Wind catchers on a cistern near Yazd, Iran, that help to keep the water cool. Photo: birdfarm (flickr)

Part of a Global Envision miniseries about Portland State University's effort to become the "Consumer Reports" of developing-world technology. Read the introduction.

Sometimes, it turns out that the wisdom of the ages is wrong. Portland State University’s Green Building Research Lab is out to tease science from superstition.

Cultures around the globe have adopted unique tricks for coping with the peculiarities of their local environments. But how much of the wisdom behind conventional designs and survival methods is rooted in real science?

That's the question that led PSU researchers to the Persian wind catcher.

Long before the unprecedented heat waves of the last decade, whose increased frequency National Geographic links to climate change, both the Middle East and the American Deep South developed building styles that allow for greater air circulation. The American dogtrot house, recently profiled in an article by The Atlantic, is a bit hard to find since the advent of air conditioning, but Persian wind catchers have been around for several hundred years and still dot the arid landscape around the Persian Gulf. The idea is that open-faced towers on the ends of a building draw in cooler, moving air from high above the ground; the air is pulled through the lower portions of the house and then up and out another tower.

Both the dogtrot house and the wind catcher are culturally accepted ways to beat the heat, but PSU asked: How well do they actually work? They put tiny models of each house into a self-constructed wind tunnel that can measure exactly how—and how well—they work to circulate air. A machine attached to the tunnel creates bubbles that lack an electromagnetic charge, which means that they simply float along on the air currents, providing a seemingly magical way to visually track airflow through the models. Researchers hope they can use the test results to help develop new building designs.

Testing traditional solutions to timeless problems like this one not only tells us something about other cultures; it also shows how old design principles could be melded with current technology to produce more efficient, livable, and sustainable spaces. And if the PSU labs are onto something, maybe your children—or grandchildren—will grow up in a house with a wind catcher.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Assistant Professor Evan Thomas, director of Portland State University's SWEET lab, demonstrates the way that the lab measures the output of two different low-fuel stoves. Photo: Megan McMorran/Mercy Corps

Brilliant ideas don’t always pan out. In the realm of humanitarian development, innovations that fall flat affect more than just investors’ bank accounts.

That's why a small team at an Oregon university has set out to become the testing ground for the world's possibly brilliant humanitarian inventions. This post is the first of a Global Envision series on how they're doing it.

While promising products like self-adjusting eyeglasses or low-fuel stoves generally undergo some sort of lab testing prior to introduction, they often perform differently than expected once they’ve reached their destination due to environmental or cultural differences. Rather than waiting to see results after the fact, Portland State University is working on a grand plan to evaluate magic bullets like these before they hit the developing world.

It's a mission that straddles two separately funded PSU programs. The internationally focused Sustainable Water, Energy, and Environmental Technologies Lab shares a roof with the domestically focused Green Building Research Lab. The latter is stocked with equipment that, as PSU architecture professor Sergio Palleroni put it, "can create any environment on earth, any weather condition." PSU researchers can use the equipment to closely mimic the environmental conditions of the destination country and closely measure products’ performance in all sorts of climatic conditions.

The SWEET lab, meanwhile, focuses specifically on putting low-cost sustainability products through a battery of tests.

"We want to become the Consumer Reports for the developing world," said Palleroni, standing in a lab room devoted to the subject. That means not only ensuring that products function as they should, but also measuring how well they function — and how similar products stack up against one another. Two small, low-fuel, low-emission stoves burned side-by-side when we visited, various sensors measuring their ouput and rate of fuel consumption.

In forthcoming posts in this series, we’ll be exploring a few of the PSU labs’ projects. Stay tuned.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.