• Question: On your last project assignment, what problems did you identify that had been previously overlooked?

    Asked by Amity to Ashwanth, Jeni, Mark, Natalie, Stephen on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Stephen Richardson

      Stephen Richardson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Amity, you like to ask the difficult questions don’t you??!
      I think I may have already said this in another answer or maybe in the chat earlier but one of the things I’m working on which hasn’t been properly taken into account is the fact that when we try to work out the greenhouse gases or carbon footprint of a building (or anything else to be honest) we have to do a lot of guessing and estimating.
      Usually this isn’t mentioned and people just write the results as if they are definitely Right when they could actually be way off.
      So I’m looking at ways to work out how far out our estimates might be and then to show that in the results.
      This is really important if you’re trying to decide on ways to reduce the carbon footprint. You might spend loads of money thinking you’re doing something great for the environment but actually it might only be half as good as you thought it was so you could be wasting your money.

    • Photo: Jeni Spragg

      Jeni Spragg answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi Amity, it’s not exactly a problem that was overlooked, but it was something I noticed which might prove helpful…

      My last project was helping out a consultancy who was doing some work for the European Commission. We were looking at the use of alternative fuel vehicles (electric, hydrogen or natural gas) across the whole of Europe, and which factors were encouraging or preventing people from switching away from petrol cars to more environmentally friendly alternatives. It was a really interesting project which was a little bit technical, but was also a lot to with politics, society and economics.

      When I was researching Italy, I came across an interesting link between the level of subsidies that help people to buy ‘clean’ cars and the number of sales. It was possible to see some really powerful effects of government policy. Perhaps that will turn out to be a helpful piece of evidence that helps politicians to decide how they can help people to be more green? I hope so!

    • Photo: Mark Gowan

      Mark Gowan answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Amity
      It was on a very short project from my point of view. I was presented with a piece of research and a working prototype for an in road sensor with Wi-Fi capability. The only problem was another company had already launched a product 2 years earlier and had the worldwide market share. The lesson learnt was just because something may not exist when you start, it may do before you finish, so you need to be quick

    • Photo: Natalie Wride

      Natalie Wride answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi Amity 🙂

      Wow! Well on my last project one of the jobs I was put in charge of was working out why things weren’t going quite as well on site as they should have been – the people on site were blaming our design so I had to figure out if we had overlooked anything or if they had. It’s really difficult to do this when the project is in a different country and you just have use photographs of the project!! It turned out the pictures were showing water dripping from hole down the wall into the excavation – the Engineers on site had not put enough drains in when they were digging down to make sure the water in the rocks wasn’t going into the excavation and making it unsafe.

      Now I’m doing my PhD, the whole reason for doing my research is because nobody knows the answer for definite at the moment! It’s not so much people have overlooked things previously, more that these are really difficult problems and we make lots of small improvements to current knowledge step at a time! So my research will be a step up on what we already know, accounting for something previously overlooked, and hopefully someone will improve my research in the future by doing the same thing!

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