Serious Games

Being playful was never so productive.

We have felt privileged to have Dr Poul Kyvsgard Hansen at Heriot-Watt for 3 days to train us as Lego ‘Serious Play’ facilitators.

From childhood we are hardwired to tell stories and use our hands to construct stories and metaphors. The current educational system might teach us out of creativity, so it is important that we go back to basics to retrieve those dormant skills with which to face the complex problems ahead of us.

We are looking into Lego to embed in our Engineering Design & Manufacture courses communication and strategy planning content.

Lego Serious Play has been used broadly in Scandinavian countries (lead by Dr Hansen’s team) as a tool for strategic management and innovation enhancement.

We run a little dry-run workshop on ‘what do researchers do’, and this was the insightful result:

Lego mini exercise – What do researchers do

(from top left to bottom right): Research for Ray is about developing new technologies and making the most of them (can you tell he works with VR equipment!?); Poul’s take was a circle which symbolises the iterative nature of research, from the knowledge acquisition, through to reflection, a hypothesis testing; Siva saw research as finding the right ‘tree’ after having to browse through many different bushes (and the flag on the miniman represents the baggage of knowledge the researcher brings on); Theo’s main points were ‘juggling’ many different ‘levers’ and knowledge dissemination; Tom thinks it is all about isolating the problem you want to tackle, and the board behind is all about dissemination, and telling the wider audience what you do. The left corner photo is the Pro-Lego set we will use in our teaching from this semester onwards.

We are bound to have a lot of fun with our students and our partner companies joining us for the Engineering Design programme. Click here if you would like to hear more, and/or get in touch.

Best Free Paper for our work on Prosthetic Devices

Our collaborators Susan Hillman and James Hollington, from the SMART Centre, NHS Scotland, have been awarded Best Free Paper for our  ‘Clinical Interpretation of ISO 16840-2, Measurements for Wheelchair Seating Cushions’ presentation at the Posture and Mobility Group (PMG) National Training Event.

Their stand also attracted a lot of interest from clinicians, manufacturers and the ISO and BSI committees.

James at the stand with clinicians

This collaborative project is focused on checking the clinical relevance of the BS ISO standard 1640-2:2007 on Wheelchair seating for the determination of physical and mechanical characteristics of devices intended to manage tissue integrity, in this case, wheelchair seat cushions. Our paper can be read here: PMG 2012.

Susan and James discussing our work with colleagues

Congratulations Susan and James!

(More info about the centre)

Current developments in low-cost bamboo huts

We are collaborating with Dr Ben Hughes and his PhD students (John Calautit and Hassam Chaudhry)  from the Univ of Leeds to study thermal and energy efficiency in our bamboo huts to assess comfortability of these as a low-cost housing solution. Bamboo huts can be upgraded to become residential dwellings, but also can be a handy resource in disaster aid and emergency relief situations for response teams in communities struck by the forces of nature.

Indoors testing rig at Heriot-Watt Univ, by Sean Paterson

Bamboo is a sustainable material which grows like a weed (in fact, it is a giant grass) and it is readily available in places like India, Bangladesh, Far East countries and South America. It grows fast (approx 30cm a day!!) unlike timber and it is ‘clean’ to dispose (versus high energy demanding materials such as concrete or steel, very expensive to produce).