The U-Café initiative has been awarded the Newcastle University, Best Environmental Initiative of 2013. 

U-Café was designed to gauge a range of possible perceptions around notions of waste, value and utility. The interdisciplinary team of researchers and students from CESER, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Centre for Urban and Regional Development, School of Arts and Cultures, School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering and Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability constructed a Café made from materials described as rubbish or waste.

The café was designed as a means to challenge perceptions around defining waste, the structure created from materials normally discarded into landfill or a recycling stream.  Central to up-cycling is a notion of adding value to materials and objects.  This process acts to encourage people to question whether items have actually reached the end of their useful life.  Defining the quality of this added value is complex and ambiguous, as people can have very different ideas of why to keep an object out of the bin.  The central question for the U-Tec team was how to promote up-cycling as a way to encourage people to behave differently towards food and product packaging?  Would it be possible, for example, by releasing the hidden value of product packaging (milk cartons, plastic drinks bottles and tin cans) to encourage people to live in a more environmentally sustainable way?

The Cafe was ‘open for business’ between Tuesday 16 and Thursday 18 April and attracted over 150 customers who participated in the research and were entertained by recitals from Hadrian Primary School’s upcycled orchestra and by ‘Junk Agency’, a group of Newcastle University musicians who will perform a concert with music made from sampling CDs and cassettes found in rubbish bins and skips.

The deadline for abstract submissions is the end of April.

Researchers from CESER (Claire Walsh, Richard Dawson, Stephanie Glendinning, Vassilis Glenis) in collaboration with researchers from Centre for Knowledge Innovation Technology and Enterprise and Newcastle City Council have recently published a paper which introduces the concept of a ‘Decision Theatre’ and describes how this approach was tested by co-designing, with a range of stakeholders, two events to identify current vulnerabilities of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne to a storm event and to investigate the effectiveness of adaptation options to surface water flooding. Based on these ‘proof of concept’ events, CESER along with other researchers at Newcastle University are considering are more permanent research and engagement facility for exploring and understanding collaborative decision-making and public engagement.

Four interactive information screens presenting information about the storm as it unfolds

Walsh CL; Glendinning S; Dawson RJ; England K; Martin M; Watkins CL; Wilson, R; Glenis V; McLoughlin A; Parker D. 2013. Collaborative platform to facilitate engineering decision-making. Engineering Sustainability 166, ES2: 98-107.

The full paper can be downloaded at: HERE.

This paper is in a special issue of Engineering Sustainability on ‘Participatory Planning’ which is available on the journal’s website.

Claire Walsh and Alistair Ford participated in a review led by the Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate Co-ordination Network on collaborative research.The review based on interviews with both researchers and stakeholders can be found at: http://www.arcc-cn.org.uk/lessons-learned/collaborative-research/

Managing Infrastructure: what can we learn from the medical experience of trauma?

The SHOCK project invites anyone with experience of working in infrastructure strategy and practice to attend this workshop.

This workshop looks at the experiences of A&E staff in dealing with trauma and unpicks the processes and practices discussed by the individuals from both their everyday and one-off experiences. We will explore a story of infrastructure shock and reflect on this based on the understanding constructed from the medical cases. We will ask you to share your own stories of ‘shock’ to help draw out learning from these different contexts.

The workshop is free to attend and travel expenses can be covered.

When: Monday 26 November, 1-5pm

Where: Bloomsbury Suite, Friends House, 173 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BJ

Register: Email claire.walsh@ncl.ac.uk

Over the summer 2012, Professor Hayley Fowler, co-chaired a two-week workshop at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado on ‘Uncertainty in climate change research: an integrated approach’.  Taking decision making as a starting point, the workshop focussed on: methods that facilitate consistent treatment of uncertainties in different parts of the climate change problem; accounting for additional factors outside quantifiable ones that contribute to uncertainty in decision making; accounting for the effect of cognitive biases that prevent consistency from one discipline to the next, and the critical differences in the end-to-end academic process vs. reality (i.e. practical application vs. theoretical approaches). The workshop comprised of a number of presentations from academics and practitioners from the UK and US, including Claire Walsh from CESER, who presented the group’s work on long term changes and integrated assessment  in London. Participants came from a wide variety of disciplines:  statistics, climate modelling and analysis, climate impacts, decision making, policy, communication, and social science concerned with vulnerability and climate change. An important and valuable component of the workshop was the participants working on mini research projects in interdisciplinary groups. Selma De-Brito Guerreiro, a PhD student in the CESER group attended the workshop as a participant.