“Our program has come a long way since its early beginnings,” said Micheal Meyering, manager of Housing & Food Services.

“We started our first front-of-the-house compost pilot at the Eleven 01 Café in February 2007. The 70,000-plus members of our campus community are the real winners. They make it happen every day by participating as environmental stewards.”

In addition to waste management, the association also recognized sustainable dining practices in four other operational categories: procurement practices, energy and water conservation, materials and resources, and outreach and education.

New book explores creating, supporting livable communities
What is a livable community? How do you design and develop one? How can government support and nurture the cause of livable communities? A new book co-edited by Fritz Wagner, UW research professor in urban design and planning, studies such questions using case studies from North America, Brazil and the United Kingdom.

"Community Livability: Issues and Approaches to Sustaining the Well-Being of People and Communities," co-edited by Wagner and Roger Caves of San Diego State University, is published by Routledge Press. Wagner, who also has an adjunct appointment in landscape architecture, manages the UW's Northwest Center for Livable Communities.

Using a blend of theory and practice, experts in the field look at evidence from international, state and local perspectives to explore what is meant by the term "livable communities."

Chapters examine the effect and importance of transportation alternatives to the elderly, the significance of walkability as a factor in developing a livable and healthy community, the importance of good open space providing for human activity and health, the importance of coordinated land use and transportation planning, and the relationship between livability and quality of life.

'New Directions' award to UW anthropologist
Danny Hoffman, a UW associate professor of anthropology, is one of 15 faculty members around the country to receive a New Directions Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation this year.

An expert on African warzones and militarization, Hoffman will use the fellowship to study architecture and urban planning through the UW College of Built Environments and in South Africa with scholars of postcolonial cities.

"The U.S. and allied militaries always came at the idea that fighting in cities was the last resort," Hoffman said. "There was little specific thinking of how one would do security in urban environments or what it would mean to fight in an urban environment. That has changed in the last few years."

How cities are put together and how people move through them are now being considered by military thinkers. It has implications for urban military operations, including how a military could isolate parts of a city if a mass pandemic broke out.

In addition to supporting advanced interdisciplinary training for individual scholars, the Mellon Foundation hopes the New Directions program will contribute to the development of interdisciplinary courses and cross-disciplinary teaching collaborations.

Disability, Law, Policy and the Community poster session May 24
Students from the class Disability Law, Policy and the Community will present their research on the effects of various policies on individuals with disabilities in a poster session from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., Thursday, May 24, in the Allen Library Research Commons.

Students from this class in the Law, Societies and Justice Program will present on topics such as the Involuntary Treatment Act, the Community First Choice Act, Shaynan's Law, the Seattle Police Department's Crisis Intervention Team Program, elimination of the death penalty, acquiring accommodations in postsecondary education, standards for Washington state educational interpreters and more. The event is free and open to the public.

Minority Affairs and Diversity hosts undergraduate research conference
More than 70 undergraduate McNair scholars and colleagues representing 14 universities will converge at the UW for a research conference, May 17-19.

Students will present year-long collaborative research in the social science, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and humanities fields at the 20^thannual Pacific Northwest McNair/EIP/GO-MAP Research Conference, held in conjunction with UW's Undergraduate Research Symposium.

The event will feature the work of 32 UW students who are affiliated with the McNair Scholars Program, the Presidential Scholars Program and the Early Identification Program.

Clay Schwenn, adviser in Undergraduate Academic Affairs, wins national award
Clay Schwenn, lead academic counselor for undergraduates, has won an Outstanding Advising Award from the National Academic Advising Association.

According to the nominating letter from Undergraduate Academic Affairs Advising, Schwenn is best known for innovative use of technology in academic advising. In 2007, he won an award from the association for his advising podcasts.

Schwenn also spends significant time supervising peer advisors, 10 undergraduates who help fellow students with quick questions on matters such as registration and course scheduling.

The National Academic Advising Association has approximately 10,000 members in the U.S.

Tower Green Fair May 15 with campus, off-campus groups
The second annual Tower Green Fair, 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 15, will bring UW people and units involved in green initiatives – such as Professional and Continuing Education, Commuter Services and Recycling & Solid Waste – together with local nonprofit groups and businesses that also think green.

The fair, conducted at the UW Tower, is open to the entire campus. Visitors should be sure to bring their UW Husky cards for entrance to the tower.

UW Housing and Food Services and four private vendors will be providing treats to sample. Nonprofit groups that will be represented at the fair are Washington Trails Association, EarthCorps, Seattle Tilth and the Washington Toxics Coalition.

Visitors to the fair can have a Sustainability Passport stamped as they move from table to table to enter a drawing for  green gift baskets and other prizes to be given away.

Visitors? Relatives here for commencement? Check Campus Tours Central
The UW Information and Visitors Center recently launched a new online resource called Campus Tours Central that offers downloadable self-guided tour publications, online tours and tour-guide tips.

"Campus Tours Central provides tools and information so that everyone will have a better campus experience whether they are visiting us online or in-person.  Since groups sometimes need a tour leader, and you may know your area of campus best, we’re providing tips so that you can be better trained to lead a group. We encourage everyone to be a tour leader," said Linda Hanlon, Information and Visitors Center manager.

The UW Office of Admissions Visit Program offers guided campus tours twice a day on weekdays and once on most Saturdays, but throughout the year many campus departments and units may need to lead their own tours, and groups coming to campus are sometimes not able to be matched with a guide through the Admissions Visit Program, Hanlon said.

"With these tools, anyone can be a well-prepared guide. You – yes you – might make an excellent campus tour guide," says Linda Hanlon.

Seth Cooper, chief architect of Foldit, wins national doctoral dissertation award
The Association for Computing Machinery has given recent UW doctoral graduate Seth Cooper its Doctoral Dissertation Award, recognizing the best thesis published in 2011 in the field of computer science.

Cooper's thesis, "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games," explored how computer games could be used to solve difficult scientific problems. He was advised by Zoran Popović, professor of computer science and engineering. Cooper was chief architect of Foldit, a computer game in which players help to solve the structure of proteins that play a role in HIV and other diseases. He is now creative director at the UW's Center for Game Science.

The association will honor Cooper on June 16 in San Francisco.

The film is a finalist in a contest where the top 10 vote getters each receive $10,000 for tree-planting projects from Odwalla Inc.

The Restore the Montlake Cut project would use trees to shade out invasive plants, according to Hillary Burgess, UW graduate student in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and a staff member for UW Grounds Management.

The video is among the 20 posted on the Plant a Tree website. Voting ends May 31.

The video stars Burgess, Teos Bisbee, a UW undergraduate and chair of the outdoor committee for Students Expressing Environmental Dedication, or SEED; Steve Kryszko, a gardener for UW Grounds Management; Lee Harrison-Smith, a local arborist; and Noca, the dog.

It was produced by Jennifer Leach, a UW alumnus of environmental and forest sciences.

Two other Seattle-area projects are also among the finalists.

Students
Justin Hellier, graduate student, public affairs and environmental and forest sciences
Katie Stultz, senior, community, environment and planning

Staff
Dean Pearson, gardener lead, intercollegiate athletics
Storm Hodge, assistant director, housing and food services

Groups
Washington Student Athlete Advisory Council
Patio Display Garden Team, UW Tower Green Team

As part of a just-launched pilot, a number of the existing outdoor garbage and recycling cans on Red Square have been replaced with high-tech, automated kiosks that collect more types of materials. The kiosks will be officially launched during a small ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10:30 a.m., Friday, April 20, during Earth Day festivities.

High-tech kiosks are monitored remotely and compact contents, meaning fewer trips to check and empty them.

News and Information

The new kiosks consist of three containers for sorting waste – composting, recycling and garbage – each of which is equipped with a sensor that regularly measures the mass of material inside. This information is reported wirelessly to UW Recycling & Solid Waste staff. When any of the three containers in a kiosk reaches a preset capacity, the device sends a text message notifying staff that the container is ready to be serviced.

Staff also can run reports based on historic collection information.

“The software records what’s going on with the hardware,” said Jonathan Hempton of BigBelly Solar, the company that supplies this waste collection system. “By logging into the online dashboard, staff are able to see what’s happening on the ground in real-time rather than having to regularly check containers by hand.”

The garbage container also has an automated compactor that increases the amount of garbage space by roughly 500 percent over the previous cans, and will eliminate four out of every five collection trips, according to Hempton. What’s more, the kiosks are completely solar powered.

“It’s changing the way we think about waste,” said UW Recycling & Solid Waste Manager Emily Newcomer. “We expect the increased capacity and the as-needed servicing to dramatically reduce our fuel use and disposal costs while using a sustainable energy source to create these efficiencies.”

The kiosks also include built-in billboards that will be used for educating the public about the benefits of composting and recycling, as well as how to appropriately sort waste materials into the containers.

The UW will be the first university in the country to use this system to capture all three waste types, composting, recycling and garbage, in an outdoor public area.

UW Recycling & Solid Waste sought the kiosks in response to results from the 2011 annual Trash-In event during which volunteers sifted through a sample of campus garbage and found that 61 percent of garbage from Red Square was actually compostable.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

In the clip below from Sunday's episode of UW|360, campus arborist Sara Shores talks about the Quad's cherry trees and how they were rescued in the mid-60s from the arboretum, where they were in the path of the 520 bridge, then under construction.

The segment on the cherry trees, as well as news stories on such things as advances in surgical robots and the UW "Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal" project, airs at 9 p.m., Sunday, April 8, on UWTV, Comcast channel 27. Past episodes can be viewed online anytime.

Just last month it was announced that KOMO 4 will be broadcasting past episodes of UW|360 at 4:30 p.m., before the evening news, each Saturday.

Art Wolfe

Enjoy plants and animals of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens as captured by UW alumnus Art Wolfe in a slideshow for the current edition of Columns magazine.

Wolfe, the West Seattle photographer who has traveled the world to capture landscape and animals on film, set his sights on some of the places he knows best in the Washington Park Arboretum and the UW's Union Bay Natural Area. Both are under the umbrella of the botanic gardens, a part of the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

"You can find quieter shots here that challenge you, and are true beauty," Wolfe said in the magazine of his campus wanderings.

Moss-covered tree trunks and blossoms in the UW Botanic Gardens are among the images by Art Wolfe featured in this month's Columns magazine.

ArtWolfe

So says an analysis conducted at the University of Washington that relied on the UW's own cherry trees as one test of a computer model used in the project.

Plant phenology models that consider when plants bloom and bear fruit in response to temperature are used for agricultural crops such as apples and grapes as well as ornamental and forest trees. This appears to be the first time such a calculation has been made for the cherries in the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., according to Soo-Hyung Kim, UW assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences. Kim is co-author on a paper about the findings published in the Public Library of Sciences' online journal  PLoS One.

Every spring tens of thousands of visitors flock to see the cherry trees in Washington, D.C. This year's celebration has been extended from two to five weeks to mark the 100^th anniversary of the first planting of 3,020 trees that were a gift from Japan.

To make the estimates, researchers at the UW used an existing computer model and adapted it using the last two decades of National Park Service peak bloom records – peak bloom being when 70 percent of the blossoms are open – and temperature records from Reagan National Airport.

UW's trees were used as one test of a computer model used to predict changes in peak bloom of Washington, DC, cherry trees depending on how much warming might occur.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

Before using the model for future predictions, they tested it using data from additional locations including the UW campus and older peak-bloom records in the Tidal Basin. The UW has the same varieties that are most common in the Tidal Basins: Yoshino, in the UW Quad, and Kwanzan, along Rainier Vista. The scientists gathered general information about when the UW trees bloomed based on news reports.

Projections were then made based on two of the various climate change scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A scenario with moderate warming suggests that by the 2050s the peak bloom could be five days earlier and by the 2080s about 10 days earlier. Researchers have already established that cherry trees and other plants in Washington, D.C. have been blooming earlier during the last 60 years because temperatures warm earlier. The trajectory of warming that's already been detected essentially mirror the UW's findings using the moderate scenario.

Early-March bloom times in pale blue ranging to late-April times in hot pink are used to contrast the historical record of peak blooms of Yoshino cherry trees 1950 to 2000 (top) with predictions for the 2050s under moderate temperature increases (middle) and more drastic temperature increases (bottom).

U of Washington

If the other – more drastic – scenario of warming should occur, then peak bloom could be about two weeks earlier by the 2050s and four weeks earlier by the 2080s.

The researchers did not attempt to make predictions for the UW trees because they couldn't find long-term, historical records of "peak" blooms for these trees to test the model before applying it to the future, Kim said.

One day Kim hopes to organize students, staff, faculty and visitors as citizen scientists to record peak blooms on campus. Scientists like Kim who study plant phenology  – when plants bud, flower, bear fruit and lose their leaves – already rely on citizens to document what they see where they live through Project Budburst and other organized efforts.

The models like the one used at the UW for the capital's flowering cherry trees can also be used, "perhaps more importantly, for assessing the agricultural and ecological impacts of climate change," wrote the co-authors. Co-authors with Kim are Uran Chung, who was a visiting scientist in Kim's lab and is now with the United Nations in Mexico doing research on maize and wheat, UW graduate student Liz Mack and Jin Yun of Kyung Hee University, Korea. Kim's lab is part of the UW's Center for Urban Horticulture and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

The work was done as part of a grant to Kim from Korea's Cooperative Research Program for Agricultural Science and Technology, which is interested in models that can be applied to specialty crops such as vegetables, ornamental crops and fruit trees.

"This type of predictive model will become increasingly useful when it is capable of making real-time forecasts," the authors wrote. For fruit crop production, for example, plant-growth models might someday help predict flowering dates so farmers know when to arrange with bee handlers to have their apple, pear, peach trees and other deciduous fruit trees pollinated as well as optimize the use of resources with minimal environmental impacts, Kim said.

The Community Gathering Building on the right will serve as an event site and meeting place. Phase II of the project will include of a student-focused building, depicted here on the left.

Stephanie Bower

A recently completed campaign, including a UW matching commitment, yielded $2.8 million in funding. Among donors to Intellectual House are 12 tribal nations, with two of them – the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe – pledging $100,000 or more. An additional $3 million in state funding has also been committed.

“We’re thrilled to begin the first phase of the Intellectual House project,” said Sheila Edwards Lange, UW vice president for minority affairs and vice president for diversity. “Thanks to financial support from the state, private donors and the tribes, we will make the 40-year dream of building a longhouse-style facility on the UW campus a reality.”

The facility will pay tribute to the historical presence of the tribes on campus, as well as the vital role they play in the nation and the local community, she said.

The Community Gathering Building, expected to be part of Phase I, will serve as an event site and meeting place to bring people from diverse cultures and backgrounds together, as well as showcase and honor the coastal-longhouse style design. Phase II of the project is expected to include final design and construction of a student-focused building. The buildings will be on a site between Lewis and McMahon halls.

Translates to "Intellectual House" in the Lushootseed language and is phonetically pronounced "wah-sheb-altuh." This particular name was given by the late Vi Hilbert, a Lushootseed linguist and elder in the Upper Skagit Tribe.

Thanks to the work of renowned Cherokee-Choctaw architect Johnpaul Jones, the Intellectual House will be a work of art that distinguishes itself from other campus buildings while honoring Native American culture and traditions, Edwards Lange said. The Seattle architecture firm of Jones & Jones is now completing the pre-design.

In addition to being a symbol that honors the region’s tribes, the Intellectual House will be important to the community of Native American students, faculty and staff at the UW, Edwards Lange said. “It will reassure families preparing to send their children to college that the UW acknowledges and respects the needs of Native American students and is committed to helping them succeed. “

The four-year planning process has been guided by a planning advisory committee, an elders committee and a working group.

The incubator is one key element in a larger commercialization initiative announced by President Michael Young today that will double the number of startups produced by the UW – from an average of 10 a year to 20 – during the next three years.

Renuka Prahabakar talks about her firm Envitrum – one of the first startups that will take advantage of the business incubator space – with the Center for Commercialization’s Merina Bigley and Xconmy reporter Curt Woodward.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

The UW Center for Commercialization New Ventures Facility, which opened today, showcases the UW’s commitment to spinning out an increasing number of companies built around UW research. The incubator will be led by the UW Center for Commercialization New Ventures program and is located in UW’s Fluke Hall.

The space will initially host 15 companies and when finished will have space for 25 startups, providing 11,500 square feet of lab space and 11,500 square feet of office space.

Among the first UW startup companies occupying the space will be:

• Nexgenia – A company using polymer-based nanotechnology that improves the speed and sensitivity of clinical laboratory tests for the diagnosis of infectious diseases, cancer and metabolic disorders.
• Envitrum – A startup with a process that converts low-value waste glass into versatile green building materials.
• VIxim – A company developing scalable simulation software for cloud environments including SimX for computation-based encryption and WaveSearch for accelerated graph diffusion.

“The opening of this new incubator signals our commitment to strengthening entrepreneurship at the UW,” Young said. “We’ve been providing the mentorship and are now going the next step in providing the space for faculty and students to work alongside highly successful and experienced Washington entrepreneurs on UW spin-outs.”

An invited guest talks with the Center for Commercialization’s Maren Ohaks, associate director of New Ventures, and Linden Rhoads, UW vice provost for commercialization.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

The UW has fostered university-based innovations to help create more than 260 companies in Washington state. Young hopes to strengthen that position in the future with a renewed focus on fostering the entrepreneurial spirit.

“We all want to see National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research result in tremendous new therapies and treatments,” said Young. “The reality is that commercialization is a major undertaking that requires space, capital, expertise and passion. We want UW to be the best place in the world to do research. We want researchers doing the important work in key translational areas to choose to come to UW and stay here.”

The UW is dedicated to maximizing its contribution to the Washington state economy by spinning out innovations in life sciences, clean technology, alternative energy and information technology. The UW incubator will help increase the quantity and quality of Washington technology companies by priming some of the most promising UW early-stage startups for outside investment and success.

“An on-campus facility is just critical,” said Linden Rhoads, UW vice provost for commercialization. “Housed here, a startup’s product development team has a much better chance of interacting with the UW faculty and graduate students who originally conceived the core technology or concept. In addition, a major goal is lowering the overall cost of product development by leveraging university expertise and infrastructure.”

UW technology startups are a major driver for the state’s economy. These startups have the potential for high growth. They create jobs and offer careers to Washington citizens.  Moreover, they pay state taxes, attract outside investment, increase exports and spawn even more entrepreneurial activity both inside and outside the university.

UW President Michael Young at the grand opening of the business incubator launched by the UW’s Center for Commercialization, or C4C.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

Companies that will occupy the New Ventures Facility are spin-outs that the Center for Commercialization deems as having significant commercial promise. Often, they are the incorporation of projects that have worked closely with the center for several years, following a program-based process that culminates in producing spin-outs.

“You can’t overestimate the value of the synergy that comes from working alongside other entrepreneurial teams, even just operationally,” said Thomas Schulte, president of UW startup Nexgenia. “A company may be developing an entirely different kind of product, but it still has to figure out how to market the product, who to retain for intellectual property counsel, how to attract outside funding. Having Internet access, standard office equipment and meeting space all included, saves us money and a lot of distractions from advancing our new venture.”

The new incubator joins the ranks of technology startup incubators at peer research institutions including those at the MIT, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, UC San Diego and University of Utah.

###

For more information:
Reach Rhoads via Debbie Woo, communications, 206-616-9540, woodeb@uw.edu
Woo also has contact information for spokesmen of startups VIxim, Nexgenia and Envitrum, which are among the first to join the incubator

Patrick Shelby, director of UW’s New Ventures, introduces Vikram Jandhyala chair of UW electrical engineering department and co-founder of VIxim, one of the first startups negotiating for space in the New Ventures Facility.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

“The 60-foot-tall canyon live oak and a smaller huckleberry oak are among the best specimens in the city according to Arthur Lee Jacobson’s ‘Trees of Seattle,’” said Chris Watson, arborist with the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, which oversees the plant collection in the arboretum.

The two curving, smooth trunks to the right, one of which is being crushed by the oak, belong to another prime arboretum specimen, a huckleberry oak. Both trees represent the best of their kind in the city.

UW Botanic Gardens

After careful inspection, it turned out that the root balls of each tree had not pulled out of the ground, avoiding death sentences. Watson and assistant arborist Darrin Hedberg embarked on an effort to pull the 60-foot oak, estimated to weigh more than 8,000 pounds, back into the upright position. The effort could save both specimens plus a third tree, a smaller canyon live oak that was being crushed.

“The structure and foliage of these evergreen oaks provide a unique feel to this area of the arboretum,” Watson said. “Preserving these trees was a high priority as losing them would be a dramatic loss.”

Righting a tree in the arboretum is not undertaken unless it is especially valuable to the collection and there is a good chance it can be saved, according to David Zuckerman, manager of horticulture and plant records for UW Botanic Gardens, which is part of the UW’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Such rescues have only been attempted a handful of times before, he said.

Using UW Botanic Gardens employees and equipment – and with the help from a number of volunteers – the four-day rescue cost $2,000 to $2,500, Watson estimated. The same operation done commercially might run $1,500 a day or $6,000 total.

Ropes, pulleys and a tractor were used to pull the canyon live oak upright so it could be supported by steel cables connected to a western red cedar, more than 60 feet tall, that was 25 feet away. As for the huckleberry oak, a minor crack in the main stem is being supported with a cable in the tree itself.

What are the chances for survival?

Watson says it’s a bit of a guessing game but the crew will baby the trees with mulch over their roots and enough water in the summer. It will take five years to really know if the rescue was a success.

“Rhododendron Glen where these trees are located was a place I was immediately drawn to when I first started at the UW,” Watson said.

“It’s a really special place.”

It's a first for Tacoma and for the University of Washington that a building has achieved the Platinum rating for "new construction/major remodel." It is the second state-funded building to receive this recognition.

The Pacific Street side of UW Tacoma’s Russell T. Joy Building features retail space.

UW Tacoma

Erected in 1892 and named after its first owner, the Joy Building was the last of the historic structures along Pacific Avenue to be repurposed for the UW Tacoma campus. It opened last spring, easing the university’s need for classroom space and providing retail storefronts on the first floor facing Pacific Avenue.

“The Tacoma campus is a leader for the UW in green building,” said Clara Simon, sustainability manager in UW’s Capital Projects Office.

The state mandates that all state-funded new construction and major renovations be designed, constructed and operated to at least a Silver LEED certification level.

“The Joy Building has earned a rating two levels higher,” Simon said.

“LEED Platinum certification is very difficult to achieve on new construction, and even more difficult for renovations,” added Milt Tremblay, director of facilities and campus services.

Among the many features of the Joy Building that earned it the high rating is a system that captures 90 percent of the rainwater falling on the building and reuses it in planters.

Eighty-four percent of the building structure was reused, including brick walls. The heavy metal door provides décor from the building’s industrial beginnings.

UW Tacoma

Other sustainable features include:

--44 percent water reduction during building operations, compared to what LEED standards consider a standard building
--50 percent reduction in energy100 percent Forest Stewardship Council certified wood used
--95 percent of construction waste recycled
--84 percent of building structure reused
--Electrical vehicle recharging station installed
--56 secure bike storage locations
--23 percent recycled content in building materials
--Daylight access in 90 percent of occupied spaces
--20 percent of materials were purchased within 500 mile
--Green cleaning during building operations
--Sited in an urban density area with community connectivity
--Built near public transportation

The architect of the renovation was THA Architecture and the general contractor was Korsmo Construction.

The campus side of the Joy Building.

UW Tacoma

University Architect Rebecca Barnes (left), University Landscape Architect Kristine Kenney and Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design Kristine Matthews contributed ideas to the Construction Graphics Program.

University of Washington / Mary Levin

Like at the corner of Brooklyn Avenue and Lincoln Way, where the new, three-story, 25,000-square-foot Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center is going up.

A series of 6-by-12 panels screen the site, affording safety for people passing by and neatening the site while also telling what’s going on, giving navigation instructions and celebrating the history and traditions of the center. The panels are part of the Construction Graphics Program, which is based in the Office of Planning & Budgeting.

Rebecca Barnes, the university’s architect, came up with the idea for the overall program, and Kristine Kenney, the university’s landscape architect, led the design work.

This woman had her face painted as part of a Day of the Dead celebration staged by the Ethnic Cultural Center.

University of Washington / Mary Levin

“There’s so much activity on campus that to keep everyone safe, we’re constantly redirecting people and vehicles,” Kenney said. She added that people want to know what’s going on, so the panels both explain and make the site more interesting.

Kenney’s group included faculty, staff and students who worked with Kristine Matthews, an assistant professor of visual communication design who also runs Studio Matthews, a Seattle-based graphic design firm.

"The concept was 'Create History',” Matthews said. “We wanted to look both forward and back, so there is a nod to the history of each site and its relevance to UW, but also a look forward.”

This image was part of a mural in the original Ethnic Cultural Center. The mural will be installed in the new center.

University of Washington / Mary Levin

The panels include both generic and customizable options. Along with the purple “W,” for example, the ECC graphics echo the groups – blacks, Chicanos, Asians, Native Americans – depicted in four murals in the original 1971 building. By the way, the murals have been preserved, and will be mounted in the new building.

The ECC panels, which cost $180-$220 apiece and were mounted in early December, are the first test of the program. They will be followed by panels at construction sites for Mercer Court Apartments, the student housing just below the northeast end of University Bridge; South Lake Union phase 3.1, the new UW medical research complex; and the Rainier Vista/Montlake Triangle Project, which will remake the area and include a Sound Transit station.

Stephen Edwin Lundgren, UW staff with Harborview Medical Center, contributed this photo from outside the center’s cafeteria of the art installation "Harborview Pillows" by Belize Brother. Lundgren emulated the work of Andre Kertesz – who often photographed empty courtyards, public squares and streets.

Stephen Edwin Lundgren

“A Washington state law states that if you steal a tree or tree limbs you can be penalized three times the assessed amount of the damaged tree,” Shores said.  “Many of the trees damaged would assess at more than $1,000, meaning the fine could be $3,000 or more.”

Here is the actual language from the law:

“Whenever any person shall cut down, girdle, or otherwise injure, or carry off any tree, including a Christmas tree as defined in *RCW 76.48.020, timber, or shrub on the land of another person, or on the street or highway in front of any person's house, city or town lot, or cultivated grounds, or on the commons or public grounds of any city or town, or on the street or highway in front thereof, without lawful authority, in an action by the person, city, or town against the person committing the trespasses or any of them, any judgment for the plaintiff shall be for treble the amount of damages claimed or assessed.”

The trees are one of the things that make the UW campus beautiful, and Shores hopes people will leave them alone for others to enjoy.