Last week we asked your opinion about Heriot-Watt’s rich heritage. As an institution nearing our 200th birthday, there are many aspects of our past that we might want to retain. More people are getting engaged and we’ve had an increase in the number of votes and the numbers of comments that we’ve received. Thank you. It is vital that we continue to hear a range of voices and views as we work together to define our new strategy.
In week one there was a clear gap between our most popular and least popular suggested ideas for “number 1 in the world” status. This week’s discussion of heritage was a closer contest. A practical focus came out top (with 22% of the total vote) by a small margin and there was least traction for continuing to be pioneers in widening access but even this attracted 15% of the vote.
Once again, some really useful comments were offered. These included a suggestion to use our 200th anniversary to engage with the many other “institutes of mechanics” around the world which followed in our footsteps and making sure that we continue to put students at the heart of everything that we do. We also saw a theme around retaining our specialist focus in those areas where we have expertise and close relationships with industry. These suggestions are invaluable and all of the comments are being fed into the process of developing and refining our Strategy 2025.
This week, our Deputy Principal for Research and Innovation is looking for feedback on the characteristics of our research communities. Please continue to support the process by reading the short blog below and by voting again.
Professor Richard A. Williams
Principal and Vice-Chancellor
Our Global Research Communities
Given our university’s position as a global organisation it is appropriate that any future strategy should consider what “global” means in terms of our research. At our recent University Committee for Research and Innovation (UCRI) strategy day a group of us spent time pondering this issue.
An unsurprising but essential conclusion was that we first need to define the attributes of a global research community. We also need to think about the ways in which we link our research into our local and regional communities.
The list we arrived at is provided as a poll and we would now like further input from the wider research community to cross check these suggestions, we’d also welcome your ideas on other attributes that we might need to consider.
Professor Garry Pender
Deputy Principal for Research and Innovation
Submit your ideas in the poll displayed to the top right on a desktop or below on a mobile device.
INTERDISCIPLINARITY
A couple of weeks ago we ran the School of EGIS ‘Collaborative Project’- a week-long ‘design sprint’ for students on all of our construction-related degrees. Students are placed in multidisciplinary teams and given a complex client brief, and site, to unpick and strategise together, in an intense, high-octane week. It’s not easy. The emphasis is on building communication skills; contextual awareness; and mutual respect. Key skills for putative young professionals, and key skill required to thrive in an increasingly automated, digital, ‘artificially intelligent’ society we cannot yet fully comprehend.
This project involved eight distinct disciplines, from civil engineering to interior design, architecture to urban studies and surveying…. a group of professions that habitually have to work together and co-create in practice, and are famously poor at doing so, leading to the built environment being one of the least efficient and most litigious sectors in industry. But we successfully collaborate in EGIS- have done for years. And this year, we went global. Staff from Orkney prepared a video briefing for students from Galashiels, Edinburgh, Malaysia and Dubai campuses. Colleagues on each campus demonstrated huge belief (even ‘bravery’!), enthusiasm and leadership, each engaging local industry partners to further enhance the student experience. Hundreds of students and staff took part across the university. The project- a ‘Marine Research Centre’ – linked into our university-wide ‘Year of the Seas’ celebration.
Such an activity is not easy: I can’t think of any another institution I know that could manage it. Academic teams are too often siloed; blinkered; myopic or self-serving. Interdisciplinarity, cross-school collaboration and mutual communication, engagement and respect are significant, complex achievements of which we should be hugely proud.
In my view Heriot Watt should be known as leaders in collaboration: the people with the foresight, skills and respect to work outwith their disciplinary boundaries and comfort zones. Espousing excellence in specialisms, but generous engagement and informed understanding of a wider, multi-disciplinary landscape. In this way Heriot Watt may become a global leader, and valued partner, in an increasingly interconnected, collaborative future.
I like the idea of being a leader in collaboration. As a small, specialist university it seems logical that we’d need to collaborate with those who hold complementary skills. Also, as a multi-campus, multi-cultural university, collaborating across the various school, campus, country borders should be central to our nature.
Thanks
“Community” Research informing “Community” Education.
Here at Heriot Watt we are well positioned to take advantage of our broad research base to produce an exciting and rewarding “community” focussed educational curriculum for our students.
As we know the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment /sustainable-development-goals/ ) are now informing the direction of a significant part of the research work undertaken in the University. The research is multi-disciplinary in nature and is realising life changing improvements for global communities. For example:
• Some of our energy engineers and scientists are working with farming communities in India to double food production by introducing digital technology into water irrigation systems (www.scorres.macs.hw.ac.uk );
• Other colleagues, engineers, scientists and social scientists, are working with mountain communities in Colombia to use mobile phone networks to predict landslides that in turn informs infrastructure developments (https://www.britac.ac.uk/co-production-landslide-risk-management ).
This is research that will dramatically improve people’s lives and continues our history of being there to support society.
I would propose our future strategy has to ensure that our students also benefit from being immersed in these types of community projects. In the past we have supported many student undertaking activities in developing countries, such as students helping to design and build coastal defence systems in Ecuador. Often this work is supported by charities and is extra-curricula. For the future I envisage embedding these types of community activities into the curriculum via our strategic plan. All of our students could be offered the chance to join multi-disciplinary student teams working together on global communities projects. What greater reward for staff than to support our students coming together across our campuses to contribute to tackling some of the worlds key challenges.
There is plenty of opportunity for heritage studies both terrestrial and marine at the Orkney campus. It would be useful to link heritage researchers together in some way perhaps across campuses to learn from each other and to help increase the critical mass needed for embracing research opportunities.
OUR GLOBAL STUDENT COMMUNITIES
Going Global is the British Council’s International Conference on Higher Education. This year, it was held in Kuala Lumpur and Heriot-Watt contributed as conference speakers as well as hosting a visit of 40 delegates to our Malaysia Campus. I thought the stand out session at the conference was the concluding plenary where young leaders from across the world reflected on their own experiences as global graduates to present a vision for the future.
Our student communities – our current students and our graduates – are a critical voice in thinking about the University’s future strategy – let’s all encourage their active engagement! This example shows how you can shift the debate beyond the perspectives of current leaders to the vision of those who will lead the future. You can see the plenary at:
https://uk.live.solas.britishcouncil.digital/going-global/programme/sessions/global-local-shaping-future-world
The key topics are:
• What are the major future challenges; what role should education play and what must change to meet these?
• What skills will future graduates need to contribute to social progress and cultural understanding as well as economic growth? Could we be better at developing these?
• How can the internationalisation of tertiary education contribute to future social and economic development both locally and globally?
This is a particularly interesting topic for us to reflect on as our campuses in Dubai and Malaysia expand and mature. We might expect that, in a global university, research themes will take root and grow in those places where the environment (policy landscape, funding regime, access to expertise, access to facilities and field sites, access to industry, and even access to climate and geography) is most fitted. Our geographical and cultural reach gives us great opportunities.
FUTURE HERITAGE -UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Architecture students in Dubai have just completed designs for a new Foundation for the Future Heritage of UAE. Two key findings emerged, firstly the benefit of understanding at a local level the forward referencing of history in the 21st century, and secondly looking more globally across a wider ME region the excavation of a unique pattern of future heritage initiatives reshaping the trajectory of the ME, in a way that is really unknown to most of us in the present time. No doubt this will become clear once it surfaces above ground. The exercise has been groundbreaking for students and faculty alike revealing the richness of this theme.
Last week we talked about our heritage in Heriot-Watt and those aspects of our heritage that we want to co-curate into the future. While thinking about the heritage of the institution and what we would like to take forward, it would also be good to think about our academic expertise right across the institution in heritage science and bring our institutional heritage and our academic expertise together. The Forth Bridge is Scotland’s most recent world heritage site. Engineers in Heriot-Watt contributed to that. Do we celebrate that somewhere? Panmure House is an icon of intellectual heritage with many important anniversaries coming up shortly. It would be good not to think of our institutional heritage and our academic expertise in the field along parallel lines, as if they were separate and never to meet. Moreover, as a global university we should be mindful of the Scottish diaspora and their interest in Scotland’s heritage.
I like this way of thinking about our heritage in a holistic way, rather than aspects running in parallel lines. It is a great connecting theme – how our university interweaves through its cultural, historical, intellectual and human contexts; past, present and future. A strategic approach to our civic role and public engagement would perhaps help articulate that to ourselves and others. This is part of our expression of identity and purpose.