Living in a dormitory that is friendly to the environment and has a high-tech media room is no longer a dream at Duke.
The Duke Smart Home Program, an organization affiliated with the Pratt School of Engineering, hopes to unveil the Home Depot Smart Home in November.
Located behind the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, the house is a miniature version of a futuristic dorm and serves as a live-in laboratory where some projects engineered by students will be implemented, said junior Scott Steinberg, construction manager of Smart Home.
The house features a media room and full laboratory benches in each bedroom along with regular amenities, such as a laundry room and a computer cluster.
Ten undergraduate students have been selected through an application process to live in the house next semester.
"Our goal is to stray away from the museum aspect and embrace the new technology by having students actually live there," Steinberg said.
"It's great that people are excited about being a part of new innovative projects that will help us solve our energy-crisis problems," said senior Jeff Schwane, vice president of Smart Home.
The house also has a roof garden-called a "green roof"-that contains an assortment of flowers and moss, which will keep the roof cool.
"The green roof also acts to minimize the footprint of construction," Steinberg said. "Looking down from the sky the house isn't a concrete slab that takes away natural greenness."
Other environmentally-friendly features of the Smart Home include a rainwater-harvesting system that will collect water that hits the roof, treat the water and distribute it throughout the house, as well as solar panels that will heat the water to minimize energy expenditure.
"We've thought a lot about the details of the house," Steinberg said. "The wind generally comes from the south, so we've placed windows and doors such that a natural flow of air would be generated throughout the house when the windows are open on the first floor."
Smart Home as an organization has a variety of other project teams that aim to improve the quality of life for people.
The Duke Smarter Living Competition, which funds student team projects, is hosted by Smart Home and will announce winners Friday for the upcoming semester.
"Our theme is smarter living and improving the quality of life for people," said junior Tim Gu, president of Smart Home.
The organization is seeking to expand the number of professors with relevant research.
"We want to be a hub for research and industrial innovation," Gu said. "We are interested in products that either students invent or companies want us to test."
Some projects include voice recognition and control systems, where mundane tasks are automated in people's lives, he added.
"We have a project called Wisdom Door [that] aims to create a system for a house to detect who you are when you walk in the door and maybe work with the control system to turn on the air conditioner to the temperature you want," Gu said.
The organization currently has 60 active members and has grown larger every semester.
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