Green Sky Thinking at BuroHappold

Monday saw the opening of the Green Sky Thinking 2015 event in BuroHappold’s London office. The title of the event was ‘The future of Engineering’ with topics providing visions of how engineering will be in the future. This was similar to an event held in conjunction with the Young Engineers Forum held between Smart and London YEF which I missed due to university commitments.

For the event, I had been tasked with providing content on “the future of healthcare” – given that this is my dominant area of research! In conjunction with Becky, we produced a poster highlighting the work in optimal utilisation for a project worked on by the team, and how the future of data capture in healthcare might look.

The poster was backed up by a video of some software I’ve been developing as part of my research this year for automated data capture. I can’t go into too much detail here as the work is still in development but it wowed the audience at the Green Sky Thinking event. For 30mins myself and the other poster owners (including fellow EngD students James R and David G) defended our poster to the audience which comprised architects, journalists and anyone who opted to walk in. We had 3 minutes per group to defend our work and ended up repeating ourselves 10 times which at the time gave little more than a sore throat, and a repetitiveness sound to the speech.

Following the walk around talks, there was a closing speech and the audience were asked to vote with their feet on which ‘future of’ they enjoyed hearing about the most. James and I received a high number of people standing by our posters but the end decision was that the future of healthcare had the most votes. I was pleased to have convinced so many people to stand by my poster, I don’t know why they did but perhaps my presenting skills are getting better (this being the second time my poster defending has won prizes this year).

The other ‘future of’ work is equally important however, and one event highlighting healthcare this time doesn’t mean healthcare every time (indeed, when Becky defended the poster at the YEF event less votes were received, mainly as the data capture video was not very good – it was very early in development and didn’t help tell the story at all). All of the engineering sectors need to work together to achieve a sustainable future for our planet and for our cities to achieve the best possible for all stakeholders. It was a credit to the Smart team overall that our work is being highly commended by outsiders (non-BH people) at such events. I’m sure there’ll be another opportunity to defend ‘the future of healthcare’ later in the year. But for now… back to coursework. Joy.