Each week, we ask one of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) students working with Historic Buildings & Places (HB&P) and Heritage Innovation Laboratory Oxford (HILO) to share a short update on their project work and their time in London. Their research and analysis will help inform the development of Future Lab.
By Chaz Aguiar
Hi, I’m Chaz! I’m the team lead for our project with Historic Buildings & Places, and I study Electrical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I’ve lived in Massachusetts my whole life, and I’m from the Cape Cod area. Alongside managing the team, I’m also taking point on several of the interviews we’ll be running in the coming weeks with other charities.
This week kept us moving! We’re wrapping up our baseline business model analysis of HB&P so we can benchmark progress as our work develops. At the same time, we’ve been finishing our sector data filtering and narrowing down the shortlist of charities we want to approach for interviews. That shortlist came from continued work with the Charity Commission for England and Wales database; plus a manual review I completed to narrow an initial pool of roughly 500 charities. From there, our team built a decision matrix to rank the remaining 20 organizations that best fit what we’re trying to learn. We’ve already outreached to our first set of charities, and we’re waiting on replies now. While responses come in, we’ll keep pushing our broader sector analysis forward and start drafting business model canvases for each shortlisted charity, so we go into every interview prepared and focused.
Chaz visiting the Cliffs of Moher.
The 2026 WPI student team collaborating with HB&P.
