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To understand how artificial intelligence is starting to shape the built environment, look at the ceiling inside Mt. Hope Elementary School in Lansing, Michigan. There, running across the tops of classrooms and hallways are thousands of feet of exposed metal electrical conduitthe tubing that holds the electrical guts of the building. This tubing runs through the entire school, bringing power exactly where it’s needed. And for the first time in the U.S., this electrical system was designed completely by AI. The AI company Augmenta created the tool that designed the electrical system. It uses a combination of machine learning and a deep background in electrical engineering to streamline the process of wiring up buildings. Augmenta cofounder and CEO Francesco Iorio says that in the growing sea of AI design tools being applied to architecture and construction, few are focusing so specifically on the complex inner workings of buildings. “It is not new that people use generative and artificial intelligence technologies for simple things like floor planning, making sure that the facade looks good, or for shape exploration, massing, and that sort of stuff,” he says. “This is the very first time artificial intelligence designed a piece of critical infrastructure.” While AI has made most of its splash in the digital realm through uses like chatbots and virtual assistants, the technology is also increasingly seen as a new paradigm for the design and construction of buildings. Architects were quick to glom on to AI’s image-creation and design-iteration abilities, and some have even turned AI into the basis for their entire architectural practice. But AI-designed buildings are still off on the horizon. For now, AI tools are bringing automation into more mundane, yet critical, parts of building design. [Photo: courtesy Augmenta] Why AI-designed electrical systems make sense Iorio says AI is an ideal tool to address the haphazard nature of designing electrical systems for buildings. Despite their essential role in making buildings work, electrical systems are often among the last parts of a building to get a detailed design. “Mechanical systems and plumbing systems generally take priority in terms of the space inside buildings,” Iorio says. “Electricians are actually left to last, and essentially have to just figure it out and fit everything they need to fit inside the building.” [Photo: courtesy Augmenta] Augmenta’s generative design tool analyzes the design of the entire building, from its architecture to its mechanical and plumbing systems, and uses those parameters to formulate a more detailed design for the electrical system that complies with building codes. Instead of electricians coming to a building site after the plumbing and mechanical systems have been installed, Augmenta allows the electrical system to be formulated alongside those parts of the building that usually get constructed first. [Photo: courtesy Augmenta] More speed, less waste The tool adds a level of precision to the material side of this work that speeds up construction. With highly detailed measurements of conduit lines, bends in those tubes, and connection points to outlets and breaker boxes throughout the building, Augmenta’s electrical system design can plug directly into automated tools that cut and bend conduit to exact specifications. Iorio says the design of the Mt. Hope Elementary electrical system took only about two-thirds of the time it would have taken to design manually, and also reduced material waste by 15%. “There are really multifaceted advantages that this technology brings to the industry overall. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. Augmenta’s tools are being used to design electrical systems for other large-scale and commercial projects, from hospitals to data centers to manufacturing facilities, but Mt. Hope Elementary is the first project to actually come to completion. “For us, it’s very heartwarming that the first project is a school,” Iorio says. The school has used the electrical system to do more than just keep the lights on. The design called for parts of the electrical conduit and other building systems to remain uncovered by drywall and visible within classrooms. “They are using the systems as a teaching tool,” Iorio says. “It’s showing the kids that this is how a building works.”
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E-Commerce
Alo Yoga is getting into luxury bags, but it doesn’t appear it’s looking to sell many of them. The brand’s first bag collection, unveiled September 9, features responsibly sourced leather and suede designs priced from $2,000 to $3,600. The limited collection features the Voyage Duffel, which Katie Holmes was spotted toting without a pair of Alo leggings or branded hoodie in sight. Other styles include the bowler-shaped Odyssey; the Balance Bucket, which can be worn as a cross-body bag; and the Tranquility Tote. Each comes with an “intention crystal,” a one-of-a-kind crystal that Alo says “carries the resonance of your intentions throughout your day.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by ALO (@alo) Priced like a Prada, this isn’t exactly the type of bag made for holding your sweaty gym clothes and throwing in a locker. It’s meant to push Alo beyond athleisure and into luxury. The collection marks an effort by the brand to level up through a premium offering with limited availability. Throw in a complementary crystal, and you manage to drawn in affluent woo woo Erewhon influencers and MAHA moms. “When it comes to bags, people want to carry something that reflects who they are,” Summer Nacewicz, Alo Yoga’s EVP of marketing and creative, tells Fast Company. “Our customer is incredibly loyal and looks to Alo for products that fit seamlessly into her lifestyle. These bags are built with the same craftsmanship and attention to detail you would expect from heritage houses, but designed with versatility and wellness in mind. At first, some might be surprised to see Alo in this spacebut once they touch and feel the product and experience the quality of the bags, theyll see why it makes sense. This is the future of luxury wellness.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by ALO (@alo) Aside from press images, the bags are, in actuality, both hard to get and hard to see. The collection is on display at just two Alo locations: its SoHo flagship store in New York City, and Beverly Hills flagship store in California. The brand will also display the bags in a showroom during New York Fashion Week. The collection can’t b purchased with a click online, either. Should you be interested, there’s an extra hoop to jump through: To view the collection in person or receive more information through “private client specialists,” the apparel brand requires an email address. This strategy does give Alo some benefit, if not mass sales. It allows the premium athleisure brand to build a mailing list of customers who have money to burn on a pricy luxury bag, while also providing face time with customers and turning the purchase process into an experience. A private company based in Los Angeles, Alo Yoga was valued at $10 billion as part of talks for a deal for development capital in 2023 that was ultimately canceled, according to PitchBook. Founders Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge started the brand in 2007 and named it for the words air, land, and ocean. Though Alo launched with a focus on yoga apparel, the company was perfectly positioned for the pandemic boom in athleisure that helped other activewear and yoga brands grow their customer base. Alo aims to differentiate itself from sportswear competitors like On and Nike by leaning into the luxury market. By building a client base of top spenders for exclusive products and experiences, Alo is also hoping the love of luxe rubs off on the rest of the brand. A couple grand on a bag might be out of reach for most of Alo’s customers, but suddenly $128 leggings don’t seem so expensive.
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E-Commerce
This is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. An odd symbol, made up of three arrows arranged in a triangle, began showing up on plastic containers across America in the fall of 1988. Inside it was a number. The idea to put codes on plastic containers came from the Society of the Plastics Industry. By 1987, Lewis Freeman, the trade bodys head of government affairs, had begun hearing that the fledgling plastics recycling industry was struggling to make sense of the dozens of different types of plastics they were receiving. The plastics had different melting points and other properties, which meant they couldnt just be mixed together for recycling. “Plastics is not really one material; its umpteen materials,” explains Freeman. “While plastics share a similar molecular structure and most are made from oil or natural gas, theyre otherwise quite different from one another.” Before he joined SPI in 1979, Freeman worked as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, fighting Senator Ted Kennedys push to break up big oil companies. At SPI, where he stayed for more than 20 years, Freeman dealt with anything that could pose a reputational risk to the plastics industry. He spent much of his time convincing companies to make changes that would forestall the risk of regulation. When it emerged that dozens of babies each year were dying by drowning in large plastic bucketsat five gallons, the buckets were so heavy that if an infant fell into them, they didnt tip overFreeman was the man who rallied the industry to hand out warning stickers to parents buying the buckets. The companies, he remembers, didnt want to add permanent labels, which made the buckets a few cents more expensive. Eventually, they capitulated when it became apparent their legal liability was enormous. “Companies are essentially all the same regardless of industry,” says Freeman. “They dont like to be told by someone else that they need to do something, period.” A symbol to aid recyclersnot consumers Back in 1987, Freeman took the complaints he was hearing about recycling to SPIs public affairs committee. Since the industry saw recycling as a tool to mitigate reputational damage, the public affairs group, consisting of men from big packaging makers like Owens-Illinois and the American Can Company, was the natural place to discuss it. The dizzying array of plastics on the market was hardly the only issue plaguing recycling. Plastics popularity came down to it being light, cheap, versatile, and robust. But being light and cheap hurt on the other end. Haulers, who were paid by the ton to collect recycling, made far more money filling their trucks with heavier aluminum or cardboard than with lightweight plastic. Things were worse for some plastics than others. Polystyrene foam was economically unviable because it was mostly air. Plastic bags, wraps, and films also had to be collected separately, or they gummed up sorting machinery. Packaging makers preferred virgin over recycled plastic since it was better quality and usually cheaper. If there were no buyers, it didnt matter how technically recyclable something wasit wasnt going to be recycled. Back in the late 1980s, only containers made from PETthe plastic used in single-use drink bottlesand HDPEcommonly used to make milk jugs and detergent containerswere being recycled in any significant volume. (The situation remains the same today.) These plastics werent turned into new soda bottles or milk jugs, but instead downcycled into lower-grade construction material that was just one step removed from the landfill. All the other kinds of plastics went straight to landfills or incinerators, if they werent littered. Slapping a code on the bottom of plastic containers wouldnt fix most of these problems. But at least it would help recyclers know what they were dealing with, Freeman told SPIs public affairs committee. Many plastic resin producers in the room were against the idea. They feared that including a code would encourage consumer goods makers to spurn plastics that werent being recycled. Even the makers of recyclable PET and HDPE containers didnt embrace Freemans proposal. Freeman compares them to the bucket makers who preferred to sit on their hands until they had a legislative gun pointing at their heads. “The bottle manufacturers opposed it because it required them to do something,” he says. Freeman eventually prevailed. He insisted the code was a way to forestall mandatory regulation that could be far more expensive and onerous. For plastics that werent currently being recycled, the code was the first step towards enabling this, he added, since it meant they could be more easily sorted. And so the “resin identification code,” as the industry called it, was created in 1988. While there were dozens of different types and subtypes of plastics, SPIlooking to keep costs and complexity lowgrouped them into seven broad categories, which still stand today. They are: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used for soda and water bottles High-density polyethylene (HDPE), used for milk jugs, detergent containers, and shopping bags Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used for credit cards and pill packs Low-density polyethylene (LDPE), used for disposable gloves, trash bags, and dry-cleaning bags Polypropylene (PP), used for yogurt tubs, takeaway boxes, and butter containers Polystyrene (PS): the solid kind is used to make disposable cutlery and cups, while the expanded kind (EPS) is used for foam egg cartons, meat trays, and fast-food containers Other plastics: a catch-all for remaining plastics including multilayer packages like pet food pouches and ketchup sachets that incorporate different types of plastic, as well as bioplastics “It was a marketing tool” To separate the number from other descriptors used on containers, SPI enclosed it in the chasing arrows symbol. It was a strange choice, one that would cast doubts over the plastics industrys motives for decades to come. Back in 1970, Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California, had seen an enormous wall-sized poster advertising a design competition. Sponsored by Container Corp., a paper packaging maker that was also the largest paper recycler in the U.S., the competition required participants to design a symbol “for the love of earth” to “symbolize the recycling process.” Andersons designfeaturing three arrows twisting and returning into themselveswon. He got a $2,500 tuition grant and a trip to Chicago in September 1970 to attend a press conference at Container Corp.s headquarters. “I was kind of an arrogant little punk student, and I thought the whole thing was kind of silly, actually,” recalls Anderson, who back then sported a goatee and wore his red hairbleached blond by the California sunin curtains parted slightly to the side. Through the 1960s, the paper industrymuch like plastics would laterhad faced mounting criticism about how its disposable products were flowing to landfills. Container Corp. made the new chasing arrows symbol available to the entire paper industry for use on shipping containers and folding cartons, saying it hoped the symbol would spread awareness about the importance of pape recycling. “It was a marketing tool,” explains Anderson. Despite this, in 1988, when the Society of the Plastics Industry decided to use the chasing arrows on plastic containers, its executives insisted the resin identification code was not meant to indicate recyclability. It also said the code was not aimed at consumers. Freeman says SPI chose the chasing arrows to distinguish the numbers from any others that might be found on containers, and that it was only meant to help recyclers sort plastic resins from one another. “It was not an attempt to deceive people that because an item had the code on it, it was recyclable,” he says. But, looking back, Freeman acknowledges that recyclability is exactly what people took the code to mean. “That ended up being the presumption people drewand still draw until this day.” What does “please recycle” really mean? Within a few months of its inception in 1988, the SPI code began catching on across the US. Colgate put it on its bottles for Palmolive and Ajax dishwashing liquids. P&G slapped it on Jif peanut butter jars, bottles of Crisco oil, Tide and Cheer laundry detergent bottles and tubs, and even on its plastic detergent measuring cups. Including the chasing arrows symbol together with the resin identification code on products that couldnt be recycled gave consumers the impression that they could. “They are made from polystyrene,” a P&G executive told reporters about the plastic detergent measuring cups, which he claimed were recyclable. “Thats number 6 on the plastic recycling code.” But local facilities didnt accept the cups, and they were not recycled. By the early 1990s, at the urging of SPI, 39 states had enshrined the code as law on rigid plastic containers. Companies eagerly embraced the law, but also started putting the code on flexible plastic wrappers for everything from pantyhose to Subway sandwiches. Some brands had begun to use the exhortation “Please Recycle” alongside the chasing arrows symbol on plastic products and packaging that couldnt be recycled, claiming this was an educational effort. Surveys showed that the majority of consumers thought that “Please Recycle” meant consumers could recycle those products in all or most communities in the U.S.. “Over time, even companies who initially opposed developing the code grabbed on to it and started putting it on everything,” says Freeman. “Companies decided it was in their interest to look green, and they ran with it. They ran with it until the cows came home.” Excerpted with permission from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri. Published by arrangement with Blink Publishing, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. Copyright 2025 Saabira Chaudhuri.
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