This week you may have noticed a slight change to our name: Lucid Design Group is now “Lucid”. After nearly seven years as Lucid Design Group, we’ve decided to reconfigure our brand in a way that reflects our ongoing and evolving work at the forefront of building operations, energy efficiency and occupant behavior change.
When Lucid began to conceive of “Building Dashboard”, our small team of green building specialists, educators, engineers and artists created data monitoring and display systems from scratch. In other words, we were a firm that designed systems in the absence of sophisticated data acquisition software, extensive libraries of intuitive graphics or social networking tools. Hence, “Lucid Design Group” befitted our modest start-up enterprise.
Lots of other things were quite different in 2004, the year Lucid had incorporated. At that time all of Lucid’s customers were institutional frontrunners in the green building movement. “Real-time feedback” and “behavior change” weren’t part of the building industry’s vocabulary. U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system was just starting to gain a strong national following. In the same year, a new company called Facebook was popularizing the concept of social networking on college and university campuses.
For all that has changed, much has remained the same at Lucid. Today, award-winning design continues to be one of Lucid’s hallmarks. As the behavior change field matures from a previously obscure specialty to a centerpiece of smart building operations, members of our team remain its thought leaders. With the addition of psychologist research collaborators, our team today possesses an unparalleled diversity of knowledge, relationships and technical expertise.
As you can imagine, “Lucid” was a logical adaptation of our old company name. For this reason we’re excited that our new name continues to be descriptive of the objectives we aim to achieve with our software products, including making energy and water use visible, actionable and understandable to non-technical audiences.
We can only dream of what the distant future holds for the commercial building industry and high-performance green building, but we nevertheless expect to be there as it unfolds. As our team continues to develop new products and approaches for delivering real-time feedback, we are charting a course in which every commercial building will have a dashboard and all constituents and stakeholders will have the information they need to make smart resource use decisions.
A quote by anthropologist Margaret Mead hangs on the wall in our office:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Although we contemplate that message humbly, we’ve always believed that the work carried out by our small group of committed Lucid employees is capable of changing the world.
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