Selected works _ Part 1 by Yuwan Sun

YUWAN SUN Selected Works

UBTECH Robotics Headquarters Office Building UBTECH Robotics Corp. is a company integrating R&D, manufacturing and sales of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots. It was established in 2012. In 2016, UBTECH began to enter the track of artificial intelligence education. With its success in financing and the development needs, UBTECH decided to set up its headquarters in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China. In 2019, bKL Architecture LLC won the competition

of the site master planning, and the competition of UBTECH Robotics Headquarters office building which is one of the four buildings in the site.

Background

A Biophilic Architecture Project Location: Shenzhen, China Height: 212 meters Area: 71,360 square meters Year of Design: 2018-2019 Construction: expect to be completed in 2024 Skills: Revit, InDesign, Photoshop, AutoCAD

My role with the bKL team was architectural designer and design development. I contributed conceptual design, diagrammatic research, design research, floor plan development, and preliminary drawings; as associate I worked on the project marketing campaign(writings, case study book, and social media kits) from 2020 to 2023. It was a great opportunity to practice biophilic design into a tall office building. How might we bring nature into the building, to improve comfort, and create a more productive, better work environment for people? The inclusion of nature elements sun light, water and plants throughout the building, connects human’s intrinsic need for affiliation with nature. Design by bKL Architecture LLC, with Jon Gately(Principal), Phil Tu(Associate Director), Philip Shin(Associate), Jamia Smith(Architectural designer)

Biophilic design overview: The design of the UBTECH Headquarters is rooted in the harmonious integration of technology and nature. The building’s 212-meter height contains an innovative display of structure, mass, and vastly expansive sky gardens. Filling the building with nature, the grand and expressive gardens allow all floors of a mixed-use office building to have an interactive experience with nature, ultimately inspires the users of the building uniquely.

Sketches by Jon Gately (Principal)

Diagram analysis:

How might we bring nature into the building, to improve comfort, and create a more productive, better work environment for people? The inclusion of nature elements sun light, water and plants throughout the building, connects human’s intrinsic need for affiliation with nature.

We were given a simple directive for the building: The UBTECH chairman requested that every person on every floor of the company have a connection to nature. This was accomplished through two interrelated design decisions: creating the series of vertical sky gardens and splitting the building’s core into two distinct elements. Relegating the vertical building cores to the northwest and southeast corners of the building opened the center of each floor for offices that overlook the sky gardens at the corners of the structure.

Project concept: The tower is a simple extruded square, 45.2-meters (about 148-feet) on each side by 212-meters (695.5-feet) tall. The whole building is a clear response to the client’s program, and their desire to provide green spaces for the people who work there. Multi-story sky gardens are located on floors 16, 22, 28, 34, and 40 with the structural bracing dramatically revealing the full vertical extent of each. The curtain wall is set back several feet around the entire tower at each sky garden level, revealing a single story of the framing to create a narrow continuous exterior balcony. This formal gesture develops a rhythmic articulation of the envelope with five story “cubes” of glass stacked atop one another, creating a contemporary version of the stringcourse, a traditional architectural element that has been used to manipulate the perception of building’s heights for centuries.

The building entrance is open, with the building sitting on piers at each corner. A five-story-tall podium structure slides beneath the northwest corner, with the building’s lobby suspended 9.9 meters (about 32.5) feet above the plaza.

Plan study diagrams:

Sky gardens: In developing the sky garden’s individual qualities, bKL looked to traditional Chinese culture. The road on the north edge of the site references the eight immortals, an important presence in Chinese life that establishes the virtues of life. We conceptualized each garden to take on a different quality that references the immortals. The eight gardens located throughout the building are designated as follows: The Garden of Zhong, representing prosperity and happiness; The Garden of Li, representing leadership and strength; the garden of Zhang, representing relaxation and balance; the Garden of He, representing water and poetry; the Garden of Lye, representing research and learning; the Garden of Lan, representing flower and blue tone; the Garden of Han, representing fine art and music; and the Garden of Cao, representing intelligence and harmony. The corner sky gardens are located on the 16th, 22nd, 28th, and 34th floors. The large sky garden on the 40th floor principally faces east.

Sky gardens analysis:

Curtain walls:

The operable ceramic terra cotta fins that surround the building’s envelope demonstrate bKL’s sophisticated approach to the blend of nature and technology throughout UBTECH’s headquarters. While the glass curtain wall and six-story-high steel cross bracing accentuate the building’s larger presence within the urban landscape, the scale, texture, and materiality of the fins make the building’s surface more legible at the scale of the person. While terra cotta is one of the oldest building materials, employing ceramic finishes at this scale is more closely related to aerospace technologies that require precision surfacing on aerodynamically derived forms. As passive elements, the fins provide substantial sun shading for the building’s envelope; their operation allows for fine tuning throughout the day and year to achieve high performance energy efficiency. Adding water collection capabilities within the fins adds another sustainable dimension to the building, allowing for the irrigation of the sky gardens via passive rain water means.

Sketches by Jon Gately (Principal)

3D renderings:

Construction photo:

July 2023, Photographer: Duoduo studio

601 N Central Phoenix Mixed-use Project

Background

My role as associate in this project was construction drawings: • The two amenity decks 8th floor and 28th floor • Egress drawings: seven stairs, plans and details • Elevation drawings • Section drawings • Slab edges • Parking floors • Site plan, typical floor plans • Kitchen and bath sheets • Sheets clean up and other details Tasks directed under Srdjan Avram(Director) and Debbie Saad (Associate Director).

This is a corporation mixed-use project developed by LG Group, designed by bKL Architecture LLC at 2022 and 2023. Currently under construction, it is located at the heart of downtown Phoenix, with a total area of 1,306,935 SF, 747-unit project, and a wide range of indoor and outdoor amenity spaces inclusive of two large decks located on the 8th and 28th floors.

Design by bKL Architecture LLC, with the whole team Jon Gately(Principal), Michael Karlovitz(Director), Srdjan Avram(Director), Debbie Saad(Associate Director), Paul Schroeckenstein(Associate Director), Olivia Kempf(Associate Director), Ruxandra Antea(Associate Director), Veronika Bakalova(Associate Director), Ann Erskine(Associate), Antonia Ramos Muniz(Associate), Karolina Jeuk(Associate), Lina Ditchev(Architectural designer).

Construction drawings: floor plans

Construction drawings: Egress

Construction drawings: Elevation

Nutrition facts for the modern grocery shopper Amazon is using technology to disrupt the grocery

store market, both online and in-store, Amazon GO is radically transforming the grocery shopping experience as well as the habits of modern shoppers. How can we bring a new intelligence about nutritional facts to Amazon’s ecosystem that will enable customers to have a more conscious relationship with food?

Background

This is a research project at IIT Institute of Design in spring 2019. I worked with the IIT Institute of Food Safety and Health (IFSH) to design the Nutrition Label 2.0 as an evolved version of the Food and Drug Administration's food nutrition label. Food labels help consumers learn more about the ingredients in a product, and how they can fit the food into their diet. Chronic diseases like diabetes require specific diets. On March 2018, The American Diabetes Association estimated that diagnosed diabetes costs America $327 billion in 2017. How might we come up with an implementable product or service as appropriate solutions. Will be able to respond to today’s social, technology and culture need?

Special thanks to the whole team IIT Institute of Design Students: Laurel Komos, Yuan Feng, Luciano Annes Nunes IIT Institute of Design Associate Professor: Anijo Punnen Mathew

Overview:

All of the food we eat needs to come from somewhere… a restaurant, your grandma’s house, or a grocery store. Americans purchase over 80% of their food from a traditional supermarket or grocery store, so we decided to focus on designing interventions for consumers while shopping since that is where a

vast majority of decisions about nutrition are made. We had the hypothesis that if unhealthy or non-nutritious food never gets into your house, then you won’t eat as much of it. Problem statement:

How might we leverage the grocery shopping experience to help people make more conscious nutritious choices? ...and how might we help people follow through with these choices?

Phase 1: Secondary research

Key findings from secondary research

Full-service stores Communities with full-service grocery stores tend to eat more fruits and vegetables and tend to have a lower risk of obesity. However, low-income and rural neighborhoods often face limited access to full-service grocery stores. Personalized nutrition This is “about the consumer of the future, that has more data available and wants to use this to their advantage. We think this consumer will desire more bespoke products and services.” Negative focus Mandatory labels may include negative aspects of foods, but voluntary labels will not. Apps are usually short of verification. The consumers are actively looking for brands that tell a sustainable story. The future interaction Five primary strategic underpinnings are central to change and are no longer considered trends: tech, convenience, experience, fresh food and local. Future grocery design will be significantly affected by technical advances like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.

Phase 2: Primary research

We focused on speaking with urban millennials, ages 23–35, who purchase their food regularly at various types of grocery stores. These stores included traditional supermarkets, ethnic specialty stores (like Indian shop, City Spice Market, and Korean supermarket, H-Mart), farmers’ markets, and even online services like Instacart. We conducted one-on-one interviews with them, observed them while they shopped, and had them send us updates and photographs as they shopped in stores nationwide. On top of this, we did an incredibly thorough scan of secondary literature in an attempt to understand the nature of the problem as well as the current “competitive landscape.”

Observations conducted at grocery stores

Shoppers followed during grocery trips

Interviews conducted with “experts”

Interviews conducted with urban millennials

Individuals responded to our “cultural probe”

Out of all that research, we came to the following 6 key insights:

People “know” what is categorically healthy vs. unhealthy, but there is a significant grey area in the middle of that spectrum and many of our assumptions about what falls into these categories are based on long-held orthodoxies.

3 Unhealthy or “Bad” (e.g. processed foods, candy, soda, greasy foods)

Healthy or “Good” (e.g. fresh produce, lean meats, whole grains)

People only look at labels for new products or brands, not the ones they buy regularly. As a result, they will never know if nutrition facts change due to alterations in product recipe or new labeling policies.

When people look at nutrition labels, they only look at the 1–2 key elements they understand as being “bad,” like saturated fat, sugar, or calories. They rarely look for “good” or pronutritious ingredients, and also do not understand the “good” ingredients as much, either.

There is a disconnect between planning, moment(s) of purchase, moment(s) of consumption, and eventual feedback. The “modes” we are in during shopping do not equal those we are experiencing as we eat or prepare the food we previously purchased.

6 Purchase

Consumption

disconnection

Feedback

disconnection

In our very connected world, “time shrinkage” is a perceptual reality for most people. This leads them to make tradeoffs in the form of convenient choices, which are typically seen as incompatible with nutritious choices.

Most people’s motivation for making nutritious choices comes from external, superficial, or temporary factors, such as losing weight for that perfect “bikini body” or getting an energy boost to get through a late night of studying.

From insights to design principles:

How might we leverage the grocery shopping experience to help people make more conscious nutritious choices?

& how might we help people follow-through on these choices?

Phase 3: Ideation and Synthesis

With the design principle in mind, we began to ideate on potential solutions through sketches and storytelling by 5E framework (Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend).

Based on the ideas from 5E framework, we selected 2 or 3 ideas to developing a new idea based on that.

Phase 4: Prototype

Card sorting

Card Sorting

Organizing ideas into actionable features, we used card sorting to summarize the features we developed from 5E. The whole flow is a huge scope to dig into, to clear our mind and be able to focus on our core features/experiences, we mapped out the story flow which tied the user goals, actionable features, and scenes that we want to show in the further prototype.

Story flow

Then we created Screen Prototypes to quick test the core experience and work on the confusing elements.

Setting goals

Selecting the meals

Adding ingredients into the shopping list

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Navigating in-store

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After several rounds of critique on the screen wireframes, we then moved on to create the mocks up of the screens building on the solutions, which we named inBalance, empowered by Amazon and Whole Foods; we started defining the value proposition of inBalance, building the scenes to show the interactions in different scenarios.

Solution

inBalance, a program that makes it simple to plan and shop for well-balanced, nutritious foods. By combining our robust Amazon-enabled database with real-time, tech-driven updates about your in-store shopping habits, we are able to

give you up-to-the-second nutrition information about the purchasing decisions you are making and nudge you toward options that balance your basket. This very same database allows us to help you plan your meals ahead of time, scan hundreds of Amazon crowdsourced recipes recommended for your needs, and consider the needs of others in your household or social circles for whom you need to shop.

Scene 1

“It’s Sunday—I need to plan this week’s meals and go grocery shopping.” On Sunday morning, Yuan receives a message from inBalance reminding her that it’s her usual grocery shopping day and asks her to update her list for the week. Along with this message, she receives a $2 off coupon for salmon because inBalance knows that she has been low on her Omega-3 intake lately. Yuan has been learning quite a bit about the importance of eating a balanced diet in her Multidisciplinary Prototyping class this semester, so she decides she wants to set a goal for herself to be more well-rounded with the foods she eats and gain weight. Immediately after setting this goal in the app, inBalance recommends Yuan a slew of recipes that she might want to consider for her meal prep this week. In order to take advantage of her

coupon and balance out her Omega-3s as suggested, Yuan selects one with salmon and adds all of the items in the recipe to her list. After adding a few other items, she’s ready to head to the store! RESEARCH SUPPORT ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTS Most people write shopping lists in order to feel prepared when they go into a grocery store. Lists help guide people toward purchasing all of the necessary ingredients for a planned recipe as well as keep them on track toward their goals... by feeling less tempted by other items not on their list. ON MANAGING ONE’S OWN DIET The people we spoke with all have their own dietary needs and/or goals—whether it is to fit in a wedding dress, stay awake to study for a test, or to manage their chronic health conditions. They are all at varying levels of “mastery” over their diet but all agreed that they could use additional guidance in order to make the best food choices for them.

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Scene 2

“I just arrived at my local Whole Foods. I hope to get in and out quickly.” Before leaving home to head to Whole Foods, Yuan receives a notification that her usual location—the store on Roosevelt—is extremely crowded at this time. Instead, the app encourages her to go to the West Loop location on Halsted to beat the rush. Since inBalance knows that Yuan is now going to a different Whole Foods location than usual, the app automatically organizes her list in order according to how she can most easily navigate the store and gives her the option to view a map with all of her items marked on it. Using data from the Amazon and Whole Foods systems, it also knows what is out of stock at this new location and—if necessary—can adjust her list with new recommendations accordingly. Upon arrival, Yuan taps her phone—which is already open to the inBalance app—on the sensors at the entrance, then walks into the store. The sensors above her will track her journey and unlock many of the inBalance features. RESEARCH SUPPORT ON CONVENIENCE Almost all of the millennials we talked to made a reference to convenience during our conversations. In their increasingly “busy” and connected lives, people are always looking for ways that technology can help guide and simplify. Millennials are looking for the same convenience when it comes to food—both with shopping for it and with preparing it. ON TECHNOLOGY Increasing numbers of grocery stores and startups are bringing technology to the forefront when it comes to food purchase and consumption. Some examples include: Kroger’s new partnership with Microsoft, personalized nutrition startup Habit, Alexaenabled cooking startup Pepper, and of course the new Amazon Go store model.

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Scene 3

“It is so tough to determine what a ‘balanced diet’ looks like for me.” Following the list in her inBalance app, Yuan comes across the salmon in the seafood section. She grabs a package and adds it to her cart. Almost instantly, the salmon moves from the “list” portion of her app to the “in cart” portion, and her inBalance score updates to account for the nutritional qualities of the salmon: her score for Omega-3s increases, her calorie score balances out, and her score for fiber decreases. She also can click to see more about salmon’s nutritional qualities, which is a bonus because fresh food usually does not come with a label. The inBalance score shows how the nutritional value of the items in her cart compares to what she needs in order to achieve her preset goals. It isn’t intended to be a judgmental feature, but rather, one that guides Yuan to be more balanced with her choices. Her goal is to earn the same score for each category—Calories, Vitamin C, Saturated Fats, Iron, etc.—to prove that these categories are all appropriately balanced for her.

RESEARCH SUPPORT ON READING NUTRITION FACTS A vast majority of respondents during our research only check nutrition facts for new items that they have never purchased before. When they do look at nutrition facts for an item, they primarily look at the 1–2 key elements on the label that they understand as being “bad for you” (e.g. calories or fat) and have more of an avoidant mentality than a proactively positive one that looks at vitamins, etc. ON PERSONAL VIEWS OF NUTRITION Every person defines views their nutrition differently. For most others, the idea of nutrition is painted in broad strokes, without a clear understanding of the wide variety of individual nutrients and how they each affect your body in different ways.

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Scene 4

“I’m often tempted by other, less healthy, items that I find in the store.” Yuan ate the last of her favorite cereal this morning for breakfast, so she made sure to tell her Alexa to add cereal to her inBalance list before leaving her home. When she gets to the cereal aisle, she picks up her usual, Honey Nut Cheerios, and adds it to her cart. Immediately, inBalance buzzes to let her know that it has an alternative recommendation for her—a recommendation that will help her keep her diet better balanced for the week. Yuan is then able to scroll through a set of alternatives that better meet her needs. Each option shows her how it recalibrates her inBalance store so she can make an informed and educated choice about which one to purchase instead. Because Whole Foods and Amazon do not want these features to be perceived as a “rip-off” trying to scam customers by getting them to purchase more expensive foods through their nudges, they have promised a “price match,” so Yuan gets the newly chosen box of regular Cheerios at the same price, guaranteed.

RESEARCH SUPPORT ON TEMPTATION No matter how much they stated that they want to eat healthier, everyone we talked to admitted that they frequently give into temptations during their grocery shopping trips. Even if they intend for their cart to be filled with fresh produce and lean meats, the occasional ice cream pint will slip in too—often the fault of “dreamlike” grocery store layouts and conspicuous product placement. ON NUDGING A key tenet of behavioral economics, the nudge is a designed intervention intended to change participant behavior. If done well, nudges can be extremely effective.

Scene 5

“Now I just need to make sure I eat all of this before it goes bad.” Since the sensors overhead have already tracked the items in her cart, Yuan is able to walk out of the store effortlessly! Once Yuan gets back home, she receives a “receipt” with a readout of her final inBalance scores, the recipes she has purchased ingredients for, additional recipes she can make using items that are now found in her home, and even some recommendations for what she should buy during her next grocery trip to keep her diet wellrounded. Once it’s time to cook, Yuan can ask Alexa to pull up the recipes she has selected. Using the connected devices in her home—such as her smart fridge plug-in or the new Alexa-connected microwave, inBalance knows when Yuan is not eating the items she has previously purchased. As such, it can send her a nudge to prepare and eat them before they expire, and reminds her of the goal she set a few days prior. This feature can help her connect her purchase mentality to her consumption experience in the present moment.

RESEARCH SUPPORT ON FOLLOWING UP Many respondents mentioned how many items—especially fresh produce, meats, or seafood—in their kitchens go to waste because they either forget about them or are unable to make them in time. With high grocery costs and awareness about food waste rapidly increasing, a successful solution would seek to reduce this level of financial and physical waste as much as possible. ON PERSONALIZED NUTRITION This new movement focuses on individuals understanding their own specific nutritional needs—for example, one person might need more iron intake than another—and then proactively taking steps to meet those needs.