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REALISING SUSTAINABILITY

Realising Sustainability was a Quintin Hogg Trust funded research and development project with a series of key outcomes that enhanced architecture and environmental design student experience and teaching, fostered relationships with key industry partners in building environment management and collaborated within the university to exchange academic knowledge with the facilities management and energy efficiency of the campus.

Post Occupancy Evaluation
As part of the campus study sustainability study, a comprehensive BUS questionnaire was conducted among 83 staff members and 57 students of the Marylebone building to evaluate the environmental performance of their existing workspaces and classroom areas. By administering a post occupancy evaluation, user experience of internal environments was quantified for future recommendations.

Teaching Workshops
Realising Sustainability project leads and research associates lead a series of teaching workshops for MSc and BSc AED students based on the Marylebone campus building as an immediate and engaging case study. Students were exposed to cutting-edge technology for recording environmental data using IoT sensors in addition to conventional data logging equipment and were able to understand the effect of environmental and personal factors on users within a built environment. Moreover, 25 prospective students from A-Level and 20 visiting undergraduate students from Taiwan benefitted through a five-day long Kinetic Climate workshop and three-week long Environmental Design Summer School respectively. The upgrade of the Fabrication Lab with cutting edge environmental equipment and facilities will benefit over 1000 students each year in their learning and research about the built environment.

Real-time Data Visualisation
Using data gathered from a network of IoT sensors and the BEMS, real-time environmental data, such as indoor air temperature, relative humidity, light and sound levels were visualised on the Fabrication Lab media wall and online using a custom dashboard. This built an awareness of the difference between user experience and measured performance and how the building environment could become more efficient and sustainable.

IoT + LoRaWAN
Much of the foundational, technical work for the project occurred through the design, assembly and installation of a network of IoT (Internet of Things) sensors connected through LoRaWan. Collaborating with the University of Westminster network team, further funding was gathered to upgrade the existing wifi network to include a low energy wireless technology called (LoRaWAN) gateway in partnership with Jisc.

Industry Collaboration
Partnerships were built with IES and other global consultancies such as Arup and Trend Ltd. to make tangible improvements to course teaching and Marylebone Campus building sustainability (mitigating energy use and carbon footprint), two key goals for the research programme.

Use of Building Energy Management System (BEMS)
With the help of the Estates and Facilities Department, BEMS data sets were utilised to monitor and evaluate the environmental performance of various workspaces, classrooms and studio areas of Marylebone building. This then fed into all the other research, dissemination and knowledge exchange strands for the Realising Sustainability programme.

Energy meter survey and environmental study
An extensive survey was completed by the RS team to map the location and status of the existing energy meters. Further submeters were proposed for improving the energy regulation and BREEAM assessments.

Publication
The ongoing research progress was disseminated through the Releasing Sustainability webpage, lectures within the university and teaching workshops. The final research findings were published in the ‘Energies’ journal with the title ‘Application of Internet of Things (IoT) to Visualise the Environmental and Energy Performance of an Educational Building’.

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