ASHRAE Toronto - October 2015 Dinner Meeting and Student Night

High Comfort, Low Impact Design

The built environment is more than the physical building. Modern engineering and design explores all factors affecting the occupant experience – including their variation in time and space. Indoors or outdoors, a climate is continually changing. Engineers and architects must implement truly effective dynamic solutions that work with this natural variability, not against it. While new technologies are constantly being developed and finding innovative applications, we recognize that technology alone is not the answer. As leaders in the building science field, we all must be pioneers in implementing passive design strategies, and pride ourselves in their application in built, significant projects, both large and small.

The product is a process. We ask difficult questions, challenge convention and propose new solutions, and thoroughly test ideas. Each project requires both sharing our knowledge and generating new ideas – ultimately creating unique experiences, but always achieving the same goal: High Comfort, Low Impact.

Krista Palen

Transsolar Inc.
B.Sc Eng, MDesign

Krista is a climate engineer with a passion for design at the intersection of architecture, engineering, computation, and ecology. Krista will discuss Transsolar’s approach including daylight, natural ventilation, solar shading, thermal, and comfort simulation to develop and validate low-energy, architecturally integrated climate/energy concepts for projects. The result of this approach is celebrated projects such as Manitoba Hydro Place that simultaneously enhance human experience and minimize resource use.

Before joining Transsolar Krista worked as a teaching assistant at the Harvard GSD, as researcher with MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab, as a designer with the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Design and as a green building consultant with Halsall Associates in Toronto.