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Push Me Pull Me

Developing an understanding of how structural systems function is an integral part of the education of civil and structural engineers. Traditionally students are expected to develop this understanding through the application of mathematical equations – an approach which only works for some students.

We have created a series of tactile interactive structural models, with which we are seeking to revolutionise the way structural engineering is taught, allowing students to develop a tacit understanding of the behavior before they even see an equation.

Try the models out for yourself on Expedition Workshed

The Push Me Pull Me models develop the linkage between real structures and their schematic representation by starting with renders of real structures showing encastre or pinned connections for example. The user then clicks a button to reveal the schematic model.

The user then interacts with the structural model by pushing and pulling it with the mouse. A series of buttons allow the user to toggle different qualitative outcomes on or off, namely: deformation, reactions, bending moment and shear and axial forces. All of these outcomes change in real time as the user changes the load.

First launched in 2010, a growing number of universities use the Push Me Pull Me models to help teach structural mechanics. They are also increasingly being used by architectural departments to explain basic structural mechanics to architects.

In November 2011, we published a set of Worksheets to support learning using Push Me Pull Me, developed in collaboration with Stelios Ytrianos at Brunel University.

Visiting Professor of Innovation, University College London

Think Up Director Ed McCann has been appointed Visiting Professor of Innovation at the department of Civil Engineering at University College London. Having previously held this role at the University of Strathclyde, the transfer to London will enable him to more closely associate his teaching with his work in practice, and to more effectively draw upon the resources that Expedition Engineering can offer to support his teaching.

This Visiting Professorship, supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, is part of an industry-into-academia technology transfer initiative. It is based on the experience-led education concept, whereby senior industrial engineers are appointed as Visiting Professors at specific universities to enrich the engineering undergraduate curriculum with the latest industrial technology and practices to enhance the quality and capabilities of UK engineering graduates.

Ed's work at UCL will build on his work at Strathclyde in 2010 and 2011, during which time he established the Expedition Workshed website and cooperated with Prof Iain MacLeod to establish a new model for teaching structural engineering. At UCL, his work will focus on collaborating with the Department of Civil Engineering to put in to practice the ideas developed in Strathclyde.

More about the Strathclyde appointment

Antarctic Research Station Design Workshop

In this workshop we recreate a design competition that Expedition entered back in 2004 to design a new Antarctic laboratory for the British Antarctic Survey. The aim of the workshop is to explore the cycle of conceiving, testing and reviewing that is at the core of the design process; and to do so in the context of one of the most remote and environmentally demanding construction sites imaginable.

We developed this workshop for Masters students at the Laing O'Rourke Centre for Construction Engineering and Technology in Cambridge. We provide the students with the same level of briefing information as was given to the entrants of the original competition. The extreme nature of the design brief forces participants to think creatively about possible solutions. Rather than in-depth designs, we ask students to rapidly develop responses to the brief and then to test these against the design requirements. As such the design process is as important as the end result.
As with all the projects that we carry out of this nature, we make the teaching resources freely available via the Expedition Workshed site. Workshops such as these are located in the Undergraduate Staffroom area.

Link to Undergraduate Staffroom on Expedition Workshed Site.

About Expedition Workshed

Exploding concrete - and other teaching resources

With funding from CONSTRUCT and in collaboration with Imperial College Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s materials testing lab, we have created a suite of videos to support the teaching of the behaviour of reinforced concrete. The videos are the latest resources to appear in the virtual materials laboratory that forms part of Expedition Workshed.

Read an overview of Expedition Workshed

Visit the new concrete resources on Workshed

Follow this link to read the latest posts about this project on the Workshed blog

Building on the suite of pilot videos we produced in the summer of 2010, these new resources are intended to be the first in a whole raft of materials dedicated to exploring and unpicking the theory of this major construction material.

Our approach when developing materials for Workshed is to create resources that support teachers, rather than replace them. So while our videos show in great detail the behaviour of materials undergoing different tests, the interpretation is left to the teacher or the learner.

Accompanying each video is a downloadable diagram of the testing rig and a graph of the material behaviour. We provide students with suggestions of other videos that they should watch for comparison in order to help the develop cross-linkages between various concepts in their learning.

The complete list of tests is:
Compression testing of an ordinary concrete cylinder
Compression testing of a high-strength concrete cylinder
Compression testing of a high-strength cement cylinder
Compression testing of an ordinary concrete cube
Compression testing of a stocky reinforced concrete column
Tensile testing or a concrete cylinder (the ‘Brazilian test’)
Tensile testing of a high-tensile reinforcing bar
Tensile testing of a mild steel bar

JBM Excellence in Engineering Education Conference

Think Up designed and facilitated this half-day workshop designed to ask , ‘what is the best way to embed sustainability in the undergraduate civil engineering curriculum?’ The event was designed for the Joint Board of Moderators (JBM) and supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Our approach was to create a place for discussion about sustainability and learning that stimulates all the senses. We juxtaposed keynote speakers with thought-provoking installations, all designed to give lecturers new ideas for how they can teach sustainability.

The findings of the conference will shortly be available for download from this page.

Speakers
The afternoon started with key note presentations. Dan Epstein, former Head of Sustainability at the Olympic Delivery Authority, gave his view on the skills that engineers need to help deliver sustainability on construction projects. Ed McCann, currently Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Sustainability at the University of Strathclyde gave the key points of his paper on the neuroscience of learning and its relevance to teaching engineering.

Big Rig Low Carbon Skills Awareness Challenge

The Big Rig Low Carbon Skills Awarenes Challenge is the latest in a series of team build events designed by Think Up to help raise awareness of low-carbon technologies through hands-on learning. The series of one-day events, delivered in partnership with the College of North West London, is being run run from the 16th March to build up to the College's Industry Day, at which the Big Rig will take centre stage.

Earlier this year the college was successful in its bid to lead one of the first hubs of the National Skills Academy for Environmental Technologies. Think Up is a cluster member of this hub.

Using a pile of low-carbon construction technologies and waste construction material, the participants have a day to build a low-carbon shower. The event is hosted in the Big Rig, a three-storey outdoor workspace. Participants will have the hands-on opportunity to learn about solar PVs, solar-thermal water panels, rainwater harvesting, biomass boilers, energy efficiency in buildings and grey water recycling. The event is run as a competition between two teams of twelve, each competing to build the most efficient shower.

More about the Big Rig
Previous events hosted on the Big Rig

Low Carb - a low-carbon awareness raising event for people not currently in employment
Retrofit Rig - an exhibition stand for designed for ConstructionSkills aimed at raising low-carbon awareness among contractors
Winter Water Warmer - a low-carbon awareness-raising event for schools, used as part of the launch of the Waltham Forest Construction Training Centre

Think Make Test Play – exhibition stand for IStructE

In January the Institution of Structural Engineers commissioned Think Up to design its stand for the Big Bang 2011 Science Fair at London’s Excel centre. Their brief was to create a stand that would communicate the fun and creative side of structural engineering to 11 to 16-year-olds.

Working with our sister communications design company thomas.matthews our response was Think Make Test Play.

Visitors are attracted to the Think Make Test Play stand by a constantly evolving 2.5 metre high sculpture constructed interlocking cardboard octagons. Visitors are challenged against the clock to build the tallest tower they can, using these same octagons thinking, making, testing and playing as they go.

With imaginations captured, visitors can learn about the creative process of designing several iconic structures, and can play with computer models of these structures hosted on the Expedition Workshed website.

Catastrophe! - warning, this is addictive

Catastrophe! is a (highly addictive!) computer game that we developed to give school children an exciting taster for structural engineering by giving them the chance to take well-known structures to the brink of destruction – and sometimes beyond. Try it out yourself.

The development of this game is a collaboration with Gennaro Senatore from our sister company MustRd and with support from Daniel Piker .
The aim of the game is to reduce the number of elements in the structure to as few as possible without the structure falling down. To play, select 'gravity' and 'remove bars' from the left hand side, then click on bars to remove them. Select 'forces' and the bars will light up according to how stressed they are. Use the left and right arrows to toggle between famous structures.

Workshed was originally designed to support civil and structural engineering teaching at universities. This pilot computer game signals our intention to develop tools that are available for a younger age group; however, if the response from staff at Expedition is anything to go by, this game will be very distracting for people of all ages.

Visiting Professor of Innovation, University of Strathclyde

In the academic year 2010 - 2011, Think Up Director Ed McCann was appointed Visiting Professor of Innovation at the department of Civil Engineering at the University of Strathclyde.

This Visiting Professorship, supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, is part of an industry-into-academia technology transfer initiative. It is based on the experience-led education concept, whereby senior industrial engineers are appointed as Visiting Professors at specific universities to enrich the engineering undergraduate curriculum with the latest industrial technology and practices to enhance the quality and capabilities of UK engineering graduates.

The purpose of Ed’s appointment was primarily to work with the Strathclyde staff to develop innovations in the teaching of structural engineering. He worked closely with staff at the university, and in particular with EmeritusProfessor Iain MacLeod to establish a new set of fundamental principles on which to build a 21st century structural engineering teaching curriculum.

Their work provides the theoretical underpinning that informs the development of the Expedition Workshed. The findings of this work will be published in a paper in 2012, and will form the basis of Ed's work at UCL to where his Visiting Professorship was transferred for the academic year 2011 - 2012.

Ed will stay on at Strathclyde as a Visiting Professor and will be back up in Glasgow twice a year.

The Big Rig

The Big Rig is a robust and adaptable mobile teaching and demonstration space designed by Think Up. It is a flexible environment that can be adapted to suit the specific requirements of different learning scenarios.

Think Up uses the Big Rig to host Project Boxes: individual training events that have been designed especially for delivery using the Big Rig. Check out a video of our first Big Rig Project Box: Low Carb.

We use the Big Rig to create learning experiences that are exciting, realistic and challenging. Our approach is to help individuals learn by using their own creative resources to design their own solutions. In doing so, we are not just transforming learning, we are transforming the learners.

Find out more about Project Boxes that are complete or under development:

Low Carb at the Big Rig

The ConstructionSkills Retrofit Rig

Low Carbon Skills training using the Big Rig (coming soon)

Big Rig for schools (coming soon)

Whether you are in the education or commercial sector we can work with you to deliver imaginative and high-impact training and demonstrations using the Big Rig. Contact us to find out more.

Student Studio

Student Studio was developed in response to a commonly observed problem: in a busy office under pressure it can be very difficult to offer meaningful work experience to students. Being new to the workplace, students can hardly be expected to produce professional-standard work and it is time-consuming to conceive of meaningful tasks for the student. Indeed supervisors may not be aware of what experience would be most relevant to their studies.

Student Studio overcomes these challenges by providing sector-specific projects in an easy-to-follow online format that provide a well designed framework for the student’s work experience. Student Studio projects challenge students to meet their own project brief, and so the initiative for their work comes from the students themselves. The activities pages for each project deliberately prompt the students to think about how they can make the most of the resources around them in the host company. And when the supervisors have got that last minute meeting to dash off to, they can be reassured that the student has plenty to be getting on with.

The development of the Student Studio website has been funded by the Useful Simple Trust. In early 2010, ICE Quest agreed to fund the development of two Student Studio project packs aimed at raising the quality of work experience in the construction sector. Specifically, these projects have been developed to tie in with the curriculum of the Construction and the Built Environment Diploma, but are designed to be suitable for any student wishing to find out more about the construction sector.

Expedition Workshed

Expedition Workshed is a collection of high-impact online tools to support the teaching of civil and structural engineering.

Visit the Workshed site

Since early 2010 Think Up has been working with Expedition and its other sister companies in the Useful Simple Trust to develop and implement exciting new content for the site. The Workshed site is being used by universities across the UK and now in the Americas. As well as supporting undergraduate teaching we are also developing Workshed resources to support teachers in schools.

Visit the Workshed blog to follow the latest news on new content and who is using Workshed

Think Up is responsible for the operation and development of the site content. Follow the links below to read more about the development of Workshed content.
Push-Me-Pull-Me – interactive online structural models
Material testing videos – high definition professionally produced videos exploring material failure
Projects – inspirational videos about people, projects and ideas
Drawing Board – how engineers use sketching to communicate
Catastrophe - the addictive structureal engineering game



Background
We have been closely involved with the education of engineers since the late 1990’s through teaching, participation in Industrial Liaison Boards and 5 years membership of the Joint Board of Moderators, the organisation responsible for accrediting civil engineering courses in the UK. During that time we have seen significant drivers for change in the teaching of civil and structural engineering at HE-level: increased student numbers; increased importance of research; and the different character and makeup of the student population, both in terms of their academic formation and attitudes to learning.
These drivers have presented very significant challenges to the institutions responsible for engineering education, for example: lower student standards of maths and physics; less experience of building by hand; teaching space and resources having not grown to match student numbers; engineering academics with less experience of practice.

We developed Expedition Workshed as a suite of teaching tools designed to respond to these challenges. Read more about the on-going development of each of these tools by choosing from the list below:

Build Camp - for 14 to 17 year-olds

Build Camp is a week-long construction event where forty 14 to 19 year-olds design and build their own railway line using real construction methods and materials. It gives students an introduction to the varied and exciting world of civil engineering by getting their hands dirty and working as part of a real construction team. In the end they'll have the satisfaction of delivering a railway line built at a 1:10 scale that they'll be able to ride on at the end of the course.

On the first day, the participants will survey three potential routes for the railway line and then choose one. The second day comprises of a guided process for designing the civil engineering structures for their route: cuttings; a causeway; a bridge; and the permanent way. The rest of the week is then spent working in teams doing everything from supervising construction plant operations and planning site logistics, through to pouring concrete and shovelling earth, so that by the end of the week they can cross the site on a train using their new line.

Build Camp is produced in such a way that the students have a real challenge to overcome. Only through the application of engineering principles and team work can the challenge be surmounted.

Time for design and build will be very limited so the participants will have to work under pressure. They will work with real construction materials and in close proximity to large-scale construction plant; while the health and safety training they receive will create a safe learning environment. Certainly the site will look and feel realistic and challenging....particularly when it rains.

British Council Communications Workshop

Think Up was approached by the British Council to design a communications and media skills workshop for participants on the 2010 Global Fellowship.

The Global Fellowship is a Department for Education initiative which sends 100 promising young adults to Brazil, India and China to learn about the global economy. On their return the Fellows are required to communicate their stories to their peers and communities through creative means. The workshop, run by media professionals, was designed to give them the tools to do this, as well as teaching them how to handle hostile or negative interviews with the media.

Held at the British Council offices in July, the intensive one-day event was co-ordinated by Think Up associates Sabine Pusch and Oliver Broadbent. Sabine brought her 20 years’ experience in broadcast media to bear, ensuring that the core skills needed were taught to the highest standard. In order to maintain the classic Think Up style of hands-on, participative learning, the workshop was designed as a series of ‘carousel stops’, where smaller groups each concentrated on the following elements: storytelling (how to structure a good story); interview skills (the art of a good interview and how to deal with difficult questions); photographic techniques (how to use a video and stills camera), and editing skills (how to hone the recorded material into an entertaining and informative piece).

The finale of the training workshop was a ‘press gaggle’, inspired by the US TV series The West Wing. During this session, half of the group played the role of an aggressive press corps in a staged press conference, while the other half attempted to answer their questions. The aim was to give participants further practice at handling hostile media situations as well as encouraging them to think more like a journalist when approaching their own pieces.

Constructionarium

The sharp end of an engineer’s education. Whilst at Imperial College and working with John Doyle Construction, Chris and Ed conceived, designed and implemented the Constructionarium. This is a one week, site-based, down and dirty, multi award-winning educational program which gives hands-on experience of construction for undergraduate engineers.

Unlike other sorts of site “experience” the Constructionarium allows students to organise, resource, fund, and then actually do the construction work. The Constructionarium now involves the successful collaboration of dozens of companies and universities. Over half the undergraduate civil engineers in the UK now attend the Constructionarium as part of their degree course.

The Retrofit Rig

Think Up was commissioned by ConstructionSkills to create an exhibition stand based on The Big Rig. The aim was to create a destination for discussing, learning about and getting to grips with the low-carbon construction technologies associated with retrofitting buildings. To create this stand we worked closely with our sister communication design company thomas.matthews. The result is The Retrofit Rig.

Click here to see a ConstructionSkills video about the Retrofit Rig at the Interbuild 2010 exhibition at the NEC. In this environment the Retrofit Rig became the ideal halfway space between a corporate stand and an exhibition space.

The concept for the stand is to take visitors on a journey. The scene is set at the entry to the stand: what is driving the construction sector towards retrofitting buildings. Visitors then learn about the specific construction sector technologies used in retrofit. In the building fabric zone, visitors get to see and touch external insulation being applied to a wall.
In the environmental technology zone, solar panels suspended high above the ground power a demonstration of how energy can be demonstrated in the home.

The final stop on the journey is the forum, a space for debate and discussion about the practicalities of retrofitting buildings.

Online materials testing laboratory

As part of our work developing Expedition Workshed (http://www.expeditionworkshed.org/), we are creating an virtual materials testing laboratory. With more and more civil engineering departments being forced to shut down their materials labs, fewer and fewer students get the chance to see how materials behave under load. We created the Materials Room on Workshed to link together really high-quality resources that show how different materials behave.

Read an overview of Expedition Workshed

Visit the Materials

Read about our stunning videos of concrete exploding under compression.

With more and more universities shutting the doors to the materials testing labs, fewer and fewer students get the opportunity to witness material behaviour first hand – to witness the brittle behaviour of an under-reinforced beam; or to watch a bolt tear through a sheet of metal. For those students who can visit a material testing lab, the experience is often a one-off, without the opportunity to review and closely interrogate what they see.

We designed Stuff Failure to be an online materials testing laboratory where students can watch these tests over and over again. Of course, producing videos of material testing and posting them online is nothing new. Unfortunately the collection of materials online is of relatively poor quality and the range of easily available material is surprisingly limited.

To produce our videos, we have made careful consideration of framing, lighting and camera speed. The use of high-speed allows us to view details invisible to the naked eye. The intention is for these clips to be as memorable as the iconic shadow graph image of the shock waves produced by a bullet travelling at high speed that many of us may remember.

Building Magazine: What the pooping man told us October 2010

Engineers' wizardry is beyond question, but they still suffer from a cultural cringe when it comes to the question of creativity. Luckily Chris Wise met someone who explained the whole thing - sculptor Antony Gormley

The Bridge from Ipanema

In conversation with Sabine Pusch, Chris Wise reveals that the Millennium Bridge would play the opening chord of 'The Girl from Ipanema' if we just had big enough ears to appreciate it. Then he continues by musing on the sounds that buildings emit as they move; perhaps he's opened up a whole new field of structural engineering?

Please click the link below to hear the podcast:
ipanema_1_mixdown.mp3

Chris Wise, 1st july 2010
In my innocence I agree to speak on the cultural crossovers between Engineering, Architecture and Music. I will be in a trio with Ranulph Glanville, architectural theorist, and Michael Bochmann, violinist. Michael will bring his string orchestra, the Water City “band”, so we dovetail with quite a posh concert. But my little part causes me considerable soul-searching. For this is all to take place as part of their cultural embrace of the London Festival of Architecture in the Great Hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Not a venue where fools are suffered gladly.

I meet Ranulph for breakfast near the Festival Hall, and over scrambled eggs we decide to blindfold the concert audience in the drinks break and ask them to wander about chanting pure vowel sounds.....so that they can really tune themselves in to each other and to the great architectural spaces through which are moving. Reverberation, grand architecture, humans....the links should all be marvellously clear. Three days later our jolly wheeze is ruled out by Health and Safety, so we are left with nothing but the chance to ruin a perfectly good concert with our unrehearsed ramblings.

Then I remember other bits of musical engineering interaction; the late lamented engineer Tony Fitzpatrick and I once called the bluff of some eminent property developers on how train rumbles might affect their buildings over railways. We advertised a physical demo of the rumbles.... Everyone arrived at a big conference room we’d furnished with an impressive hi-fi and some giant loudspeakers, which were all switched off. Out of sight, turned on under the table was a springy lump of steel which magnetically shook with recordings of real trains. The lump was so big that its wobbles could set off a harmonic response in the floor and the walls.

After a rather fine discussion about acoustics and the technicalities of human perception. someone said “I’m fed up with mumbo-jumbo.....when are you going to start the train vibrations?”. Of course, from the moment he walked in the unseen steel lump had been shaking both him and the floor and he hadn’t felt a thing.

Chris Manning the acoustician then explained how the walls, floors and volumes of a building could be a musical instrument.... just like Michael Bochmann’s violin.

Natural harmonics, from atoms to tides, walls to bridges to violins. When we walk, each foot comes down about once a second. Our resting heart pumps at about a beat a second. Most natural things have a fundamental rhythm, and some, say a hummingbird or a Ferrari engine, a vibration so pure that they make a recognizable musical note..I found myself thinking, if only our ears were as big as parachutes, we could “hear” the built environment and wouldn’t that be quite something?

Here was a cue for the cultural crossover. Take the Millennium Bridge, from my own past. Arup’s seminal paper gives three fundamental wobbling frequencies, one for each span, which I convert into very deep musical notes. Eight octaves below middle C, way below the threshold of human hearing, you’d need a violin the size of a battleship to play them.

Play those same notes in a higher harmonic and we can hear the natural voice of the bridge. Michael Bochmann lent me his double bass player who played the first note, the pure vibration of the north span....which turned out to be a very very low C. A whale in Antarctica wrote in to complain. Then a cello played the south span, a G. You may know these are harmonically linked as part of a C chord, but surely that’s just a fluke. What would the middle span do.....could the bridge complete the chord with an E, or would it dissolve into a discordant racket? Logic said it should be a discord. Another cello played the note....and it wasn’t the rest of the C chord, but a B.

Then they all played together, and at that moment the beauty and exquisite irony of the natural world and our interaction with it were revealed. For if you add B to C and G, you don’t just get a boring old C chord (like the first chord of the national anthem). Instead, the B turns it into the chord of C major seventh. In our culture, we hear that as jazz, but it’s even more popular in Latin dance....in tango, samba and mambo. So there we are in the Institution’s Great Hall...the strings playing the natural sound of the Millennium Bridge, a great all consuming Cmaj7th chord. Over the top of it, Michael Bochmann plays “The Girl from Ipanema” on his ancient violin, the ode to Brazilian girlhood, the audience sway, and all is well with the world. How appropriate, after all its troubles, that the Millennium Bridge is not just wobbling, it’s singing a bossa nova.

Skills for the Low Carbon Economy

Think Up was commissioned by Podium Skills London to design a facilitate a workshop to investigate how FE colleges could provide the skills training that London needs to develop the low-carbon capital of the future. The event took place at Eversheds on 29th March. The workshop, being highly participative , was based on the Greengaged model of event delivery: a series of highly interactive working groups punctuated by short presentations from experts.

Present at the event were representatives from the LDA, LSC, SummitSkills, ConstructionSkills and thirteen FE colleges.

Professor Sa’ad medhat, of the New Engineering Foundation, spoke about how innovation is being supported in the delivery of low-carbon skills development. Martin Watson, of the Building Research Establishment, described the technologies that the workforce of the future would need to be able to deliver. Ed McCann, Director of Think Up, gives Think Up’s analysis of whole-life learning and the role that FE can play.

The event was hosted by Think Up Associate Sheila Hoile who gathered the outcomes from the workshop as captured on multi-coloured post-it notes, and who will be writing a report of the recommendations from this workshop. This report will be available for download from this website when it is ready.

Low Carb at the Big Rig

Select the 'video' option on the right to see our 'Low Carb at the Big Rig' film

Low Carb was a two-day construction event designed to encourage unskilled and unemployed Londoners to make the most of the employment opportunities in the burgeoning low-carbon construction sector. Forty-five participants, split into two teams, were given an array of low-carbon technologies - solar thermal water heaters, PV panels, super-insulation - and brief to a low-carbon shower unit. As well as giving the participants valuable work experience, they also had the chance to meet representatives from local FE colleges to find out how the skills they need to get employment in the burgeoning low-carbon construction sector.

Low Carb, designed for Podium Skills London, was hosted in the Big Rig, a three-storey scaffolding cube conceived by Think Up as a flexible and robust environment for action-based learning. For this event, the Big Rig was plumbed up to spray water – rainwater for the participants to capture and feed into their shower systems. The event was run in conjunction with the National Construction College, Newham.

The visual identity for the Big Rig was designed by thomas.matthews, whose work included designing the Big Rig's information panels and briefing packs.

Practical creativity

Creativity is a term burdened by preconceptions and differing interpretations. It means something different to each individual. It is also essential to all kids of business particularly in the current challenging environment. Creative solutions need to be found. But the creative process is one that is illusive and difficult to explain. We recognize creative types but not the attributes that makes them so.

Through the course of this workshop we explore definitions, tools and techniques to enable the birth, nurturing and growth of sound ideas…. and how to get better at generating ideas that are recognised and then used as creative solutions.
Most recently we were invited by Macmillan Cancer Support to run this workshop to help them generate and develop solutions to improve digital media support services.

Teaching design workshops at the Polytechnic de Catalunia

Ed McCann has an ongoing relationship with the Polytechnic de Catalunia in Barcelona, which gives him a chance to practice his Spanish and consume plenty of fine Catalunian grub.

In 2008 he was one of a number of nationally and internationally recognised engineers invited to deliver one day design workshops to students on the Creative Engineering Masters Degree run by Xavier Font. Ed’s workshop involved group discussions on both the nature of the project process and the role of design in that process. The group were introduced to the Artist, Artisan & Philosopher models of design and invited to assess their own tendencies. Much of the day was spent in a conceptual design exercise where the students worked in groups of 6 to develop conceptual proposals for the canopy of the Capodechino underground Station in Naples, which is a project currently being undertaken by Expedition with Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners. The teams presented their work and carried out formal “crit” sessions on the other groups. The feedback on the workshop was excellent and as a result Ed has been invited back in 2010.

Ed was invited in 2009 by the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació (the Catalonian Foundation for Research and Innovation) to be one of 3 international experts on education to present at the ENGINYCAT conference to debate the future of engineering education in Catalunya. Ed’s presentation focused primarily on the relationship between industry and academic institutions and provided both a critique of the status quo as well as providing examples of best practice. In so doing Ed was drawing extensively on his experience as an industrialist teaching at Imperial College and as one of the originators of the highly successful Constructionarium program as well as his current experience as a member of the Joint Board of Moderators, the body responsible for accreditation of civil and structural engineering programmes in the UK.

Engineering Conversations

Think Up is developing a number of workshops and events to help engineers communicate better be it through drawing, speaking, writing or the medium of video, we are helping engineers find ways to communicate that suit them as well as the audience so that their story can be heard. Keep an eye out on the news board and forum for events that related to this theme.

That engineers need to be able to communicate - to clients, the public and with each other - is no revelation; it is not for nothing that communication skills form a core part of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ requirements for professional qualification. With the importance of communication skills clearly acknowledged, why then is there a perennial anxiety among engineers about their status in society. It could just be that while they have the communication skills, engineers don’t yet know how to tell their story.

Royal Designers for Industry Summer School

In their capacity as Royal Designers for Industry, Tim O’Brien and Chris Wise developed this residential program that brings together 12 of the UK’s most eminent designers with 30 young and talented designers from all disciplines. The purpose of the RDI summer school is to engender transformations of perception and understanding among all involved about the world and their part in it. We believe that the summer school exercises its positive influence on society at large through the daily work of the participants, many of go on to become highly influential in their particular fields.

Greener by Design: Talk at the Royal Institution

This talk by Chris Wise was at the august and venerable Royal Institution in London, sharing the platform with RIBA President Sunand Prasad.

Aimed at raising green awareness among designers about the energy consequences of their design decisions, the talk used as its evidence four iconic stadia, including the Birds Nest and Watercube in Beijing, Stadium Australia, and the new Velodrome being designed by Expedition Engineering and Hopkins Architects for 2012.

To make life easy for the speaker among others, their embodied energy performance was rated using a traffic light system more familiar to the purchasers of washing machines. On this basis, the much-feted Birds Nest came out 9 times worse per seat than its equivalent in Sydney, designed 8 years earlier. Such is progress. But a fine chat between speakers and audience took place afterwards in the RI foyer bar.

Engineering Unchained at the RSA, London

At the request of the learned 250 year old Royal Society of Arts in London, Chris Wise and Ed McCann spoke freely about the Watershed in contemporary engineering life. Held in October 2001, the talk was chaired by Sir Christopher Frayling, of the Royal College of Arts. Click on download on the right of this page to read the whole talk.

In Chris Frayling's words, it was "More of a performance than a lecture". With its theme developed out of the question: "Why do we need engineers?", Ed began by noting that we'd all be in the poo if Joseph Bazalgette hadn't sorted out London's Victorian Great Stink, and things went from there.

They spoke about the principal of Dominant Uncertainty (the thing that is most likely to keep you awake at night). The dominant uncertainty might once have been "Will I catch the Black Death from the Ether?", while today's dominant uncertainty might be "What are we to do about global warming?". Of course engineers can play a great part in solving the technological problems of rising sea-levels, or over-dependence on fossil fuels, but traditionally they are too busy doing hard sums to take their heads up from their calculatiors and log tables. Nevertheless, in the digital age, they are potentially freed from the tyranny of mathematics, and can use their undoubted talents of logic, problem solving, and engagement with the natural world at a more fundamental level, if only they want to. This is the Unchained part of the title of the talk.

In amongst the mayhem, as a demonstration of the power of new technological tools, Chris ran a structural analysis of a 50 storey skyscraper in 3 seconds, something that wouldn't have been possible in the olden days.

The Infinity Bridge (with Alloy Wheels) at the Building Centre

"The Infinity Bridge With Alloy Wheels" was the name of an exhibition held to celebrate Expedition's bridge in Stockton. It took place at the Building Centre for 3 months in the summer of 2009, and was launched with a talk by Chris Wise, and a party. The exhibition was put together by two of the family of companies owned by the Useful Simple Trust, so Expedition Engineering designed the bridge, and thomas.matthews designed the exhibition. The exhibition took its name from a quote from a Stockton Resident who said that if the bridge was a car it would be a silver Ford Mondeo (good value) with alloy wheels (touch of class!).

Designed by 23 companies led by Expedition Engineering, the 180m long footbridge forms part of the major Tees Valley Regeneration project. It was born out of Maggie Thatcher's 1987 confrontation with unemployed Eric Fletcher, a Walk in the Wilderness; on the very same site. The exceptionally slender double bow form of the bridge is a unique response to the local culture, the site and the natural forces there. It was largely built by local people. Free of fancy thrills the bridge is carefully and rationally detailed and was opened in a blaze of fireworks and beer in the presence of 10,000 Stocktonites.

The opening talk was more of a celebration of the bridge than a technological tour-de-force, and included the back story of the dereliction and rejuvenation of the industrial North East as a backdrop. Much of the bridge was made with pride by the local people, and their pithy observations were included in amongst the welds, cranes and piledrivers.

Being a Sport - Building Magazine 21/08/09

In this fifth article in the series, Chris Wise draws some interesting parallels between the discipline of sports and (building)industry professionals.

Read the full article at the Building Magazine website.

Lost In Translation - Building Magazine 13/07/09

In Building article, Chris Wise talks about how "designers can have 10 great ideas before breakfast, but if they can't find ways of making the bureaucracies that run our world understand them, they're doomed."

Read the full article on the Building magazine website

The Bridge On the River Tees - Building Magazine 29/05/09

Chris Wise writes about the Bridge over the River Tees and how it fits into Stockton.

Read the full article here.

Human Beans - Building Magazine 24/03/09

Chris Wise talks about how, "our percentage fee culture treats architects and engineers like commodities and actually pays them less the better their designs work," in his third article for Building Magazine's comment column. He says it's time for a rethink.

"Its bananas. The harder we work, the less we get paid, and we can't blame the recession." Read full article.

The World in a Pencil - Building Magazine 20/03/09

In this article Chris Wise discusses the pencil line and asks why engineers don't make more use of it.

Read the full article here.

Stop Navel Gazing And Look Up - Building Magazine 03/02/09

In the first of a series of articles published every 6 weeks or so, Chris Wise writes about the construction industry and its failure to recognise that "there's a bigger universe out there". Full Article on the Building website.

Velodreams

Velodreams was a competition to design an Olympic Velodrome which was run nationally in late 2007 to schools across London. The program was choreographed by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), as part of their schools engagement programme and designed to inspire and share some of the 2012 Olympic adventure with school children from age 8 up. As part of their prize, finalists from 10 schools were treated to an educational two day "prize-winner’s" event in London.

On 27 Feb 08 at the Lee Valley Indoor Athletics Club, Expedition led the first day - where the finalists joined forces to create a 1:5th scale Velodrome, engineered by Chris Wise, Ed McCann and the Expedition Team. The structure was constructed out of bamboo, gaffer tape and string … and there were many at the event who amazed themselves as their baby Velodrome came together and eventually stood up! The event was topped off with a personal appearance from 19 year old BMX world champion Sineze Read...... who spent all afternoon thrilling the pupils as they asked her about her motivation, training and inspirations. All materials were recycled after the event.

The Giant Roman Catapult - March 2007

The largest weapon the Romans ever built was described by the Greek Philon. It was 23 tonne torsion spring catapult 8m tall, used as a siege engine. It was said to be able to throw rocks 1ft in diameter at least 100 yards. Energy for each throw was stored in special ropes made from the very springy Achilles tendons of cattle.

For our big Cat, all constructed and erected in green oak by Carpenter Oak and Woodland, we did all projectile and trajectory studies, parametric studies of geometry and stresses, 3D visualisations and assembly mockups, materials selection, all working drawings, mechanical drawings and erection/safety dossiers.In this, we were greatly helped by Alan Wilkins, classical archaeologist, who provided definitive interpretations of the texts of the ancient engineers Vitruvius and Philon and provided us with literal interpretations of them in sketch form as the basis of our own work.

Meusnier’s Airship - October 2006

Jean-Baptiste Meusnier was a French soldier who designed the world’s first airship in 1784……only 6 months after the Montgolfier brothers first hot-air balloon ascent. Meusnier himself was killed in battle, so his ideas never became reality. But he was way ahead of his time….many of his technological ideas became an intrinsic part of the mammoth airships of the 20th Century. Expedition set out to turn his ideas into reality, engineering them into a plausible replica with experts including the doyen of ballooning, Don Cameron RDI. And then, after an intensive training regime, Chris flew it as part of a crew of 4 at Cardington, beginning with a trial flight indoors in one of the giant R101 hangars.

The Great Millennium Gamble - March 2006

In this program Ed visits the Millennium Bridge and interviews Chris Wise who (as you may gather elsewhere on this website) was largely responsible for “old wobbly”. Sitting in Zelda’s wine bar, where the original idea was dreamt up, Chris explains the conceptual origins of the bridge and the problems that occurred. Later, in the laboratories of Imperial College, Ed demonstrates the problem of pedestrian induced lateral excitation (the origin of the wobble) with the aid of some skateboards! Finally, Sophie le Bourva of ARUP describes the solution that they developed and successfully implemented.
Ed also visits the Falkirk Millennium Wheel, a project that he worked on as a young whipper snapper. He meets with George Ballinger the Chief Engineer for British Waterways in Scotland. George was involved in the project from the very start and gives Ed a guided tour around the wheel explaining how this 1800 tonne wheel moves smoothly around using only the power of a few electric kettles and has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Scotland.

Rollercoaster - March 2006

The program explores the world of rollercoaster design. Ed meets with John Roberts a structural engineer who has become something of a specialist in rollercoaster design and Dave Rothwell an engineer responsible for the operation, maintenance and safety of rollercoasters.Together they explore the Big One at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach a “hyper coaster“ where the cars reach speeds of over 90mph. Ed also builds a simple model to explain the principles behind their design.

Performance Boosters - March 2006

This program explores two areas where engineers work to improve the performance of sportsmen and sportswomen. Ed meets Vaughan Lovelock the inventor of a headband to help professional footballers improve the accuracy when heading the ball. Together with the young footballers of Sheffield United and the scientists of Sheffield university they put the device to the test.
The program also explores how engineers get involved in designing things to help the disabled. The program focuses on Gary Sanderson a disabled athlete attempting to qualify for the 2008 Para-Olympics. The program explores how a team of bio-mechanical engineers are helping him achieve his goal by developing a special splint.

Drebbel’s Submarine 1620

Allegedly King James once journeyed underwater from Westminster to Greenwich. Contemporary accounts say that he did this in a special boat that was rowed, invisibly, underwater... the fact that the Thames of the day was a brown murky soup and that they would have had to navigate the world’s first “sub” through the weir of the Old London Bridge make it all the more of a challenge. How did they do it?? ...unable to see where they were going, and unable to breathe (as oxygen wasn’t isolated as a breathing gas until many years later). For the design of the sub, Expedition did intensive design and analysis, prototypes and 3D visualisations and models for all the key components. This included pressure and stress calculations for an operational depth of 7m, buoyancy and stability analysis, buoyancy tank systems and pipework, test sequences and evaluation, safety protocols and much more... the sub was finally launched in Eton College’s rowing lake.

Body Builders - March 2006

This program shows how engineers work with the disabled to help them enjoy a better quality of life... and specifically deals with the cases of June Grinstead and Malcolm Gilbertson both victims of serious car crashes and both needing artificial limbs.

Imperial College Creative Design

Chris Wise was Professor of Design at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London from 1998 until 2005. From 2000 he was

Save the Children: Kenyan Playgrounds

One of Save the Children (UK) operations is at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya near the border with Somalia. Dadaab is the biggest refugee camp in the world with over 162,000 children and the provision of structured and supervised play is extremely limited. Working on site at Dadaab with Save the Children, Ed McCann & Julia Ratcliffe have developed a program for the development of four Child Friendly Spaces within the camps as a first step towards addressing this problem. The program is based on the local community designing, constructing and operating the facilities with our support.

Tallest Tower Stunt

Chris and Ed asked the freshers in the design class at Imperial College to design, manufacture, transport and construct a stable tower that was as tall as possible in a restricted site

Royal Institution Friday Discourse: Time Travel

Venue: Royal Institution, Friday Discourse, a lecture series going back centuries.
Audience: Members of Royal Institution
Held in March 2002

We are only a thousand generations from the Neanderthals and Chris Wise is only one generation from a Southampton University degree.

Juggling art, science and nature he once spoke about what Renzo Piano calls “the turbocharged application of experience” in the design of everything from skyscrapers to sculpture. What the future holds, who knows, but Chris is one of many engineers designing it right now so let’s hope Southampton taught him something useful. Engineering education was and still is up in the air, and he tried to tempt it to head off to Utopia using the recommendations of the Institution of Civil Engineers or more likely, a rocket-propelled sketching laptop attached to his (now extinct) one-day-a-week professorship at Imperial College.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
(US Office of Patents, 1899)

“ !!! ”
(CW)

Egyptian Shaft Tomb - March 2002

The great nobles of Ancient Egypt were buried in stately tombs covered in hieroglyphics. In celebrated cases the body itself was place inside a 100 tonne granite sarcophagus. Almost all of these ancient Egyptian Tombs were burgled by tomb raiders... except for those of one particular type….the “shaft tomb”. These tombs were booby trapped with super dry desert sand which would flood the tomb and drown the thieves they before they could get away with their booty. We set out to discover how they did it, beginning with the not-insignificant task of working out how they placed the 100 tonne sarcophagus at the bottom of a 30m deep shaft.

Our researches showed us how the Egyptians used sand hydraulics to move these enormous weights under complete control (a technique revived for the construction of the huge cross girders on the Eiffel Tower).

The Millennium Bridge at a scale of 1:26.7

The design group at Imperial College built a scale model of the Millennium Bridge including its foundations using the same construction system as the real project. They were provided with a scale site and the additional physical and negotiated constraints on the design and construction process.

Rockin Ron the Paper Robot

As part of design teaching at Imperial College Chris and Ed asked students to design and build a mechanical robot with two legs and feet, two arms with hands, and a head with a lower jaw. The group researched their own bodies (and each other's with owner's consent!) and drew the system before building it.

This is how Leonardo da Vinci learned and it should be ok for us too.