Saturday 25th February 2023

EDC at Imperial College London: an amazing start to a new era!
Supported by Blue Spark

Our new Environmental Design Challenge was a great success in London in February 2023. We are grateful to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering for providing us with designers’ work spaces in a department with a long history of high-level innovation and research into making our world environmentally sustainable. 

The challenge involved designing solutions for the community who live in Kroo Bay, by the sea in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Kroo Bay exists in real life; Kroo Bay is an unplanned residential area created by the people themselves. The lack of infrastructure for water, the threats from flooding, pollution and landslides are real, and well-documented by the UN and other international agencies. These information resources were vital to the students who became collaborative workers for a long day, and went from knowing nothing about Kroo Bay to having serious and involved discussions with the Client team at the end-of-day presentations, across a wide range of issues, for joined-up solutions that could serve real people, in the near future. 

A host of schools participated. As with our sister scheme, the UK Space Design Competition, the model of work was an industry simulation of companies providing complex designs in response to a client’s request for environmental proposals. Three companies were working to win sub-contracts from the client team, and all won at least one sub-contract for a section of the design works. Each company has a profile, listed in our Designers’ Resources page on our EnviroDC.org website.

The schools participating were schools with prior knowledge of how our sophisticated industry simulation works and we appreciate their willingness to participate. Those schools from around London were Alexandra Park Sixth Form, Dartford Grammar School, Queen Elizabeth School, Barnette, Wallington High School for Girls, Henrietta Barnett and the independent team ‘Muffins’.

Our next EnviroDC events are in Liverpool, Oxford and Sussex, with other events in the pipeline such as an event for Portugal. We are pleased to have suggestions and requests for events: please complete our registration for HERE to either sign up for a planned event, or suggest where you would like us to hold an event in the future.