Meetings, meetings and more meetings....

If there was one word that summarised the past few weeks for us it would be meetings; first with the Centre for Public Engagement who are overseeing our project, then with a wide range of potential community partners and university staff. 

During the first week we spent a lot of time with the Southville Community Centre  trying to scope out what potential projects could be delivered within the community, and trying to ensure that these also had engineering outcomes.  We found that everyone we contacted was very helpful and provided us with even more ideas and contacts!

At the moment the project is really starting to gain some momentum. There are a range of example projects beginning to emerge including:

·         Sustainability Unit – University of Bristol

-          Monitoring energy usage across the university, in particular monitoring fume cupboard efficiency

-          Ways to reduce energy usage and increase the efficiency of fume cupboards

·         Windmill Hill City Farm

-          Considering the sustainable options for an independent community centre located on an urban site

·         Forum for the Future – Temple Gateway Redevelopment

-          New site developments

-          Creation of sustainable urban drainage schemes

-          Interdependencies of infrastructure in the area

·         Southville Community Centre

-          Traffic re-routing

-          Improving current sustainable techniques

We have a further meeting next week with an architect who is a resident of the ‘Myrtle triangle’, who has an idea of trying to tap energy from the Malago Interceptor which runs underneath the ‘Myrtle triangle’. This is an individual’s idea who has no particular expertise in this field and so the students would be required to see if this is possible, feasible and worthwhile.

One of the difficulties we have encountered is the distinction between a research project (where students investigate and solve a technical problem) and a design project (where students develop a conceptual and detailed solution for a project).  We have found that many of the initial projects we scoped are in fact more suitable for design projects as opposed to research projects. Furthermore we have experienced difficulty in finding community partners happy to offer a research project from which they will not receive any design or implementation. The main question at this stage is whether a project can be passed on to the following year group without having to repeat this process again next summer. One idea is that 3^rd years complete an evaluation / project brief for the next year’s students on completion of their project.

Finally, any thoughts, advice and guidance would be very welcome!