The Netherlands – Lucas de Ruiter’s conceptual project, Bathing in the Cloud, imagines the excess thermal energy generated by data centres as a sustainable heat source for a spa.
The Design Academy Eindhoven graduate’s project explores how the thermal output of a data centre could be used to warm a bathhouse, with the concept’s aesthetics inspired by the Cloud. To this end, De Ruiter uses thermal imaging to show the vast amount of heat generated in the data centre building. Other photo techniques including photogrammetry, computational fluid dynamics and digital photography also depict other aspects of a data centre's inner workings.
Bathing in the Cloud aims to ‘demystify the invisible world of the data centre’, bringing light to the real ramifications of using the Cloud, and hopes to provide an environmentally conscious use for the ‘massive amounts of heat’ generated with the design of the spa.
The rise in Sustainable Data Centres is a direct response to the growing awareness of technology’s impact on the planet.
