Month / October 2025

by shannonchance

Grab your popcorn! YouTube ethical & sustainable engineering

Our SEFI keynote about socially responsible engineering is now on YouTube!

It opens with the launch of our handbook on teaching ethics in engineering. Next, we discuss a strategy for making the necessary changes in engineering education to address turbulent times.

Below, I share fun pics of SEFI, as posting this is a chance to relive the excitement! From the launch:

A significant — unexpected — highlight of the SEFI conference was receiving the award for the BEST RESEARCH PAPER of the entire conference! I accepted the ward on behalf of my PhD student, soon-to-be Dr Sandra Cruz!

Here I’m being awarded by Professor John Mitchell and congratulated by my co-editors of the European Journal of Engineering Education.

The official photographer captured the conference vibe:

And the SEFI Director General, architect Klara Ferdova, captured and shared other behind-the-scenes moments, like Gillian Saunders-Smit and me at the Moonmin Museum:

And here are Klara’s photos of the keynote! An architect’s eye for structure and composition, Klara has!

And finally, here’s the official SEFI photo, showing the whole happy family!

If you’re interested in teaching engineering well, please join us for next year’s SEFI conference in Prague!

by shannonchance

Material reuse in architecture

This past Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of reviewing studio work and giving architecture students feedback on prototypes they have been developing to reuse scrap materials from the woodworking shops at the School of Architecture, Building and Environment (SABE) at TU Dublin.

A cool transformer-type system that can be moved and easily set-up.

The students are helping support the circular economy, and learning to work together.

This is a vertical architecture studio, comprised of second and third year students.

A corbelled system that can be reconfigured dozens of ways.

Each team as allocated a collection of cast-off wood sheets or wood planks to use to make a small structure. The structure needed to be at least 3 meters in at least one direction.

From the reminders of CNC routing

This architecture studio is led by Marcin Wojcik and Kevin Donovan. The project is also tied to a grant from Ireland’s Housing Authority to study how to modularize materials brought to construction sites, but never used to allow them to be reused elsewhere. Marcin and Kevin are doing the grant-funded project with Noel Brady.

And I am an enthusiastic observer, doing what I can to help my colleagues get more involved in research.

Reviewing the proposal by Group 4.

Overall, the work I saw presented and the level of attentiveness and collegiality among the students were all highly impressive! They have done all this in just three weeks. 

A pavilion for bird watching; intriguing lessons in tension and compression.

I was excited enough about the work I saw to convince Marcin to draft a short conference paper, which he accomplished over the weekend. It’s about the outcomes of this three-week assignment, how it has evolved over the years, and the implications of Friday’s presentations for the grant-funded project.

Kevin and I are editing Marcin’s draft today, so I’d better get to it!

Hope you have enjoyed seeing the students’ collaborative work! I was thrilled they agreed to let me post photos of them and what they designed and constructed.

Working with knots and catenary curves.