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The Return of Training on what to do after declaring a Climate Emergency

Image showing Oliver Broadbent and Bengt Cousins-Jenvey delivering a workshop to twelve people

It’s been a year since many engineering and construction firms declared a climate and biodiversity emergency. Six months since the pandemic struck. But the climate clock is still ticking and the world is still heating. Are we one tenth of the way we need to get to in this decade to avoid the worst kind of climate breakdown?

In hindsight, making the declaration is the easy part: the difficult part is knowing what to do next. That is why we created the course ‘Training on what to do after declaring a Climate Emergency’. It recognises that the emergency status is a new operating paradigm for most organisations, and that within those organisations there will be individuals and teams whose job it is to work out how to respond. We created this course to support those people.

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All online for an introduction to conceptual design

This month our face-to-face and webine cohorts for our Introduction to Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers course joined to form one online group, enabling us to deliver to both groups despite lockdown.

The course splits conceptual design up into three phases: establishing the brief, creative thinking and convergent thinking and provides simple models for understanding each of these phases.

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Giving the gift of knowledge

To celebrate the start of a new decade Constructivist is experimenting with the gift of knowledge. From now until the end of February we’re offering you the opportunity to join one of our courses* for free, when you buy a course for a friend or colleague.

Essentially, this is a buy one get one free deal, allowing you to gift a course and then enjoy it with that friend.

If you’re interested in taking us up on the offer please email Lucy and let her know which course you’d like to buy, and for whom.

*courses run via the IstructE are excluded from this offer.

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Conceptual Design at Plymouth University

Oliver Broadbent stands next to a van that has the caption on it Creativty with Plymouth Univesity. Oliver is pointing at the word creativity. He was invited to the university to talk about teaching conceptual design

Last week  Dr Boksun Kim  Lecturer in structural engineering at Plymouth Univesity invited me to the engineering department at Plymouth University to talk about creativity with staff and students. Boksun had attended the two-day Advanced Conceptual Design course I run at the Institution of Structural Engineers. As a result of going to that couse she asked if I could come down to share some of my thinking with the department. I was happy to be asked!

A recipe for cooking ideas

In the morning I gave a 45-minute talk on conceptual design to a group of third-year students. In this short time I gave them a quick run through my process for having ideas. After this run through I asked the students to create their own recipe for creative thinking. The idea was to create a series of steps that they can ‘cook’   from next time they are set a design project. Continue reading “Conceptual Design at Plymouth University”