This seminar is part of the CIB Presidential webinar series, “Women researchers in the built environment”
Event details
The retrofit of social housing can have positive social, health and financial outcomes for lowincome populations. Upgrading the existing stock of social housing (SH) offers an opportunity to ease the effects of inadequate housing through improvements, reduce social costs, alleviate housing deficits and promote sustainability. Targeted upgrading efforts need impact sensitive processes, which involve stakeholders. These
are primarily end-users, but also housing and construction companies, design professionals, etc who have specific, at times, conflicting needs and interests. Shifting from individual to more collective engagements, through innovative mediation, should bridge boundaries between stakeholders.
This presentation focuses on research results of a 2-year international research project called ‘U-Value: User-Valued Innovations for Social Housing Upgrading through Trans-Atlantic Living Labs’. The research premise was that by applying and refining Living Labs in the SH context, uservalued innovations could be identified. Boundary Objects (BOs) with advanced communication tools (Augmented reality-AR, Virtual Reality-VR, sketches, Building Information Modelling-BIM) were investigated to support decision-making, contribute to idea generation and mediation. A transatlantic articulated nexus between research institutions in Brazil (BR), Germany (DE), the Netherlands (NL) and the United Kingdom (UK) addressed social challenges through SH upgrading protocols.
Speaker
Patricia Tzortzopoulos is Professor of Integrated Design, Director of the Innovative Design Lab research centre and Head of Department for Design and Built Environment at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Huddersfield. She comes from an architectural background and her interests cover design management, Lean Construction, Value generation, Building Information Modelling (BIM), and the design of healthcare facilities and social housing. She developed research projects examining requirements management, evidence based design, code checking in healthcare design, participatory design, BIM in the retrofit of social housing, between others. Patricia has been an active member of the International Group for Lean Construction since 1998, having served as reviewer and conference editor/organiser. Patricia is currently the vice-president of the CIB – International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction, a worldwide network of
building and construction experts.
