Currently in that state of everything ticking over with teaching since we are in the middle of term and having several projects that are either starting or coming close to ending. This means it feels like lots of balls in the air and switching between activities. Sometimes from external forces like the lemon in blue pea tea.
This week we had Claire Rowland visit the lab to introduce a living lab case study based on the Energy Systems Catapult Living Lab. Really interesting to hear about the work they are doing bringing together 5000+ homes across the UK as a living lab environment to test home energy systems in real world settings. I had been going through the theory behind living labs earlier in the day and trying to drill home the difference between traditional lab testing and living labs (slide below). An incredibly useful case study and hat tip to Alex for putting us in touch.
I had a couple of lovely serendipitous meetings in the labs and workshops this week. One of the benefits of being in the lab making stuff is that you bump into people doing cool stuff. The first encounter was a result of popping into the wet labs to try and get a photo of someone doing some work in a lab coat. My niece had sent me a picture of her daughter doing some science at the kitchen table, full safety kit and mixing chemicals in test tubes. So I thought it would be fun to send her a picture back of a live lab. So called in and chanced across Dhruv making some conductive silicone feet for his soft robotics research. Ended up having a lovely chat about his research and meeting someone new in the lab.
The second serendipitous meeting was with a researcher in Electrical Engineering who was making a novel foot sensor from lots of tiny pressure sensors built into a shoe insole. This was particularly nice to chat about since it allowed me to recount a story from 25 years ago when with colleagues from Arup on a ski trip we invented an insole that would provide realtime foot pressure feedback to ski instructors. We did pitch the idea to the owners of indoor snow domes in the UK but never managed to bring a working prototype to life. Slide below shows our thinking in 2002.
Manifold work continues and edges closer. I think I have a plan to safely power the system so need to get that build finished and can then focus on getting animations up and running.
Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:
(looks like I didn’t do much browsing this week…)