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 Daniel Freedman
Hello, my name is Daniel Freedman, a mechanical engineering major from Winchester, Massachusetts. I am excited to provide you all with my group’s update from this past week!
In the past week, we have been working on finishing up our project. This past Wednesday, we held a roundtable with HB&P and members of HILO. In the roundtable, we presented our preliminary findings and six initial recommendations to HB&P. Our recommendations focused on different ways that HB&P could diversify income streams and improve community engagement. We broke HB&P and HILO into small groups, and each group was assigned three of the six solutions to discuss. SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) was performed on each of the recommendations to identify benefits and problems associated with each recommendation.
On Friday, all of the WPI students currently working in London went on a group trip. We took a boat tour on the River Thames. After the boat tour, our group rode the London Eye.
As we move into our final week, we will be sharing our case studies with our case study charities to ensure accuracy in our findings. Additionally, we are in the process of completing our final research report. On Thursday, we will be presenting our findings to HB&P and HILO at a presentation day with other WPI groups working in London.
