Competition Boosts Sustainability in the Community

Engineers Without Borders has announced the winners of its annual Engineering for People Design Challenge. The challenge is intended to take a project learning approach that support students in understanding their impact as engineers on both people and the planet. Each year, a new community partner is chosen to give the students a real-world design brief that is shaped by insights and reflections through interviews with the local community. Previous partners have included Makers Valley in South Africa, EcoSwell in Peru and Centre for Appropriate Technology in Australia. This year’s community partner was the Govan Community Project in Scotland. The awards are open to first- and second-year undergraduates as a mandatory part of their degree course. The aim is to encourage engineers to broaden their awareness of the social, environmental and economic implications of their engineering solutions.

John Kraus. CEO of Engineers Without Borders explained how the Govan Community Project was chosen and how the organisation differed from previous community partners, “some of the Engineers without Borders team are from Glasgow, which provided us with local awareness of the area’s needs. It was also straightforward for us to liaise with them, because they're right on our doorstep. Last year's community partner was in Northern Australia, so it's a challenge to work closely with the community. This is the first time we've had students take their proposals directly to the community and present them, and had community representatives judging the entries. We tended to concentrate on rural areas in the past, but most people live in urban areas and we ought to give at least as much attention to them.”

This year saw 30 teams take part in the competition. The top prize went to the team from the University of Greenwich with a ‘Health Pod’ design that aims to tackle food insecurity and inaccessibility to healthcare in Govan. The award was chosen for the use of a single space that could be used to meet multiple challenges facing the area. The winners received a £1000 educational bursary.

Second prize went to a hydroelectrically-powered greenhouse space designed by a team from Manchester Metropolitan University. Judges praised the team’s consideration of the local geography in the development of the design, and particularly liked that the team had given thought to how food could be distributed to the community using e-bikes.

The Peoples’ Prize, which was voted on by the public, went to Nottingham Trent University for their design to implement aeroponics using shipping containers.

The runner-up and the People's Prize winners will each receive a £500 educational bursary to share between their teams.

Although the designs are not mandated to be implemented practically, teams have the opportunity to work with community group in the future to see the designs turn to reality. As well as helping the community, the competition also helps students understand the problems they will face in the future from a holistic perspective. The competition also helps the universities themselves design a balanced curriculum. Kraus explains, “universities have a requirement to start to put sustainability into their curriculum and the competition helps them to implement sustainability fairly easily. Broadly speaking, the educators decide they want to take part and form a team. Then they organize the students into teams of four or five people at the most. As an example, Sheffield has around 200 students divided into roughly 50 teams. One of those teams is chosen to represent the university in the final. That process counts towards the university’s curriculum sustainability content.”

PSD