Design in the UK construction sector is held in high regard internationally and produces 3.8 billion of export income per annum (Business and Enterprise Committee, 2008). In construction, design is undertaken as a collaborative activity by necessity, due to the division of labour and expertise between organisations (Bresnen et al., 2005). A consequence of the structure of the sector is that design activity involves the coordination of complex information exchanges in multi-disciplinary design teams. Coordination and communication challenges underlie difficulties in the integration of work activities of design teams. Communication is central to design collaboration and the coordination of design inputs, yet the communicative practices that coordinate design activities remain under-researched.Design team meetings are the locus for activities that are difficult to replicate in technologically-mediated environments (Visser, 2007). Indeed, it is the nuanced, micro-interactional communicative practices that are difficult to replicate but are significant for some shared understanding of a design situation that will be studied through this research. Face-to-face design interactions involve discursive moves where changes to the design are made verbally. In conversation designers with different knowledge backgrounds will negotiate design problems and verbally test alternate design solutions. It is these interactional, self-organising practices that coordinate real-time design activity that will be examined. The coordination of design activities will be investigated as this happens in the collaborative practices and communicative actions of cross-functional teams in design meeting settings. The face-to-face interactions of designers will be analysed from a language-use perspective, where the actions and practices that accomplish design coordination (or misunderstanding, ambiguity and uncertainty) will be investigated. From a conversation analytic-informed perspective patterns of interaction, spoken actions and particles in speech that mark shifts in understanding in the process of design will be analysed to locate interactional cues and communicative practices of design coordination. An intention is to link an understanding of structures and patterns in conversation with the way that engineering and construction management research communities understand design processes.

Children spend 30% of their time in school. Thermal comfort in classrooms has been extensively researched but we know little about outdoor exposures, like those taking place in school playgrounds where children may spend up to one third of their time at school. Outdoor play is important for children's health and wellbeing and outdoor learning experiences are effective in developing cognitive skills. Many of the playgrounds are in dense urban areas where the outdoor temperatures are exacerbated. Children are one of the population groups most disproportionately affected by the extreme climatic conditions and regularly identified as a vulnerable group with respect to heat-health and climate change. In the design and evaluations of children's spaces, typically, adult heat budget models are used scaled to children's proportions. These models may be resulting in large discrepancies in comfort as well as physiological strain for the children population, due to the inaccurate assumptions employed in the models and due to their lack of a children-based validation. Therefore, there is an urgent need to better understand children's thermal comfort in outdoor spaces, particularly schoolyards, to deliver spaces that are effective in promoting outdoor activity and keep children safe across the seasons, especially given the increasingly frequent hot periods. The project aims to develop models and guidelines that ensure outdoor spaces in schools provide comfort conditions which reflect children's thermal state, along with preferences and expectations and are resilient to climate change. The research objectives are the development of outdoor thermal comfort models for children and thresholds for thermal comfort, while accounting for different forms of adaptation and habituation specifically for children, to evaluate the potential impact of different climate change scenarios, concluding with the development of guidance for the design of the schools' open spaces. This will be achieved by the complementary expertise of four UK universities (Kent, Brunel, Loughborough and Portsmouth) supported by the Department for Education (DfE), Greater London Authority (GLA), London Climate Change Programme (LCCP), The Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineer (CIBSE)-Resilient Cities Special Interest Group, Arup, Atkins, and the Met Office. The project will carry out measurements and thermal comfort surveys in six primary schools selected from dense urban areas in different parts of the UK to account for different climatic zones and socio-economic backgrounds. This will allow the development of empirical comfort models based on extensive field studies. Detailed laboratory data on exposures of children in climatic chambers will further investigate a wide range of parameters, which cannot be captured through surveys. Simulations will be carried out based on data from the schools to study how physical parameters and microclimate of the playground impact on children's thermal comfort. Design studies will be performed (based on data collected from surveys, laboratory and simulations) to propose solutions. The resilience of the solutions will be investigated using climate change weather data. The models and guidelines of the project will be of benefit to a range of beneficiaries within and outside Higher Education including academics in the different disciplines, school communities, professionals in the related fields (e.g. engineers, architects, specialist consultants), professional association and standardisation bodies, planners and policy makers. Representatives from the different user groups will participate in the Stakeholders Advisory Board, along with the DfE, a key partner for the project.

All surface and buried infrastructure have a limited safe life and it is vital to evaluate their condition and structural integrity during their service life to avoid potential catastrophic failure due to their deterioration. Accurate assessment of infrastructure's condition is of significant financial and strategic importance and allows better resources planning. The research presented in this proposal offers an innovative solution in the form of a unified framework to assess and evaluate the condition and structural integrity of both underground utility and surface transportation infrastructure, and its surrounding ground, by means of combining physical non-destructive testing and numerical modelling. The physical tests will be used to generate necessary data for the damage detection algorithm. The numerical simulation involves a hybrid back-calculation algorithm based on integration of finite element analysis and a novel evolutionary computing technique. The proposed numerical approach will be able to capture the non-linear and complex behaviour of both the ground and the buried utility and detect damage in infrastructure by characterising reduction in the constitutive properties of the finite element model of the system between two time-separated inferences. The proposed framework in this project will provide sufficient information on mechanical and structural condition of a system and will enable asset managers to make informed decisions with respect to what, where, when and how interventions are required with emphasis on structural stability and integrity of the infrastructure.

Domestic transport is the UK's highest emission sector, and congestion in cities is costly (e.g. London £5.1bn in 2021). Drastically reducing urban car dominance is imperative to reach the UK's 2050 net-zero target, but also an unparalleled opportunity to create more equitable, inclusive and accessible cities of the future across the country. Recent UK investments of approximately £15bn seek to radically transform urban mobility and modality: £2bn for half of urban journeys to be cycled/walked by 2030 (e.g., cycle lanes, mini-Holland schemes), £5.7bn City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (e.g., Manchester bus and cycle schemes), and £7bn to level up local bus services. To realise full investment potential, and develop holistic adoption pathways towards net-zero, inclusive mobility, multimodal transport must be effectively planned, managed and operated, with people and their differences as a core consideration. This is challenging for a complex system-of-systems. On the supply side, modes compete for limited road space on shared infrastructure, creating conflicts. On the demand side, modes complement each other in intermodal journeys, jointly influencing uptake. For example, cycle lanes promote cycling, but may impact road speeds and exacerbate congestion and pollution, highlighting the need to evaluate person-level mobility and system-level emissions. A recent survey reported two-thirds of disabled respondents finding cycling easier than walking, highlighting the need to consider the broad disability spectrum and the potential for cycle lanes to improve access for all. Therefore, holistically optimising cycle lane schemes, as with all multimodal schemes, requires integrated methodologies: fully capturing multimodal transport systems' distributed and interconnected processes, the complexities of modal competition and complementarity, and the heterogeneity of traffic and population. My research will overcome these research challenges and develop the first multiscale digital twin for the transport-people-emission nexus using a truly integrated approach to model and simulate multimodal urban transport, advancing and coalescing my adventurous research in multimodality, using traffic flow theory, agent-based modelling, and machine learning. This will enable the development of holistic adoption pathways towards net-zero, inclusive mobility through scenario testing and optimisation, with guidance and recommendations to support implementation. Leading a strong consortium of 3 cities and 12 partners, covering the entire multimodal transport value chain, I will collaboratively exploit the digital twin to realise UK strategic agendas: net-zero; Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI); and levelling-up. By holistically enhancing mobility for everyone, my Fellowship also will propel the Green Revolution for economic growth, leveraging the net-zero mission to unlock new business opportunities, and establish the UK as a global leader in digital technologies to tackle climate change. I will deliver a strong positive impact on making net-zero a net win for people, industry, the UK, and the planet, thereby enabling both me and the UK to become world leaders in multimodal urban transport, at the forefront of research and innovation.

Vibration absorbers are commonly used in infrastructure assets (e.g. wind turbines, buildings, bridges) and in the dynamic systems which operate on them (e.g. railway and road vehicles). To achieve more structurally resilient, low carbon and lifetime cost efficient infrastructure assets, a step change in the performance of vibration absorbers is urgently needed. There are numerous absorber design possibilities considering components from multiple domains (mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical). However, because there is no systematic approach available, only an extremely limited number of designs have been studied to date. This fellowship will establish an optimal multidomain vibration-absorber synthesis tool, which will fully unlock the significant potential of vibration absorber designs. The superiority of the proposed synthesis tool, and the subsequent design improvements, will be demonstrated using industrially driven and supported case studies in three infrastructure sectors. These include the alleviation of wind- and wave-induced loads to wind turbines (wind energy sector); the mitigation of environmental- and human-induced oscillations in buildings and bridges (civil structure sector); the enhancement of vehicle-track and pantograph-catenary interactions (rail sector). The developed absorber synthesis tool will be applicable to solving the dynamic performance challenges in a wide range of mechanical structures, for example, minimising road damage produced by heavy duty vehicles, vibration mitigation of hydraulic and pneumatic pipelines, and dynamic performance enhancement for robotics and autonomous vehicles. These present a significant opportunity for the PI, UK Academia and UK Industry to establish a world leading capability in this challenging field with unique expertise.