Spotted: In Sub-Saharan Africa, almost 9 out of 10 children are unable to read and understand simple text by age 10. And, today, the cause of this learning gap is no longer enrolment, which has improved massively since the 1970s. Instead, the issue is the quality of education, with millions of children attending class but not learning effectively. This is often due to poor support for teachers and a lack of effective learning materials.
Edtech startup KAINO tackles this problem with a complete Early Childhood Development (ECD) mobile solution that leverages lesson guides, children’s workbooks, storybooks, and formative assessments that are aligned with a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) blended curriculum. These materials, which are targeted at early childhood education centres and parents, help children to learn how to read and write efficiently and can be delivered through mobile and web apps.
The company’s curriculum encompasses six distinct learning areas which are crafted to foster holistic development in children. A key feature of the organisation’s approach is that it eschews traditional educational paradigms to make learning not only effective but also enjoyable for every child. This includes a focus on encouraging children’s curiosity through hands-on learning that introduces them to technology in the context of their daily lives.
KAINO’s next steps include developing its content and technology integration, as well as completing pilot programmes, cultivating meaningful partnerships, and raising awareness of the company’s offering.
Springwise has spotted many educational tools aiming to help young people, like providing TikTok-style content to help young people understand finance or personalised online learning powered by generative AI.
Spotted: Mixed reality (MR) refers to technologies that create immersive computer-generated environments in which parts of the physical and virtual environment are combined. With potential applications that range from education and engineering to entertainment, the market for MR is forecast to record revenues of just under $25 billion by 2032. Now, in a ground-breaking partnership, Singapore-based company Mediwave is teaming up with Sri Lanka’s 1990 Suwa Seriya to deploy MR and artificial intelligence (AI) to create a fully connected ambulance.
1990 Suwa Seriya is Sri Lanka’s national pre-hospital emergency ambulance service, which boasts response times that surpass even some services in developed countries. The innovative ambulance it has deployed uses Mediwave’s integrated Emergency Response Suite, which combines the latest communications equipment with internet-of-things (IoT) and AR capabilities to enhance the efficiency of the emergency response eco-system.
The connected ambulance ensures swift response times and digitises critical processes, while specialised care can be provided remotely through a Microsoft HoloLens. The technology enables Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) – staff who man ambulances in Sri Lanka – to connect with physicians at the Emergency Command and Control Centre. These physicians help the EMTs provide care during the so-called ‘golden hour’ of medical emergencies – the concept that rapid clinical investigation and care within 60 minutes of a traumatic injury is essential for a positive patient outcome.
In addition to connecting EMTs with doctors, Mediwave’s system also employs an AI-powered transcriber to digitise Electronic Patient Care Records. This minimises human error and reduces delays once the patient reaches the hospital.
Other applications of extended reality in the Springwise library include holograms that are used to train doctors, virtual environments for treating phobias, and an augmented reality contact lens.
Spotted: Many small sustainable businesses offer great products, but lack the tools and resources to tell the full story of their items. In a world filled with products, it is easy for these manufacturers to lose out. German startup Seedtrace has developed a platform that allows food companies to prove their product’s sustainability, as well as manage and communicate their social and environmental impact to consumers.
Seedtrace’s platform includes a supply chain software solution that provides transparency to every stage of a food product’s journey. It also includes tools that allow businesses to then incorporate this transparency information into an online store, or other marketing materials. The cloud-based infrastructure allows high scalability, privacy, and security, allowing users to access their supply chain data ‘whenever and wherever’.
The platform helps small businesses bring transparency into complex supply chains, helping organisations validate their claims by tracing products ‘from seed to shelf’. By helping businesses better manage, prove, and communicate value chain information, Seedtrace enables businesses and consumers to better understand the positive impact of sustainable products. Product transparency is turned into a unique selling point.
On its website, the company describes its product as helping organisations with “customer communication at every stage of the sales process and at all [their] customer touchpoints”. This allows brands to build strong relationships with their customers quickly.
Provable transparency is becoming a vital component in supply chain management, and Springwise has spotted a number of projects focusing on this area. These include everything from a marketplace connects verified buyers and sellers of scrap metal to reduce carbon emissions to digital tags for shellfish that ensure seafood traceability.
Spotted: A large proportion of the world’s arable land is already degraded by the effects of climate change, pollution, and salinisation, and this is set to get worse over time. At the same time, the agricultural industry spends a huge amount of money on fertilisers and other soil treatments. Now, Argentinian startup Puna Bio is developing a novel all-natural solution for improving crop yield using extremophile organisms – microbes evolved to thrive in extreme environments.
Puna co-founder Elisa Bertini scoured locations including Utah’s Great Salt Lake and South America’s high desert, known in Argentina as La Puna, for organisms that thrive in harsh environments like active volcanoes, saline wetlands, and desert soils. The extremophiles that live in these locations have evolved to live with a low amount of nutrients and to optimise the uptake of available nutrients, such as nitrogen or phosphorus, making them very efficient.
The company found that some extremophiles also contain multiple copies of genes that amplify the microbe’s ability to produce nitrogen and phosphorus or grow well under conditions that non-extremophile microbes cannot handle. This, in turn, means that when these microbes are relocated to other soils, even those that have been heavily depleted of nutrients, they thrive. Puna co-founder and CEO Franco Martínez Levis explains it by saying, “What we found is like what happens when an athlete trains at high altitude.”
However, Levis also added that the company doesn’t just collect and sell on the extremophile microbes. They have developed and patented a method for combining these microbes with seed stock. This means that farmers can buy and plant the treated seeds as normal, but also that the extremophiles will not outcompete the existing microbes already present in the soil.
As global warming picks up pace, the race is on to find ways of improving or maintaining agricultural yields without causing further degradation of the environment. Luckily, innovators are coming up with a number of solutions, including a method for turning batteries into fertiliser and a system that can make sustainable biofertiliser on-site.
Spotted: As just about everyone is aware, owning a smartphone is now a necessity. Smartphones are vital not only for communication, but for conducting business, farming, shopping, and banking. Yet new smartphones can be expensive, pushing them out of reach for many. According to some reports, the global average cost of a smartphone is around 26 per cent of the average monthly income, and in some regions, the average person would have to spend over half of their monthly income to buy a smartphone.
South African telecomms company Vodacom is hoping to make smartphones accessible to everyone with their ‘Good as New’ programme. Good as New offers used Apple iphones for sale at a fraction of the cost of a new model. The phones come complete with a standard 12-month warranty, and the devices are approved for resale. The programme involves the refurbishment and recycling of 200,000 phones by 2025, reducing e-waste as well as cost.
Vodacom also plans to expand the number and type of phones it revamps and resells, bringing in additional pre-owned products at lower price points. The company points out that the COVID-19 pandemic forced individuals to find creative ways to continue working and learning, making affordable access to smartphones even more vital. Digital access is also a particularly important issue in South Africa, which has some of the least affordable mobile phone prices in the world.
Smartphones are a lifeline for many – especially those in regions that are poorly served by land-based communications. Springwise has seen some exciting innovations in the use of mobile technology, including an app that lets micro-merchants turn their phone into a point-of-sale system, and a platform that connects smallholder farmers with the marketplace, helping them earn more.
The winners of Architizer’s 3rd Annual One Rendering Challenge have been revealed! Interested in next year’s program? Subscribe to our newsletter for updates.
Sections are integral to understanding any architectural scheme. Whether 2D or 3D, they can give an insight into the varying heights within a model, site conditions, function, material use, light mapping and more. Students and professionals have been experimenting with a variety of styles and techniques to create conceptual and realistic sections to best showcase their proposals. Softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop have also made the task easier, especially when paired with 3D modeling applications and rendering assets.
People creating or inspecting design portfolios now expect drawings that are not only accurate but also have a strong visual appeal. Whether it is a blueprint effect, pop-art palette, x-ray layering or a watercolor effect, every technique contributes something different to the composition. Below is a list of videos that show some different types of sections and how to create them digitally.
Using Photoshop, the above video walks viewers through the different steps of converting a simple line drawing of a section into a rich visual that shows material, depth, light, green cover and more. In addition to the main drawing, there are several smaller steps that can not only apply to sections but can also help enrich other 2D drawings. The tutorial also takes care of less important details that might otherwise be overlooked such as staggering shadows on sloped surfaces and recesses.
The creator has explained how to take a perspective section from SketchUp into a vector drawing on Illustrator to create a minimal black and white render. This is especially helpful to understand how angled sections can be created for structures with irregular forms. Naudet starts with detailed instructions on how to cut a section in a 3D model and add a reference height for human figures as well as faces for shadows on transparent surfaces. The tutorial then moves to Illustrator where we learn how to layer the base image and the shadows and then add humans, manipulate the site and play with line weights.
Street sections are helpful when it comes to showing road widths, tree heights and compound boundaries. The video above shows how to simply and effectively render a cross-section of a road for larger architecture projects, public space designs or urban planning. It starts with a line drawing and builds on it with silhouettes and vector additions of cars and trees along with labels and dimensions.
This video combines the regular view and the hidden line mode and normal mode views in SketchUp to create a conceptual render in Photoshop. There are also tips on how to vary opacity to enhance depth and manipulate line weights, add subtle textures, and correctly use colored lines instead of black for drawings. The technique is an effective way of moving away from traditional sections to more stylistic drawings without compromising on details or accuracy.
More focused on the Photoshop rendering than the original SketchUp model, this lengthy video is a must watch for all looking to create detailed and dramatic section renders. It starts with the basics of masking, introducing textures in perspective and adding noise, before moving into light modifications, building contrast and artistic flourishes. The voiceover is also extremely helpful in understanding the importance of each step and how the different tools and commands work.
This two-part series shows how to build out a landscape section entirely on photoshop. The first video focuses on a basic 2D section with a water body, vegetation and human activity. This is a method that focuses less on accurate site contours and more on the visual impact of the site. However, it is easy to start with a contour diagram from an AutoCAD drawing or SketchUp model and then follow along with the steps as described in the video. The second video shows how to convert the previously created 2D section into a perspective view, again entirely on Photoshop.
There is something very charming about hand-rendered drawings and sketches. However, creating multiple drawings by hand is not only more time-consuming but also can leave less room for modifications. The tutorial above shows a simple way of converting a line drawing imported from any 3D modeling software into a section that appears to be rendered by hand. It uses a variety of brush settings such as size, opacity, spacing and jitter to create realistic shading. While the brushes linked in the description are not available anymore, it might be possible to find similar ones on other websites online.
Paired with a great music selection, this video uses an angled section plane in an axonometric SketchUp view to create a colorful section. The initial part of the video focuses on cleaning up the imported drawing, adding fill to the cut portions and tweaking certain line weights. It shows how adding blocks of color can help differentiate programs and also assist in labeling. The drawing is finished off with painted shadows, tree silhouettes and tags for functions.
A less traditional way of depicting a 3D section is by using a puzzle piece form to cut a section line as opposed to a standard section plane. The video shows how to cut a puzzle piece out of a 3D model in ArchiCAD and clean the model for rendering in Illustrator. The second half focuses on using transparency, adding dotted lines for better understanding, introducing color and more.
The winners of Architizer’s 3rd Annual One Rendering Challenge have been revealed! Interested in next year’s program? Subscribe to our newsletter for updates.
Spotted: As global temperatures continue to rise, the demand for air conditioning is skyrocketing. In fact, according to a recent study, the use of air conditioners is expected to quadruple by 2050. This increased demand will not only strain the world’s energy resources – it will also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. In response, engineers in China and Germany have designed a new type of foam made from wood-based cellulose nanocrystals.
The new foam is lightweight and reflective, meaning it can deflect solar radiation and allow heat to escape. The material is also thermally insulating. In fact, during trials the material reflected 96 per cent of sunlight and emitted over 90 per cent of the infrared radiation absorbed. If widely adopted, this technology could help to reduce the cooling energy needs of buildings by more than a third. As the world looks for ways to mitigate the effects of climate change, this foam has the potential to be a game-changer.
When placed over an aluminum foil-lined box, the researchers found that the material was able to keep the temperature inside the box 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the outside. And when the air was humid, the material kept the inside of the box 13 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. The team estimates that placing the foam on the roof and exterior walls of a building could reduce its cooling costs by up to 30 per cent. So far, the material has only been tested in small spaces. But if it can be scaled up to commercial applications, it could provide a much-needed break for our overburdened air conditioners.
The researchers believe the foam can be adapted to work in a wide range of environments, making it an ideal solution for a variety of applications.
The study also provides an important proof of concept for the use of cellulose-based materials in thermal management, and it is hoped that this technology will eventually lead to significant reductions in energy consumption.
Other recent heating and cooling innovations spotted by Springwise include a smart building management system that heats and cools offices as needed, a smart roof coating for better energy saving, and a window coating that blocks infrared light.
