Solar Decathlon 2023: Sustainability, Education, and Arts Development Center

The Sustainability, Education, and Arts Development (SEAD) Village is an ongoing, student-led design and build of a village for unhoused youth in Oakland, CA, consisting of 24 residential units and an artist-maker community center. The SEAD Center is this artist-maker community center and acts as a competition entry into the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge 2023, an international collegiate green building competition hosted by the US Department of Energy. In Spring 2022, there were about 50 UC Berkeley students and about 9 University of San Francisco students working on the project, actively supported by faculty and staff at both universities with over 20 industry sponsors. The SEAD Center incorporates a number of innovative and sustainable design practices and technologies, including off-site modular construction, greywater and blackwater treatment, intelligent building controls, passive design, and more. In particular, the construction of the SEAD Center will form the basis for the remaining residential units of the village and is focused as an experiment in scalability. Construction of the SEAD Center begins in August 2022 and ends in February 2023, while the remaining residential units are constructed alongside and afterwards.

The owner and client for the project is Youth Spirit Artworks (YSA), a local interfaith nonprofit that provides job training to underprivileged youth in the Bay Area. As part of their “100 Tiny Homes for Homeless Youth” campaign, YSA built and now operates the world’s first tiny house village for formerly unhoused youth aged 16-25, the Tiny House Empowerment Village (THEV), which is the origin and progenitor for the in-progress SEAD Village. The SEAD Village is thus the second village of YSA’s campaign and plays a crucial role in taking the foundational lessons learned from the THEV and developing a scalable model for addressing youth homelessness in the Bay Area. The most useful foundational elements from the THEV project are: the scope of local community engagement and establishment of organizational credibility, the development of a construction workflow that effectively coordinates heavy involvement of community volunteers, and a precedent in navigating local permitting and other legal processes for the novel building types involved. The SEAD Village now aims to further refine these elements and adds a couple of new directions for exploration and concrete action, primarily focused on scalability and long-term effectiveness: the development of a robust construction supply chain consisting of strategic alliances with industry partners and the establishment of an academic program for exploring the complex network of societal and technical issues surrounding the project.

Several of the SEAD Center’s goals are to:

• Demonstrate the feasibility of the Center’s prefabricated modules for rapid construction and replication across the Bay Area
• Develop of a robust construction supply chain consisting of strategic alliances with industry partners
• Establish of an academic program through SHAC for exploring the complex network of societal and technical issues surrounding the project
• Implement a novel daylighting sensor for indoor lighting simulation and control
• Integrate several new-to-market sustainable water technologies into one system
• Implement and test panelized wall assemblies with a new-to-market stud system
• Develop makerspace-enabled education pedagogies for underprivileged youth
• Test devices and algorithms with the planned on-site set of networked microgrid
• Finish building the Building Management System and implement algorithms for Internet of Things (IoT) devices
• Win the Solar Decathlon