A wonderful conversation with Alan and Monica at their beautiful green home.

Had an amazing visit on Friday last week for one of our case studies for retrofits in Greater Manchester. Alan and his wife Monica were wonderful in describing their experience of the retrofit process and passed on the lessons they learnt to myself and our first year students. The interview we conducted aimed at uncovering some of the unforseen conciderations that crop up when working on site, as well as a look into levels of thermal comfort and actual thermal gain, post retrofit.

Part of our case study visits and outputs was the collection of photos that illustrated the variance in retrofit approaches as well as our participants articulating the changes on site. In order to get the best out of these images, carrying on from a prior session on how to take good architectural photos, Brian delivered an extremely well recieved presentation on editing architectural photos and images on Photoshop. Safe to say we all learnt something new in this one.

After making our case study presentations on the first day back this week, we worked through the information gathered the next few days to create articles to present to Carbon Co-op. The articles were drafted as a group and themes from the interviews were delegated to each team member. Through our writing process we could solidify the lessons learnt from our visits on sustainable design and retrofits.

Having completed our first drafts for our case study articles, we engaged in a democratic editing session, chaired by our esteemed peer Joseph and peer reviewed by independent reviewer from a neighbouring group Sanjidah. Edits pertained to layout and aesthetic changes, as well as some edits to the text before a final internal peer review.

A happy democratic process has come to a close. Got a bit heated on the topic of word count (Faizal) but we all came to a uniform resolution.