I’ll admit to having missed class and then regretting it when my final grade popped up on Compass, but very rarely do I regret missing class for its content. One of those few times was this past week, when my roommate ran out of gas near Rantoul and my subsequent rescue mission put me well past the ‘attend class’ time zone. Thankfully, it was my turn to learn about digital fabrication at the FabLab, so attending a workshop later should rid me of my regret. Now onto the cool part – the Deloitte Greenhouse (and I’m not just calling this cool because of my impending employment at Deloitte).

The Greenhouse in Chicago is run by none other than an alum from our College of Business – Nick Murphy. He describes it as a space to break free from the typical restrictions of brainstorming and use the technology present in the lab to come up with solutions to unique business challenges. It is also a lab that studies how disruptive technologies (read AM) will affect today’s businesses. We were briefed on three new technologies at Deloitte’s lab – AM, Augmented Reality and Visual Interpretations of Data. We even had the opportunity to work in teams to solve a mini-case regarding incorporating these technologies into Ameren’s business and ow these could be used to better respond to power outages. It was well worth the seven hours of driving and you should make it there sometime if you haven’t already.