Let Your Voice be Heard

The PAYETTE Young Designer’s Core (YDC) and Building Science Group hosted the first annual PAYETTE Research Voice event, giving individuals the opportunity to present a two minute research pitch to a panel of in-house ‘experts’. The winning pitch received billable time to pursue their research with backing from a team of coaches and other colleagues interested in the topic. 

The theme for this event was inspired by the popular television reality show, ‘The Voice’, where aspiring singers have a public, blind audition in-front of a panel of four coaches. Each coach critiques the artists’ performance and selects the artist with the most potential to be a part of their team.  After a series of vocal challenges, the winner of this competition receives prize money, as well as a record deal that could catapult that artist to stardom.

In our version of the PAYETTE Research Voice, the presenters pitched their topic during our lunch hour in front of our five-person panel and the live studio audience – our PAYETTE staff. The five panelists for the event included Andrea Love (PAYETTE Director of Building Science/Associate Principal), Scott Parker (PAYETTE Associate Principal), Charlie Klee (PAYETTE Principal), Mark Oldham (PAYETTE Associate Principal) and Alejandra Menchaca (PAYETTE Senior Building Scientist/Associate).

In front of a filled Wilson Practice Room, we had six quality proposals presented. After each two minute research pitch, the panelists commented, critiqued and presented questions to the candidates to better understand how the idea could flourish with the help of the Building Science Group.

After careful deliberation, the panelists selected three of the pitches to be supported as an in-house PAYETTE Research project:

Acoustic Mitigation in Research Spaces: Designing hard surfaces with acoustical comfort in mind
Presented by: Parke MacDowell, Gordon Grisinger, Garrett House, Chris Mackey 

Project DNA: Benchmarking of planning and programming efforts to improve our understanding of current and future trends
Presented by: Abigail Klima

Cross-Platform migration: Strategies for optimizing model migrations between a plurality of software platforms
Presented by: Harry Solie

People’s Choice winner was a tie between Acoustic Mitigation in Research Spaces and Cross-Platform Migration. 

We hope to turn the PAYETTE Research Voice into an annual tradition at PAYETTE, giving everyone the chance to break away from their usual everyday tasks to have the opportunity to participate in meaningful research. The knowledge gained from these research projects will not only further develop the skills of the individuals who work on them, but will also continue to progress the field for which we are so passionate.