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Driving them wild at the Dana Centre

By Hilary L Jackson, on 21 May 2014

The sun shone on South Kensington last Tuesday as five intrepid researchers, and around a hundred members of the audience, took Focus on the Positive on its first foray beyond Fitzrovia (well, Bloomsbury).

Our fearless host and former prizewinner Hannah Fry welcomed the audience to the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, encouraged them to listen carefully to the researchers, and choose their favourite project to win the £2000 prize.

IMG_7941First up, Clemence Cavoli (UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering) told us about chapas, the main transport option in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. Chapas provide transport to thousands of people each day, but they’re privately run, hard to predict, and completely unmapped. For £2000, Clemence and her colleague Joaquin want to start working with chapas drivers to map their routes in the city. Can they make a map as successful as the London tube map?

Next came Nikos Papadosifos (also UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering), crutches in hand, to tell us why the sticks given to most of us by the NHS are not doing us justice. He asked for help to create a handle design the won’t cause the common problems of elbow and shoulder inflammation and skin irritation.

IMG_7955After Nikos, UCL urban food researcher Marina Chang talked about her love of the Calthorpe Project. Marina told us that urban gardens are rarely productive, but Calthorpe is exceptional. The thirty-year-old city garden, on busy Gray’s Inn Road, has just installed a biodigester, but they need more space to grow vegetables and capitalise on the heat and fertilizer they create. Would the audience help Marina buy polytunnels and other materials to expand Calthorpe’s vegetable patch?

IMG_7974Tia Kansara, UCL Energy Institute, told the audience about her plans to create a zero waste area in North London. Could the communities of Primrose Hill come together to reduce, reuse and recycle their unwanted resources. Tia is already working with local people to do this, but needs some help to bring people together and make new connections.

IMG_7991Finally, Isabel Christie (UCL Medical Physics and Bioengineering) showed us the difference between good and bad scientific animation. Great animation, Isabel argued, can bring scientific concepts to life, but poor animation, often made by scientists using powerpoint, is the norm. In the long term, Isabel wants to create a graduate degree course for scientific animators to develop their skills. Would the audience help her to scope this by paying for a workshop this summer, bringing together experts in the field?

The audience quizzed the speakers soundly in half an hour and confidently made their decisions. Hannah asked them to provide their own drumroll before announcing that Clemence was the winner! Clemence and Joaquin will be taking £2000 to Maputo to help them create a map for the city’s transport. In second place, Marina was delighted to be able to offer her £1000 to the Calthorpe Project in time for their 30th birthday celebrations!

IMG_8006Keep up to date with your favourite projects by following us on Twitter @focuspositive and here on the blog, where our prize-winners will be posting soon.

Focus on the Positive is funded from UCL’s Impact Acceleration Account from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

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