My work over the past few weeks has been focused on groundwork. As you may remember, it is my ambition to help the engineering industry understand how they can ensure their designs are inclusive for everyone.
This has been enabled, in part, by my Royal Academy of Engineering visiting professorship at the University of Huddersfield and Aston University. This means that the next three years I will be working across these two universities to ensure the students studying engineering, are able to understand and implement their responsibilities for inclusion and accessibility.
Over the past few weeks, I have been inducted at the University of Huddersfield and Aston University. At Aston, I am working hard with colleagues to develop an inclusive engineering framework. This framework is aimed to be used by all engineers, when they are designing their systems, projects or contributing to a wider scheme of work. Essentially, at the moment, inclusion and accessibility is not something which is a requirement. Myself and my colleagues believe this is wrong and therefore we are designing a framework to help engineers bring inclusion and accessibility into all engineers designs.
I will be able to feedback on this project over the coming months, but it will only be completed by April 2025.
At the University of Huddersfield, I am supporting final year students with their inclusive engineering projects and helping to educate both the students and the staff about the world of inclusive engineering, ensuring that everyone understands that disabled people are still people and must be included within every engineering design.
I will continue my posts on here, to update you with the progress we are making. Through my project at Aston, I will be asking disabled individuals for their thoughts on the current public spaces we have and how accessible they think they are. I will share more about this work in a few weeks.
