Walked with my sister from Primrose Hill to the John Soane Museum via Regent’s Park and Marylebone this week. I have been in London for over 20 years but this was my first visit. The house is packed full of curiosities and art, the “material” of creativity. I could imagine these artefacts sparking ideas and connections in the mind of this architect. It was a serendipitous visit since one of my tasks last week was to refresh my list of project ideas (mainly dissertation but potentially PhD) that I share with students each year.
A sample of one of the many rooms in the John Soanes Museum.
Some of these projects have been bubbling away in the background, some have been on the to do list for a while as potential dissertation ideas for CE students. I do this annually in preparation for CASA CE dissertations but it also make me realise that these are the things I want to be working on! A couple of themes emerged which I found interesting - Data-Driven Infrastructure for Environmental Sensing and Immersive Visualisation & Ecological Insight
On the former, there are a few projects focusing on using IoT, Edge AI, and real-time data analysis to transform how we monitor, manage, and interact with the urban environment, and a few on how we address infrastructure resilience and facilities management. “A Statistical Surge” aims to predict flood events at House Mill 24 hours in advance by combining multi-year hydrological data with machine learning, while “The Bone-Shaker Index” employs volunteer cyclists and geolocated sensors to map road surface quality and enhance urban mobility safety. The projects “Room for Improvement” and “From Ticket to Texture” focus on optimising building management: the former analyses IoT data to quantify space utilisation and system cost in a pop-up teaching space, and the latter proposes creating a cutting-edge FM Holodeck using 3D Gaussian splats to allow occupants to visually log maintenance issues, bridging virtual space with real-world FM workflows.
In the second theme projects emphasise ecological monitoring, data communication, and immersive visualisation as tools for engagement and insight. “Park Life’s a Pitch” updates our existing Olympic Park bat monitoring system with Edge AI to also count bird calls, creating new community visualisations of biodiversity. Projects like “A Sense of Place” and “The Giant Robot’s Handbook” use Digital Twin and multi-sensor data to make the invisible workings of buildings visible: the former communicates the ecological impact of a new green wall at UCL, while the latter develops an immersive guide to demystify our UCL East building’s real-time systems. Finally, the projects “Paddle, Probe, Protect” and “Sonic Flora Underwater” push the boundaries of citizen science and bioacoustics by using kayaks equipped with sensors to map river health and exploring if aquatic plant growth can be identified and quantified by sound. “At one with the building” further explores immersive data, suspending users in a VR sea of real-time building data to explore alternative perceptions of space.
I had to stop myself adding in projects on drones, kinetic art and pen plotters…
One for Andy, an astrological clock.
Looking at links.duncanwilson.com I also spent time on: