One of those weeks where you don’t think you have got much done, but in reality many seeds have been planted. I seemed to have a week of meetings - starting with RIBA Festival of the Future, ending with a Biophilic Building in Swansea and included a visit from a guest lecturer in the middle who trained as an architect (so maybe there is a theme here…) - notes below the fold.

Matt Jones was speaking to our Connected Environments students on being around other people, bouncing ideas around, thinking with different pairs of glasses on.

I joined the first of four workshops with the MOSAIC researchers a “four-year programme of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral research and innovation that will deliver a step‑change in how we design, plan and build our cities for thriving multispecies cohabitation.” - out focus was Spitalfields City Farm which was lovely on a bizarrely warm March day in London. Was also great to hear about progress on the East London Waterworks Park.

I ended the week sitting on a mock interview panel for an AHRC grant proposal called REPAIR - via Blanche Cameron in BSA who is one of the CO-I’s on this mainly Swansea Uni proposal. They are working on a Biophilic Building - BIOSWA. Was great to meet the project team and really exciting to see the AHRC focusing their grant application process on a team convening approach. The application looked great to me and the team were clearly passionate about the project - I really hope they get the funding, could really open up some research on how to quantify the social and economic value of Biophilia.

In other work news we made some progress on project Alleyn Key (a Digital Twin proposal with Alleyn’s school), had a lovely meeting with Klimatize plotting to see if we can do some work on One Pool Street as a last activity on Wills PhD and finally stopped at the Insect Garden at Stratford Cross (which is also conveniently opposite the Last Post - our nearest pub to the office).

On the theme of looking through different lenses, tomorrow will be a visit to the opticians to get some new Lindberg frameless glasses - I went with the trend and got some heavy full frame ones a year or so ago and whilst I like them, they just feel so heavy and “in the way” - our apparatus influences how we see the world …

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Photos from RIBA event:

Annual visit of a Heron to the garden looking to clear out the fish from our pond… they seem to be here a couple of weeks earlier than last year