make the lighting work in a cost-effective and practical way."
Alexander Baldwin-Smith Graduate Transport Planner added: "If we could change markings, a company could reserve a loading bay, say for 30 minutes, which then merges into the road again. Likewise with emergency service vehicles. But we need to get the technological aspect right to begin with."
