For my capstone engineering project, my five teammates and I designed and began building a mobile, tiny house-style, super-insulated, off-grid research station for ecology research in the Second College Grant, a tract of forested land managed by Dartmouth in northern New Hampshire.

When we received the project, the building looked like this:

We conducted multiple user interviews with ecologists who work in the Grant about what they would want in a space, and designed the interior and exterior based off what they told us. Through these interviews, we also discovered that the ecologists would only use the space from spring to fall, since they don’t do field research in the Grant in the winter. We decided that, rather than let it sit empty and unused for 3 months of the year, we would instead make it a Living Lab, by including temperature and humidity probes in the building and monitoring the electricity produced and used by the building, and making the data available online for future students to analyze and use. The Lab will be driven back to Hanover each winter, where it will serve as an example of sustainable design and an educational resource for students and faculty, who can alter the building and perform experiments on it.

My roles in the team were many. I was on the sub-team that performed energy modeling of the building, which I did in Excel, to help determine the optimal insulation levels and window placements, and the best heating system. I was also on the Green Building sub-team, which helped determine our green building goals and which materials we would use to be Red List-free, and calculated the building’s embodied carbon. Before construction, I performed a blower door test on the building, and found that it was extremely leaky, and because of my previous experience in the industry, I was the team’s resident building envelope expert. Finally, once construction started, I was the Safety Manager for the team, and, as we all did, completed multiple construction shifts each week. I also contributed to the website content, and conceived of and sent out a weekly email update to all of the stakeholders who were involved in our project.

Unfortunately, due to a few setbacks from campus COVID policy, we weren’t able to finish the building, though we did bring it from a stick frame to a (nearly fully) insulated, weatherproofed, air-sealed, windowed structure. We then passed off the rest of construction to our faculty advisor’s spring Structural Analysis class. When we finished our portion of construction in March, the Lab looked like this:

For a more comprehensive overview of the project, I recommend checking out the Tiny Research Station website we created.