- Brunel to Broadband evening lecture
- The ‘Halcrow Studio’ opened in Cardiff Uni’s Engineering building
- Social Sustainability business breakfast
- ICE Exec Board Xmas dinner
Plenty of free grub but they’ve also given me food for thought on some of the big issues that’ll challenge Civil Engineers in the future……
Monday’s lecture on IT in Civil Engineering presented interesting theories for the way design and construction teams will work in the future. Tony Sudworth suggested communication and collaborative working tools similar to facebook and Wikipedia will become the norm for business applications, and discussed the concept of truly remote teams with instant access to central projects. The Halcrow Studio (a section my company have sponsored in the refurbished Trevithick Library) was officially opened on the same night and I called in with Alun to take a look. Here's some photos:
The social sustainability breakfast meeting (awesome fry up in the Novotel btw) drew up some heated debate between the Assembly’s top procurement guru and the Director of CECA (representing Welsh Contractors) on how industry and government could/should be driving change in social sustainability issues through the economic downturn. This linked to unemployment, investment and education. Interesting to hear that 22% of welsh people do ‘civil’ work (employed by government), and that doesn’t include those employed by money the government spends. Gareth Morgan from the Assembly suggested industry needs to innovate to reduce dependency on state money, and drive an economy of its own. A big challenge but I can see the point. Industry needs to adapt and generate a skill/service that we can export outside of Wales.
Thursday was the Halcrow Christmas party in the Yard at lunchtime. I stayed on the shandies (as much as possible) to try and save myself for the ICE Exec Board dinner Mr Grif held later on at the uber posh Walnut Tree restaurant in Abergavenny. It was worth saving myself for as the food and drink was just about as good as it gets. Awesome night and a nice opportunity to get to know the Board members on a more personal level. Alun’s hospitality and company was, as always, fantastic. I didn’t go for the sweetbread starter though. Yikes!
Sloped into the office the next day nursing a hangover, and ended up had a good long chat with Barrie (my Halcrow Regional Director) about what I’d been up to lately. Barrie’s always enthusiastic to get us young ‘uns thinking about innovative subjects, and after talking through all the above we came up with some fresh ideas which we’re going to work on – The concept is tackling sustainability, using links between academia/industry/the Institution and Government and implementing innovative communication methods and aligning with the goals of ICE (look back at the ICE State of the Nation Report on Low Carbon Infrastructure), government, academia, industry, society and so on and so on. Centred around utilising the Studio and maybe in the future integrating with the WATT Centre (if you don’t know about the WATT centre, it’s an idea currently being working on for Wales, Think of it as going to be an advanced Techniquest for Civil Engineering). This all made me feel like there’s a load of big jigsaw pieces in front of us, and we just need to shuffle them round and make them work. Hmmmm…….thinking caps on…….
I think this’ll be me last post of 2009 so Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all. Thanks for reading
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