Aurelia participating in Autodesk’s Make It Resilient program
Pavilion Tinkercad design serving as a starter model for high schoolers in creating habitats for harsh environments
The TESSERAE Pavilion’s truncated icosahedron design provides a model for students to use in imagining their own habitats for extreme environments.
Autodesk's annual Make It Real program is a creative competition that encourages high school students to learn and use the design thinking, tools, and problem-solving needed to take on real challenges in construction and the built environment.
This year’s Make It Resilient theme challenges young people (ages 13-21) to design a habitat for an extreme environment. Whether tropical rainforest or lunar surface, Arctic tundra or Martian plateau, construction projects in the near and distant future will need to consider harsh climate and extreme weather conditions. Autodesk’s prompt asks: “What if extreme environment habitats embraced their unique surroundings to enhance human wellbeing?”
Aurelia Institute has provided a starter model for contest participants to build their designs on. Available in Autodesk Tinkercad and Autodesk Fusion, the 3D model is based on our TESSERAE Pavilion: an interactive exhibition designed to showcase our human-scale TESSERAE space habitat prototype.
As a resident team in the Autodesk Technology Centers Outsight Network, Aurelia Institute has been building and iterating on Pavilion since 2022.
“We are delighted to support students and the next generation of extreme environments design through the Make it Real campaign,” Ariel Ekblaw told the Autodesk team. “Working with the Autodesk team and tools at the Boston Tech Center has profoundly empowered our own work, as we prepare to deploy novel space habitat technology, and we are honored to have the chance to pay this forward and inspire young engineers.”
Contest details
Make It Resilient 2024 is now open, and the deadline to submit is June 24, 2024.
Judges for the contest will include representatives from the National Society of Black Engineers, Nox Innovations, The PENTA Building Group, Aurelia Institute, and Autodesk Research. Entries will be judged based on the following criteria: 3D digital literacy and design; engineering mindset; real-world relevance; and presentation. One $10,000 grand prize in each of the two following categories will be given away: “Best use of CAD (Computer Aided Design) or BIM (Building Information Modeling) tools” and “Best physical prototype.” Additional prizes include: $5,000 First Prizes (4); $1,000 Second Prizes (10); and $50 gift cards for Runners-Up (20).