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Engineering innovation has created incredible technology and found new ways to use current technology to overcome engineering challenges.

LiDAR is an example of one of these revolutionary tools and today we hear from an art historian turned civil engineer who is using it to scan our cities. We hear about their creation of the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City, and the challenges they’ve overcome in transforming how we understand, plan, and protect our cities.

Our guest is a pioneering force in urban data science and has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents and worked as a professor in UCD Dublin. She is Professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress Dr Debra Laefer.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Using LIDAR technology to create highly detailed 3D scans of cities
  • Developing methods to efficiently store, process, and analyse LIDAR data
  • How 3D scans are revolutionising urban flood modelling and emergency response
  • Applying the LIDAR data and 3D models to real-world engineering challenges
  • Exploring the use of 3D printing technology in conjunction with LIDAR data

GUEST DETAILS
With degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, Ph.D.), NYU (MEng), and Columbia University (BS, BA), Prof. Debra Laefer has a wide-ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation.

In her decade and a half as a faculty member in both the US and Europe, Prof. Laefer has served as the principal investigator for grants from a wide range of sponsors including the National Science Foundation, the US Federal Highway Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Science Foundation Ireland, and the European Research Council (including a €1.5 million single investigator award from the flagship ERC program for which she is the only civil engineer to have been funded in Ireland in the program’s 11 year history).

Prof. Laefer has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications, been awarded 4 patents, and has supervised 15 doctoral and 20 Masters theses. Among many honors from IEEE, ISPRS, and other professional societies, the most notable is perhaps the 2016 commissioning and hanging of her portrait by the Royal Irish Academy as one of eight researchers selected for the Women on Walls project to celebrate Irish women in science and engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debra-f-laefer-09510a11/

 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES
"We didn't devise a sensor, we didn't even improve the sensor, but we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. We took this more systematic approach of; let's reverse engineer the process, figure out what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data."  - Dr. Debra Laefer

"This technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research. So that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"It's good to make mistakes, and it's good to have senior engineers check them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"As crazy as your idea may seem, a lot of the time the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve, so don't give up on them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

KEYWORDS
#buildings #data #dublin #engineers #civilengineering #lidar #computationalmodel

 

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00
Right now on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out how to make a 3D scan of Dublin.

Debra Laefer  00:05
If people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up, that if you push on it hard enough long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem, and a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on it.

Dusty Rhodes  00:24
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. We're very familiar with the BIM and LiDAR in civil engineering but how far can you go with those technologies? Could you apply them to a full city and still get millimetre level accuracy. Our guest today is behind the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City. She is a pioneering force in urban data science, addressing the challenge of handling massive amounts of information collected by drones, satellites and laser measurements, and then using smart ways to store search and turn that data into useful visuals. She is a qualified civil engineer, has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents, worked as a professor in UCD Dublin, and is currently serving as a professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Debra Laefer to the podcast. How are you, Debra?

Debra Laefer  01:24
Great, thanks so much for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:26
It's a delight to have you with us. Before we get into the world's densest LiDAR data set, which you generated here in Ireland, you had a very interesting route into engineering, you had a kind of an art history degree and then got into civil engineering. What, tell me the story behind that.

Debra Laefer  01:43
So I fell in love with painting and old buildings and decided I wanted to become an art historian. So I applied to the best program in the United States and got admitted to Columbia University. And as part of this, I gotten involved with creating a student art gallery. So this was supposed to be a place for students and faculty and alumni could show their own artworks. And then we were informed that we had to temporarily move out of space, because they were going to do construction through it to put in some new telecom lines. So this was back in the mid late to late 80s. And I was concerned because it was a historic building. So I started asking around, started doing some investigation, and found out that not only was the district building, but it had been damaged. In fact, it had been damaged the last time they did construction near it, so called the Landmarks Preservation people to confirm that yes, the building was protected. We reached out to a people at the historic preservation program at Columbia University. And they put me in touch with one of their students who is a civil engineer. And I was so impressed with this, this young woman, her name is Marie Ennis, she's actually still a practising engineer here in New York City. And that she could combine this large toolbox of thoughts and knowledge and conveyed in a way that was meaningful to people in practice. And I was very, I think, influenced by that. And over the next few months, I started thinking, well, if I really love old buildings, maybe this is what I want to do, maybe I need to be come a civil engineer. So there I was finishing my last year in my Bachelors of Arts degree in art history. And starting my first year in my Bachelors of Engineering and civil engineering. And ultimately, I persevered with this, I been worked in the construction industry, at a time where it was it was pretty rough, a lot of organised crime, a lot of violence on the sides. It was a pretty exciting time in New York construction. But I really was happy doing that. And I thought, Oh, well, you know, I feel like I still don't know enough. So we're going to start a master's program at night part time. And as part of that, I met some amazing people in the geotechnical engineering realm. So that's a division of civil engineering. And a lot of them surprisingly, had PhDs. And they were in the midst of really important a lot of amazing technologies from Europe, into the United States, things that were very well suited to protect existing structures when you did excavation or drilling or blasting or de watering, or tunnelling near them. So I finished my master's degree I applied and got a Fulbright to Italy, I spent a year at the Polytechnic of Milan, really studying brick masonry and its vulnerabilities and then I came back to the US, and I took my PhD and Geotechnics. But I had also the opportunity to do some travelling as part of that research. And we went to Korea, and I got a chance to come over to the UK, and to spend some time, particularly some people from McDonald, looking at the Jubilee line. So at the time, this was the most expensive tunnelling project that had ever happened, it was about, I think, 2 billion pounds. And about 25% of this was being spent either on predicting which buildings were going to move, monitoring them, or, you know, kind of free tunnelling intervention where they were pumping grout under the ground, in particular, under Big Bend. And despite this huge investment, a lot of buildings did get damaged. So when we spoke to the engineers, who simply what kind of great computational Shanell models are you using to predict which buildings are going to get damaged, and they said, Oh, we don't use the computational models at home, what's wrong with them? And they said, No, because there's nothing wrong with the model. But we do not have documentation of all of the above ground buildings. Many of these buildings date back hundreds and hundreds of years, and to go out and to survey each building, and then convert to generate drawings. And then to convert that into a computational model would be impossible for the hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are along this tunnel route. So instead, we're using a fairly simplistic set of numerical equations that date back mostly to the 50s, but then kind of improved in the early 70s. So here we are, we're pushing the turn of the millennium. And we're using stuff that's at least 30, if not 40 years old.

Dusty Rhodes  06:53
So that I understand it, you find yourself in London, and you have all of this tunnelling going on, they can't correctly tunnel because they can't do the computations for all of the buildings because it's just too big an area.

Debra Laefer  07:07
It's not that they can't tunnel if they can tunnel but it at greater risk to the structures than need be.

Dusty Rhodes  07:14
So, you said to yourself, aha, here's a problem. I'm gonna come up with a solution for this.

Debra Laefer  07:20
Not quite, I just went home and thought, Wow, I'm surprised this is a problem. Yeah. So I went, I bet back, I finished my degree. And about two, three years later, I had just finished, I had moved to North Carolina to become a young faculty member. And 911 happened. And having spent many years in New York studying and working, having Mitch family there. My parents were born there. My grandparents were born there, many people from our families still live there. It was a very disturbing and moving kind of time. And I was very interested in what they were doing, how they were trying to do the rescuing, because I'd been involved with some kind of post disaster earthquake work while I was also at the university. So it was kind of a little tied into the emergency management community at that point. And I started to learn about a fellow named Dave Bloomquist, who is a faculty member down at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And his work with NOAA, and the work that they did to basically put up a small plane, and to do heat detection and LIDAR over the World Trade Centre disaster zone, so that it could help them both figure out where there might be fires happening underground still, and how to start to remove debris at that point, they already realised that there are no survivors. So but it started looking at these 3d models, or 3d representations using this LIDAR data. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. And about four months later, I was up in New York, and I had an opportunity to work to get to know an engineer who was really helping coordinate a lot of that removal, and had the opportunity to actually go down into the site. So this is like January 2 2002. And the site is still on fire. Even with a gas mask, it was very hard to go through. But I'm looking around and I'm seeing you know, these buildings on the damage and thinking about the work that Bloomquist did, and I said, No, no, maybe we could use LIDAR to document all these structures. So I called him up and he was very generous and he helped share some of experience and help get my group started and we started doing some work in this area. And we started doing some work for the owner Emergency Management Agency. Looking at prediction have trees falling across roadways, where we would go and MIT from the LIDAR they already had, we could measure the height of the tree and the distance to the road and make estimates to what extent if the tree fell over, it would either partially, completely or not at all block the road. So that was kind of our first foray into that. And once I started, I was completely locked.

Dusty Rhodes  10:25
Okay, so now, it sounds like you are looking for data over huge areas of land and very highly populated land, with a lot of buildings in it. That's a huge amount of information that you need LIDAR piqued your attention. For engineers who are not working in this space. Can you explain how that technology works? How do you 3d scan an area?

Debra Laefer  10:48
Yeah, so it's a technology that can be used from multiple platforms from even right now through your iPhone, or from some type of stationary unit, the unit can be mounted on a car, it could be a small lens mounted on drones, on helicopters on airplanes, the technology is fundamentally the same, you're sending out a laser signal, kind of a beam of light, you know, what time it left your piece of equipment.

Dusty Rhodes  11:27
And you know, where kind of in the world your equipment is, is it on the ground? Is it above is it at the bottom of the broad of a craft.

Debra Laefer  11:29
So, that beam part of it will come back, it will hit something and it will come back. And you will know and the equipment will record the time that it comes back. So based on the change in time, we have a certain distance that can be calculated because we know what the speed of light is. And we use that to determine what they call the range.

Dusty Rhodes  11:52
And you were doing this millions and millions. And it's I imagine millions and millions of times a second.

Debra Laefer  11:58
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, obviously some of its limited by your equipment, but it's actually more limited by the how much data the equipment can take back. And how long your battery is good for.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15
Let's put a picture on it. Okay, you somehow found yourself in Dublin and you decided Grafton Street. Okay, we're going to 3d scan that we're gonna measure that down to what kind of measurement Did you get it down to what scale?

Debra Laefer  12:28
The first scan we did was about four centimetres. Wow. Okay. And the second I think was down to about two and a half centimetres. Wow. So tell me maybe a actually even less than that. So made that a centimetre.

Dusty Rhodes  12:47
Tell me about this story about how you use helicopters, drones, whatever centre of Dublin Grafton Street, the whole block and you measured it and 3d scanner to within a centimetre.

Debra Laefer  12:57
So what we really wanted to do was to provide these representations of these buildings to the engineering community. So you have to set your mind back to 2004. Celtic Tiger, Ireland's booming, and a lot of discussion about putting in Dublin's first metro to go from the bottom of Grafton Street, or more specifically, in the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green, yeah, up to the airport. So Dublin, and Ireland, in general, at that point had had almost no tunnelling. And obviously, here we are in a country that has limited experience with this technology, you have a very complicated geology with a lot of small, granular material mixed in with kind of big boulders and stuff. So it's a tough thing to tunnel through without a lot of disturbance of the ground. And here you have this amazing architectural resource in terms of the centre of Dublin, that at that moment was actually under consideration as a World Heritage Site. So you have this kind of conflict happening about preserving and the future and at risk. So I was fortunate put together a proposal to science foundation Ireland, with a colleague at UC Dublin, Hamish Carr and a colleague up at our collaborator up at Trinity, we were able to come up with kind of a plan of not only how to acquire this data, but how to process it and make it usable.

Dusty Rhodes  14:39
Okay, tell me about acquiring it.

Debra Laefer  14:40
So, when most people even today, put this kind of unit under a plane or a drone or helicopter, it faces down so the unit swings, and depending on the equipment, it might swing thing, just left to right. Or it may have kind of an arc to it. But it's kind of, you know, it's not just capturing exactly what's below it, but kind of a swath, but it's pretty much focused on what's directly underneath. And as the LIDAR unit swings to the side, the quality and quantity of data that you get, when it intersects a building facade is pretty limited. So most of the good data that you're getting is roads, and roofs. But if the thing that you're interested in knowing about and protecting is the building's facade and its structure, knowing about its roof and knowing about the street next to it's not going to help very much. So we kind of took a big step back, and Hamish and I really like, Well, how do we capture these building facades? And we said, well, let's let's think about the equipment, how does the equipment work? And how do they traditionally fly? Even though old kind of medieval city, like Dublin has a kind of pattern to it. And much of it's a grid. So typically, what they do is they say, Okay, we're gonna fly from x to y, and from A to B, this is our kind of area, and they will fly along the grid line, they'll go down, turn around, back down, back. And then when they're finished with that, they'll come around 90 degrees and do it the other way. It's great for the pilots, they really get lost, it's not so great for the data acquisition for the con, we watched you. So we show through geometry that if you flew diagonal, to the street grid, that you could pick up significant like basically double the information, just because the angle, just because the angle, the other thing we realised is that the amount of overlap that they fly was only enough to basically sew together, you know, one group of data from the next. So when you're flying down one street, they would go over, they wouldn't necessarily do the next street, that they would position themselves so that there was only about a 10% overlap. So if you're from the geomatics community, and you're interested in mapping, and you're interested in floodplain, or using this for floodplain risk analysis, this is great. But if you're interested in looking at these facades, it's not so great. And it basically really limits what you can pick up, because it's in that swing at the edge of the scan, that we're picking up the facades, right, because we're looking down, we're looking at the street, and now we're swinging to the left. And only at the end of that swing, do we start picking up the data. So again, we went back to basic geometry, and established that we needed about a 60% overlap, to achieve a complete scan so that we didn't have these is good blank spots, because you have with this line of sight technology, if you can't see it, you can't capture it, like the camera. So you have a situation if you're in front of one, if you're standing in front of a building, you obviously can't see what's on the back. But also, sometimes buildings preclude you seeing a building behind them. So if you're up in the air, and you've got a tallest building, and maybe there's a small one across the street, maybe you can't see that. So again, we had to kind of compensate for a lot of these things. When we originally did this, people thought we were insane. They're like, why do you want to do this, you know, like, trust us trust us. And it was very hard to even find a contractor to do it. And when we got the data, they were astonished. They're like, Wow, we had no idea we could get this kind of data.

Dusty Rhodes  19:08
Let me just say that there is a YouTube video of the data that you got. And when you watch the video, your jaw will drop and go, Oh, my God. And I have put a link directly to that video in the show notes in the description area of this podcast that we're listening to right now. So you can just click on it. And you can see it. Apologies, Deborah go on.

Debra Laefer  19:28
No, thank you. I think that's one of the best demonstrations of it. Because we're taking we didn't devise a sensor. We didn't even improve the sensor. But we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. So I think that the way the technology had been used this idea was like more data is better and you just get we can you smash it together and you kind of muddle through the best you can. And we took this more systematic approach of let's reverse engineer the process. fear what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data.

Dusty Rhodes  20:06
So now you have the data, what the problem is, is that you have an enormous amount of data. And that's the next problem. The next challenge, what do you do with it? I mean, how do you sort? Those many ones and zeros? Yeah.

Debra Laefer  20:22
So the basic storage of it, the I would call the static store, it's just, you know, putting it somewhere is not so much a problem. My brother used to work for Google, and he would joke, you know, what's a petabyte between friends? So it's not the storage, it's, as you said, it's the sorting. It's the what they call the queering. It's the retrieving of the data. And so we really, with my help, my long term colleague and collaborator Michela Berta loto, at UCD, really sat down and looked at a lot of the work that she had done in database and database structures, and talked about, well, what were our needs? How is the community currently doing at least some of this work? And what was that opportunity. And so in about 2006, we really started in earnest, taking on that problem. And I would say that that work really culminated about nine years later, when we graduated, jointly drew graduated a PhD student who demonstrated that you could very effectively use the data structure as the fundamental building block for post processing algorithms. So that you already have stored the data in a way that is highly usable. The paper that on jeuveau are joins graduate student who is still in Ireland is the lead author on is in the top point, zero 1% of all papers cited. For the years published, this technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research, so that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets. So which is really amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  22:24
So you put some banners on the data, then how do you integrate it with other technologies? So a lot of people talk about GIS and bi M and stuff like that? How do you get that data then interacting with them? So engineers can actually use it? 

Debra Laefer  22:37
Yeah, I'd say actually, most of the ways that us engineers use it reaction, computational models. So certainly, there are ways to tie it to GIS systems, the time we were working, there wasn't even a full 3d solution, which meant that it was what they call two and a half d solution, which means that every Z point, every elevation point, there could only be one unique one for every xy point. So if you had a building that was truly straight, there was no way at that x, y point, you know, at that corner of your street, or the corner of your building, to represent both the bottom and the top. So you had this kind of slightly wedding cake effect, where the points were actually slightly offset. Obviously, the technology has moved on from now, these GIS systems can both produce and host 3d models. But to just to give you a sense of kind of where we were, you know, with us BIM kind of really wasn't even really a thing by then. And the challenge is, is that unlike a photograph, when you have a photograph, and you look at it, every pixel, every little space is filled, right? There's no blank spots. With the LIDAR data. It's not that way. Maybe the beam went through a window, and it didn't come back or you know, maybe it went through a tree and you it came back in like six different pieces. So you get this data set that's very non homogeneous. These often refer to a sparse, it's an ordered. So there's not no, there's no natural order, when you get it back from the vendor. mean, it's been geo referenced. But there's, it doesn't like say, Oh, this point belongs to a building. And this other point belongs to a building.

Dusty Rhodes  24:30
It's a bit scattered.

Debra Laefer  24:31
It's a bit scattered. It's a bit chaotic. So So we continue to pioneer really groundbreaking work in how to fundamentally store that data. Because very early on, it became clear that the sheer size of the data, it was a major impediment to people using it. And it's still content used to be so some of my most recent work that we've not published yet, really looks at how do you take a billion points and process them actually Just on a regular PC, you know, can you do that? So, for us, the bigger question was, how do you get these points into a computational model? We don't care, we're labelling them necessarily, may eventually want to label them to a certain extent, because you want to know if your material model for each piece is correct. But the bigger thing is, how do you generate what they call a watertight model. And this is where the 3d printing starts to sneak in. So to do a computational model, you have to do create what they call a watertight mesh, which means that every point has to be connected to other points through a set of lines, but these lines must connect at nodes, they can't overlap, they can't be a little short of them, right. And when you use the traditional transfer transformation processes that were available for ticket in the late 2000s, you ended up having to do a huge amount of manual correction. And if you're looking at a terabyte of data, that's not gonna work, right. Yeah. So we really had to kind of think about how do you overcome those problems. And through this wonderful kind of collaboration between computer science and through civil engineering that we had going on at UCD, between myself and Hamish Carr and our students, Tommy Hanks, and Lynch ronghong, we had this kind of Eureka moment that the way the computational models were set up, many of them used would look like almost a little bricks, that they were these eight noted elements, and that these eight nodes had no elements, which didn't have to be squares, that could be rectangles looked an awful like, the elements that we were using to do the storage axis that this is acting like a key is that, yeah,

Debra Laefer  27:02
in this, so we divided the data in something called an octree. So we're you chop it up into basically eight quadrants. And if there's no data in the quadrant, you forget about that part. And then you keep kind of digging down either until you only have a certain amount of points in a box. Maybe that's the amount of points that can be stored in the computer's cache and dealt with comfortably. Or maybe you do it more generically. And say you're just going to do you know, five divisions of these things. We realise that the octree and the computation model in the finite element, they looked a lot like so then we came up with two really pioneering algorithms to do that transformation. So as we were thinking about watertight, so what is starting to happen, the patents for the original 3d printers are expiring, and we're starting to see this boom of three. So actually, this is about 2012 2013. Starting to see this boom of home 3d printers, or the you know, low low in 3d printers. There's 3d printers this 3d printed that people are even talking about maybe can you 3d print a house, you know, all these things that people are now really excited the same way? Everybody's talking about AI now. So if you cast yourself back to 2013, everybody started with 3d printing through their predict 3d printed clothing and hats, and, and, and, and everything. How do we start saying, Well, if we're creating this watertight model, couldn't we use that same watertight model approach for 3d printing, because that's what you need. The input files for 3d printing have to be these watertight models. So there was an opportunity to apply for a competitive commercialisation type grant through the EU. At that point, I had received the European Research Council Award, which was the single largest single PI award that you could obtain at that time. And they had a program they wanted to really try to commercialise work. So you could then say, Okay, this piece of work came from his project. And we'd now like to try to commercialise it. So went through that competitive program, and we got a good amount of money. And we said, Okay, we have this wonderful used 3d printer, commercial grade metal 3d printer that we were able to acquire. And it quickly became apparent that this is a very expensive thing to run. It requires a huge amount of knowledge that you have to keep in the group. And we said, how are we going to sustain this? So we said, well, there's no 3d printing centres in Ireland. What if we just opened one, and that's that so that was our next big adventure. And we started to acquire other funding and other equipment and we really, you know, kind of graduated a whole class of people who then went on many of them to really lead the introduction of what are called Advanced Manufacturing in Ireland, including a guy named Brian Marin, who came to us off the dole through a, you know, train to work program. And it was so successful, that Brian became the main initial technician for the first National Advanced Manufacturing Centre. So I think, a real success.

Dusty Rhodes  30:31
Let me put this into some kind of a context, then on the engineering and design side of things because of our use of BIM. And we're used to digital twins, and you're able to play around the buildings and change things and see how it looks. How can you do that? Like, can you use this technology that you are working on to do that on a city wide level? 

Debra Laefer  30:50
Yeah. So obviously, acquiring the data takes a while processing the data. So it's not something that you just go out and do every day. But we do see that communities, municipalities, even states are doing this now on a pretty regular basis, if not once a year, once every two years, in fact, the United States, we are having the completion of our first national scam, which is pretty exceptional. The difficulty of processing and storing that data is in part related to the quantity of the data. If you want really good sub centimetre data, it's gonna be a lot. So that always has to be part of it. But we have certainly taken that data when we've, you know, generated middle little 3d models of parts of Dublin.

Dusty Rhodes  31:41
And where would an engineer be able to use that if he is looking as as a city planner? What kind of things would he be able to do with it?

Debra Laefer  31:48
So I think one of our very early visions when particularly we got our first data set back in 2008, we said status, so good, but it's not quite good enough. That the I think the aspiration was to have a data set that was so good, you could pick out the curb height. Wow. And I think that is what we really achieved in 2015, that the data was so good that we could determine bather, basically whether the edge of the sidewalk was handicapped accessible. So I think that's a very easy, accessible use case. We've now most recently moved, we just completed a project called Urban Ark, with UCD. And with work off under her up at Queen's University, Belfast, looking at urban flooding. And one of the key components to that was the detection of subsurface spaces, basements, parking garages, things like that. And although Lidar is a line of sight technology, we can get a pretty good understanding of some things, that there are the spaces and some extent the size of them. Based on if you're you know, the angle, you're collecting the data, you might see kind of the stairwell that many of our Georgian town-houses have, or even be able to capture some of the data through the windows, or the entrances to parking garages. And by incorporating that into a larger flooding model, we can determine more effectively where the risks really are, where's the water going? Are we over predicting, or these people are particularly at risk. And we've generated flood models that show that the subsurface spaces really have an impact of where the water's going, and how fast it's building up. So if you're trying to evacuate parts of the city, or deploy emergency services, you want to know where to do that you don't want to send people to the wrong places.

Dusty Rhodes  33:45
So listen, you've done Dublin City, I believe you're going for something slightly bigger for your next project.

Debra Laefer  33:51
We don't so much bigger, but maybe more technically advanced. So we've recently completed a one square kilometre area in south-west Brooklyn. And what's really special about that dataset is not only do you have this great LIDAR data, pretty much the equivalent but we didn't delve in a little bit denser. But we've coupled it with something called hyperspectral data, and hyperspectral data, ours is in the bottom of the shortwave range downward. So if you have materials that are known, and you can get the what they call the spectral signal from them, we can match that spectral signal with things in the built environment. So a computational model has two important components. One is the geometry. And that project through our lab work and those of others has largely been solved. But the assigning of those materials and those material properties has not and hyperspectral gives us that opportunity to start doing that.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02
So some exciting stuff happening, a lot going on. I love talking to you, because you're talking about things you did 20 years ago, that are almost like cutting edge. Now you have a type of brain that just thinks 2030 4050 years in advance. So I have to ask you, what do you consider now the main challenges that engineers today need to start thinking about?

Debra Laefer  35:25
I would say one of the main challenges is coupling these major weather systems or storm systems with that kind of urban level weather system, we have huge investments of, you know, trying to predict where hurricanes are going, and how much rain and how much storm surge. But what's really happening from the street level, say, up to the first 100 or two feet, there are not a lot of models. And yet all of that's controlling all these urban heat problems that we're having. And we just don't have those couple of models. So it's that multi-scale physics, that we're kind of missing right now, where people like me very much on the crowd at the bottom, could work with somebody like one of my collaborators, Olivia police here in our Chaos Group, which is our weather group in our maths department. Between Olivia and myself, there's a big space. And there's not too many people in that space. So I think that that's really where we need to start going.

Dusty Rhodes  36:32
I also wanted to ask you, because I was watching an interview with you, you were talking about the advice you give to your students, which I mean, it just rang true with me. It's when you're a student, make mistakes, because you learn more from mistakes. And when things go right. Now, that's great to say to students, we're all engineers listening to this podcast. Can you apply that to engineering in a real life professional situation? Or should you just have made audio mistakes in college?

Debra Laefer  37:02
One of the highlights of my educational career was getting to meet a geotechnical engineer named Ralph back. And Ralph peck at the time was the most important living geotechnical engineer in the world. And he had been a student of Karl Terzaghi, who is the founder of geotechnical engineering. And he would come at the age of, you know, 79. And he would give these talks about when he was a young engineer, working under Karl Terzaghi, and all the mistakes that he made. So it's good to make mistakes. And it's good to have senior engineers check them.

Dusty Rhodes  37:42
Keep trying new things, regardless. Yeah, kind of wrap up then by just ask, is there anything else that you'd like to add to our chat today that I haven't thought of? Or haven't brought up?

Debra Laefer  37:53
Yeah, I mean, I think that if people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up. That if you push on it hard enough, long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem that a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on them.

Dusty Rhodes  38:15
If you'd like to find out more about Debra and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Professor Debra Laefer from NYU Centre for Urban Science and Progress, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating chat.

Debra Laefer  38:31
Lovely to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Dusty Rhodes  38:35
And if you enjoyed our podcast today do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-released episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. But for now, until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.

How to 3D Scan Dublin City: Professor at New York University, Debra Laefer

Engineers are naturally creative, from problem solving to designing and planning. But when you combine that with visual creativity, it leads to unique and beautiful things.

Today we meet an Irish engineer who is using his engineering skills and artistic flair to design some of the most impressive structures across the world, including a very well known New York tourist attraction.

Our expert guest has worked in over 20 countries across the globe and is passionate about the architectural response to the climate crisis. He is Principal and Founder of VOLUTA, Eoin Casserly.

 

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Engineering as a passport to the world
  • Working through design limitations with efficiency
  • Complex design with user experience in mind
  • The architectural response to the climate crisis
  • Chartered Engineer of the Year award and its benefits

 

GUEST DETAILS

Eoin Casserly is principal and founder of VOLUTA, a specialist structural engineering consultancy operating internationally, based in Sligo. Previously, he held structural engineering positions in Paris, New York, and Stuttgart. He has designed advanced structures such as gridshells, cable nets, facades, stadia, and artworks in more than 20 countries, working through six languages.

Project highlights include the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, the world’s first cable net with curved glass, the largest-spanning glazed roof in South America, and gridshells for the largest botanic garden in the world. His current research combines pre-industrial materials with innovative construction and analysis techniques.

Casserly won the Engineers Ireland Chartered Engineer of the Year Award in 2023.

 

MORE INFORMATION

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES

We're really guided by the beauty and efficiency of nature, because if you imagine a seashell, or a snail, it doesn't want to spend undue energy making what they have to live in, they want to do in the most beautiful, most efficient, and the least energy intensive form they can, which ends up being really beautiful. - Eoin Casserly

There's a great quote, that architecture is dancing in chains.  There are limitations, but you can always work around these. Limitations can create a box for something new. And that's part of the beauty of it all. - Eoin Casserly

Around 30% of global waste is produced by the construction industry. It's a massively wasteful industry. A big focus of VOLUTA is this shift to a more sustainable method of building. - Eoin Casserly

 

KEYWORDS

#glass #engineering #design #climatecrisis #structuralengineering #architecture #charteredengineer

 

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

 

Dusty Rhodes 00:00

Right now on AMPLIFIED we're about to find out how engineering meets art in structural design.

 

Eoin Casserly 00:05

To make the problem even more complex, the world is urbanizing at a huge rate, and the amount of building compared to a city the size of New York will have to be built every month until around 2060. So it's an enormous challenge.

 

Dusty Rhodes 00:20

Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED, the Engineers Journal podcast. As we know, engineers are naturally creative from problem solving to designing and planning. But when you combine that with visual creativity, it leads to unique and beautiful things. Today, we're chatting with an Irish engineer who is using his engineering skills and artistic flair to design some of the most impressive structures across the world. We'll find out how he blends his love for engineering and art, with a passion for responding to the climate crisis, and what he's learned from working in 20 countries across the globe. I'm delighted to welcome the founder of VOLUTA, Eoin Casserly, Eoin how are you?

 

Eoin Casserly 00:59

Great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

 

Dusty Rhodes 01:00

So listen, tell me what what got you into this wonderful, crazy business we call engineering?

 

Eoin Casserly 01:07

Well, I suppose I didn't really have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. But engineering seemed to have this combination of technical skills, I suppose I saw a lot of my strengths and in maths and physics and and these very technical subjects, but also, other other areas, you know, languages are to design. And I think the handy thing is that you get to combine all of these with engineering. So I study structural engineering with architecture in UCD. But probably it wasn't until I moved into my first job in Paris that I really started to think of it as a something I wanted to do. I was working for a company called tests in Paris. And it was a bit more glamorous than what I would have expected for an engineering job. So the company at the time was designing the finessing. Graviton, this enormous museum on the west of Paris. And because of this, it was a new company, it was only about a year established. And they were working in a Louis Vuitton office. So I was a 22 year old guy from San Diego, going to work every day in a Louis Vuitton office with these incredibly cultured, multilingual people, who also just happen to be as well really competent and brilliant at their jobs. So it really opened my eyes to what was out there. And I think, drove my career then.

 

Dusty Rhodes 02:46

And they say one of the things about engineering is that once you have that it's a passport to the world. And you've opened up by saying you worked at Louis Vuitton, in Paris, what a great start, you've worked elsewhere in the world. Tell me give give us give us a sample.

 

Eoin Casserly 03:04

So I, after I finished my master's, I moved to New York, and eventually started working for a company called stretch begonnen, which is a German company, with offices and a few countries around the world. From there, I was mostly mostly working on us projects and a lot on a new development at the time called Hudson Yards, which was a $25 billion real estate development, basically making a new neighborhood within New York. And from there, worked a little bit on on stuff outside the US, because I had the experience in parasites, advice on some some projects there as well. My visa ends in the States. And then I decided to move to the headquarters of that company slash burger man in Stuttgart, in Germany. At that stage, I was working as I suppose the technical lead for for glass projects, so anything with a bit of glass and as I was giving technical inputs, and they're one of the leading companies in the world for architecture class. So I was advising on projects for say, the Chinese office, the Paris office, are doing a few projects in Brazil, the US a few in Canada. So all over the world, really. And then from there, I ended up leaving that company during COVID to set up my own company. Initially, I was I started off in I was living at the time in Palermo, or nearby Palermo in Sicily, where my wife's family are from, and from there had the idea to eventually move back to Ireland and set up my own company work on projects across the world, from their from my company here in Slagle I've worked on projects in Oman, the Netherlands, a few in the US, Belgium, Austria, Germany. And hopefully some soon and it's common. And you

 

Dusty Rhodes 05:13

said that you met your wife in Italy, the name of your company voluto is strikes me as being an Italian word, is it? And what does it mean?

 

Eoin Casserly 05:21

Well, I actually met my wife in New York, but her family's from from Sicily. So we all run during COVID. So it's a it's the name of a seashell, it was actually probably the toughest thing about starting a company was finding a good name. So fluid is the name of a seashell. And it's also the name of a type of facade detail. So those two things, I think, combined, give us a sense of what the company does. So we're really guided by the beauty and efficiency of nature, because if you imagine a seashell, snail or, or whatever, doesn't want to spend onto energy, making this water what they have to live in, they want to do in the most beautiful, I suppose efficient, and least energy intensive form they can they can make, which ends up being really beautiful. And so taking inspiration as well from from Moscow performing as a big, big part of the company.

 

Dusty Rhodes 06:19

And do you feel like kind of that little creature? Because you're just one? No, but what I mean, seriously, you're one human being, and you're designing these huge big projects, which are, you know, 1000 times bigger than you are? And you're keeping in mind the functionality of it, but also how it looks on the practicality of it. Have you ever had a design dream in your head? That was like structurally or logistically too big?

 

Eoin Casserly 06:51

Just on the first part, I don't think I can ever say I don't think anyone can really ever say that they're the soul. No,

 

Dusty Rhodes 06:58

of course, no, I don't I don't I'm not putting it all down to you. You're involved in it? I know. Yes. Yeah.

 

Eoin Casserly 07:05

It's something that I thought before I started working in all of this, that it was something that's portrayed or lost as one, you know, it's creative genius, alone, in engineering, which isn't ever the case at all, that it's always a team of people, there's always a huge amount of compromise. This, really a lot of the time, you're just a facilitator, that for, for other people's visions, or for a combined vision. Plus, there's limiting factors in terms of, you know, the reality of of materials, and what can be achieved with them. Plus, I think there's a, there's a great quote, This architecture is dancing in chains. So they have these limitations, that these chains, but that you can still dance, when you're held down by them. And that's, that's from God, Mark, I think. But I think that there are limitations. But you can always work around these, you know, this limitations can create a box for something new. And that's part of the beauty of it all, I think.

 

Dusty Rhodes 08:12

Do you think that when you have limitations when you try to achieve something, or to design something, that because of those very limitations, you come up with something brilliant?

 

Eoin Casserly 08:22

Exactly. I think that's the beauty of it all, that if you're designing without these limitations, then you're purely, you know, you might as well be a video game designer, that this is not based in reality, we have all of these realities are these, these limitations in what's actually constructible, the you really have to be, you can't be sitting in an ivory tower, just saying, get this done. This is I believe this is possible without basically doing it yourself, you have to first understand how someone can build it. I think that's a huge part of overall, which a lot of unfortunately, a lot of engineers they think are, are a little bit divorced from the construction side of things. And architects to this, you really have to understand that side of, of what can be built to understand the sequence of AI can be built, even for natural limitations of of who you're working with. That I think all of these combines. These limitations are actually what create, create the best projects.

 

Dusty Rhodes 09:26

Do you have any particular project where he is kind of started off going, Oh, my God, this is never gonna happen. And then you made the U turn it around or something.

 

Eoin Casserly 09:35

There were a few projects where we were doing things that had never been done before. So, you know, we're world firsts. And there's always an idea that if you're going to hire or are using something that hasn't been used before, this from first principles, you can figure this thing out. But there's always a shaky moment of Where you will question yourself and wonder, you know, how, how do we test this? How do we ensure that everything is safe, but that's the process, I suppose that you have to believe it is.

 

Dusty Rhodes 10:17

One of the projects that I've seen that you were involved in, I think, is one that everybody listening to the podcast will know. And that is back in your time in New York City. And I don't know if it's part of the project where you're literally developing the new neighborhood over the railway, but the edge in New York as a huge tourist attraction, where literally, I don't know what floor it is, but it looks like the 250/7 floor as you walk up to this massive balcony thing. And it looks like you're hanging over the edge of the building, how, what was your involvement in that project.

 

Eoin Casserly 10:48

So I was the project manager and lead engineer for the work on the secondary structure and facades, glass floor, the glass perimeter, basically everything apart from the primary structure, what directly attaches to the building. So I also didn't, there's a, there's a staircase in it, leading up to, to a second store that I also didn't want didn't have any involvement in. But basically, everything else I was, had my my hand in, I actually haven't been to a census is finished. So it's, I suppose it was one of the really unique parts of that was this, it's in a yard, these, if you think about when I was going back to thinking about how this can be constructed. So there was only basically, I think it was one night allowed for closing off the roads in New York, to transport this thing. So there has to be a huge amount of pre assembly. So there were modules are called modules, basically, individual pieces connected together, done in a factory, which would then be assembled on us. If you can imagine it almost like Lego on site. So craned up around 400 meters high, and then a fit to within three millimeters of tolerance of each other. So the three millimeters of tolerance of each other needed to be exact, because of I've actually cleaning it to allowing the facade maintenance teams to calm down the rails. And if those, if those rails were even slightly Miss connected to each other, by three millimeters or more, then they might get stuck. So this involves a huge amount of analysis on the individual modules to ensure this, there was enough adjustability, to connect them in the air at 400 meters with the battery with no scaffolding underneath, which is another big part of it. So then there was also apart from the modules, which is the, I suppose the structural part and the sad part. There's also the glass. So there's a three major tall cantilever bridge, glass barrier around the edge, and the highest outer glass floor in the world. So for this, these were, I suppose a little bit different to the more heavy structural, structural steel parts of the modules, there were more fine, lightweight, architectural designs. And we really had to find a balance between transparency and the structural stability of the glass. Because this is where you might look as glass in your window. But it's not holding up anything. The glass and these is preventing is holding itself up. And also holding up a full group of people standing on a jumping on it, whatever and needs to maintain its capacity for for many, many years. So you could go very thick with the glass. So have many, many layers. But you lose a bit of the transparency, you lose the whole idea of what you're you're putting it there for the first place. So find your balance there with some some fairly complex finite element analysis and through testing as well, to figure out exactly the minimum that we can use that will still be safe. Still be structurally sound.

 

Dusty Rhodes 14:33

That sounds amazing. I mean, it's such an iconic thing being the edge in New York. Was that your biggest challenge today or have you dealt with something even bigger?

 

Eoin Casserly 14:43

Yeah. Lots of lots of big projects like that. One that comes to mind is our first project with voluto which is over which was we're finished with a no or man Botanic Garden. So this is the biggest project in the history of of Oman, making the biggest botanic garden in the world. I was the technical consultant for the grid shells in this. So the idea behind this Botanic Garden is to showcase the diversity of plants in Oman, which actually has lots of different climates. And so there's in the north of the country, in the mountains, there's a northern climate, like juniper trees, things like this. And then in the south, they have what's called the Hareesh season, which is monsoon season, that actually brings a lot of green, very unexpectedly in the south of Oman. And this huge biodiversity, they wanted to showcase this partially for tourism, and also just to show what, what amazing biodiversity on and has. So in these two grid shells, these two quite freeform looking steel and glass structures, the ideas to house and the northern biome, the plants of the northern regions, and in the southern biome, the plants of the southern region. So this was, and still is just an amazing project. The scale is, is outstanding, the x axis and beyond photos from site A few weeks ago, which really these these things look big on a computer. But once they're actually built, it's at another level entirely. A

 

Dusty Rhodes 16:33

lot of the projects that you're talking about are in public spaces, and therefore the public is the experience of the people who's going to experience these spaces important to you, while you're doing the design are

 

Eoin Casserly 16:46

hugely I mean, to everyone in the design process, I think it's best the goal. I mean, there can be lots of little things that you you obsess over, that maybe people might not notice. But it's it's always the end goal is is the end user. And

 

Dusty Rhodes 17:02

with engineering, when you're coming to having to do a design for a particular purpose, and you've got so many challenges to overcome, when you figure them all out, is then also adding the fact that the public must think this is amazing. Does that add to it? Or does it make it a more interesting project? Oh,

 

Eoin Casserly 17:20

definitely makes it more interesting. I mean, it's it's always really interesting to see how people engage with structures and with with the architecture, because it can be completely different sometimes to what you expect her to what everyone in the design team is imagining. And I think that's, that's the beauty that, you know, you, you can spend years on, on something. But someone else can just come and have a completely fresh perspective on it. After a few minutes,

 

Dusty Rhodes 17:54

and as well as thinking about that a factor of that the yield, the public has to be wowed by this design, you like working with glass as well? In what ways does that make these structural process more difficult?

 

Eoin Casserly 18:07

Well, for one thing, glass has very different tolerances to the more standard building materials. So you're often looking at tolerances of a millimeter for glass, where you know, for steel, you might be looking at a 10 it's a very fine piece of design work that you have to have to really understand how how things will be installed, how they will be maintained, which is critical, obviously, you don't want if you design this, this brilliant piece of of glass, that it just gets dirty after a few weeks and then remains dirty forever. But you have to understand the process of of how everything's done. The fabrication process, installation process, obviously the the first principles of the engineering, and it's quite a new while it's maybe not that new, it's maybe you know, probably 40 years, where people are working with structural glass or glass to actually hold up itself or, or other parts of a building. So it's quite a niche, niche area, with research sometimes coming out. So this may change your perspective on it. What do you mean by that? What is it because it's not as well studied as other materials. The research on it can can be, I suppose, maybe a bit more groundbreaking breaking down, for example, with steel where a lot of it has already been figured out. So for example, there isn't or it's coming out soon the Euro code for glass, a design manual for glass, which of course with lots of other materials is already present for a long time. So there's debate it's very different in every country as well, there'll be huge differences in standards of, of what can be used for glass structures, say from Brazil to the US or to, to Germany, a big part of that is having to rely on your knowledge of first principles of the chemistry, the manufacturing of the material, to know what will work, what's safe, or what isn't. So take little pieces of these courts from all around the world, to add to your knowledge,

 

Dusty Rhodes 20:32

it's fascinating to hear these things that you're passionate about with the design of the materials and the glass and everything and how you're able to just bring it into your work. You're also passionate about the architecture response to the climate crisis. Can you tell me a little bit how you weave sustainability into your work?

 

Eoin Casserly 20:52

Yeah, well, I think it's the big challenge for the construction industry in general. So something this that isn't talked about a huge amount, especially not in, I suppose mainstream in papers, for example, you don't see this, the buildings and construction in general accounts for normally around 40% of, of the world's global greenhouse gas emissions. The law was the things about, you know, to reduce flying, which is a great idea. But no one ever talks about using less concrete and mainstream discussions of the climate crisis. But we are in addition to about 40%, of of global greenhouse gas emissions around 30% of of global waste, is produced by the construction industry. It's a massively wasteful industry. And it's, it's a, it's a big focus of luta. This, this shift to a more sustainable method of building those just to make the problem even more complex, the world is urbanizing at a huge rate, and a city the size of New York, basically, if you take the whole world combined, the amount of building compared to a city the size of New York will have rebuilt every month until around 2060. So it's an enormous challenge. You know, some people rightly see this a big part of that, that challenge to face this or the solution face the challenge is a shift to biomaterials, bio based materials, such as timber, bamboo stone, because concrete steel, they're very carbon intensive. And so this is something we're focusing on with Volusia shift to to biomaterials. Also, a big part of what we do is we work with complex geometry structures. So often structures that are curved in two directions. So if you imagine, say a ball, this is curved in two directions, if you imagine an arch, this is only curved in one. But the two directions don't necessarily have to be the same one. So if you imagine a saddle, one curve is in one way, the other curves in the opposite way. So this is one of the the big, kind of untapped potentials of how we can how engineers going to approach the climate crisis is the power of geometry. And a great voice in this regard is Philip block, Professor Philippe block in at Hans Ulrich, he's really pioneered what's called the war against bending. So elements that are in bending, so for example, like beams and slabs, it's quite an inefficient method of construction or method of, of internal stress, where if things are intention, so being pulled apart, or compression being pushed together, it's much more material efficient. And so, a lot of the of what we design in terms of grid shells, cable nets, these are tension or compression structures, which use a lot less material in comparison to to these bending structures. So, if you look around yourself, you will only see buildings at right angles. Now, this means that everything is in bending more or less or most things are in bending, and this is a really inefficient way to use material. So, this is a big part of what we do in with volute is is harnessing the power of geometry to and using biomaterials to really minimize this carbon footprint.

 

Dusty Rhodes 24:54

Let me change subject for a few minutes on because you hold the title of Chartered Engineer of the Year with Engineers, Ireland and congratulations on that. Can I ask you? How does it help you to be a chartered engineer specifically?

 

Eoin Casserly 25:10

Well, it's great because I can work in Ireland. So all projects in Ireland have to have a chartered engineer. And this allows me I've worked on projects in over 20 countries, but never in Ireland, never where I'm from. So being a chartered engineer allows me to, to work in Ireland and hopefully bring some of what I've learned abroad and some of the expertise of gains to Ireland's as well.

 

Dusty Rhodes 25:40

Well, needless to say, there's more information about going from engineer to chartered engineer on the website at engineers ireland.ie. Can I wrap up today on by asking you, I mean, you're obviously hugely experienced person. And with all of that global knowledge that you have, from your experience, what would you like to see change in the world of engineering?

 

Eoin Casserly 26:04

So I suppose, like I'd mentioned, a shift to biomaterials. So cement production alone, just one part of of concrete is a percent of global greenhouse gas and gas emissions every year. We're running out of materials, from the way we construct a crazy thing that that happens is this the UAE, which is I think 99% Desert, actually import sand from Australia, for concrete,

 

Dusty Rhodes 26:34

you're kidding me that somebody is selling sand to the Arabs, literally.

 

Eoin Casserly 26:41

So it's sands from rivers is actually much more useful, as accurate, or sorry for use in countries because of the friction coefficient. But we're going to run out of materials like this are very fast, unless we started using renewable sources, and using less. So using bamboo, which is a really fast growing material has huge, huge potential, especially in the developing world, because it can be grown almost, in almost every climate, a shift away from, from the very carbon intensive materials like like concrete and steel, I would hope this, there'll be a shift to more circularity in construction. So reusing materials, most of the time, something is, is demolished. And basically, it just becomes a waste. It's something new is built from virgin materials in its place, which is, is a incredibly wasteful process. So I would hope there'd be a lot more circularity. And then something this, I also lecture in university, and it's you. And I don't lecture in engineering actually lecture in architecture. And the reason I chose to do this was because I think there needs to be much greater integration between architecture and structural engineering for one thing, because right now, especially in Ireland is quite a vertical process where an architect might design something structural engineer has to make that work. Where I think there's a lot more to be gained from a collaboration and creative tension at the start of a project. It's really where the structural engineer can contribute the most can make a huge saving in terms, especially in terms of, of carbon. I think this creative tension creates something much better than the sum of those parts in the end.

 

Dusty Rhodes 28:54

And it's like you said earlier, where you have limitations, you have to come up with solutions around that. And actually, often you will end up getting something even better because of those limitations. So exactly. Listen, if you would like to find out more about Eoin Casserly and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes, and link details in the description area of the podcast. But for now, Eoin Casserly, founder of VOLUTA, thank you very much for joining us.

 

Eoin Casserly 29:21

Thanks very much Dusty.

 

Dusty Rhodes 29:23

If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland for advanced episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland, or career development opportunities. There are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie to check it out. Until next time from myself Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening

 

When Art & Engineering Collide | Eoin Casserly, Principal and Founder of VOLUTA

Greg Hayden is a dynamic innovator who is all about reinvention and the power of keeping things fresh.

Over the course of the past 17 years Greg and his team at Ethos Engineering have ridden one wave after another in the constantly evolving tech space. On this episode of the AMPLIFIED podcast, he gives us a front-row view into what it looks like to go from boom to bust, pivot quickly and pioneer frontiers such as data centre transformation, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and blockchain.

He also shares what he believes should be our global current priorities (particularly around climate change) and the logic behind basing his company culture on outcomes rather than hours logged.

Whether it’s developing energy-efficient next-gen data centres, creating exciting new points of entry for smart buildings or reconceiving the ways in which we share global resources, Ethos’s … well, ethos … is all about vision, innovation and agility. Greg sees technology and its interplay socially and economically as a fascinating “jigsaw” – with diverse points of view, constant learning and openness to surprise as the central drivers.

“The world has changed so, so fast. We need to not only keep up with it, but surpass ourselves by bringing something new and fresh,” he says. “And the only way you can do that is through innovation!”

Listen below or on your podcast player!

Topics we discussed include

How repetitive tasks represent an area rich with opportunity for digitization through machine learning.

  • What smart buildings have to offer in terms of real-time data customized to our individual live/work environments and needs, including things like air quality, energy efficiency, meal planning and other elements of a living lab.
  • Greg shares the smart culture at Ethos’s offices, from scheduling conference space for collaborations to controlling room temperature in real time to reserving a parking space.
  • Why data centres don’t deserve vilification.
  • Why Ireland’s future lies in building out future-facing, ambitious energy infrastructure.
  • Should CPDs reflect bleeding-edge technologies? Greg says, Yes! Without a doubt, engineers need to be at the forefront of development and scalability.
  • Work-life balance, it’s practical implementation at Ethos and how scheduling non-negotiable pockets of quality time will change your life.

Guest details

Greg Hayden’s role at Ethos is to attract, grow, and enable the best talent in the industry to support clients in the delivery of best-in-class projects. He works with some of the most significant clients in the Data Centre, Smart Buildings, Sustainability, and Commercial Sectors. He enjoys continually learning and developing, from his Honours Degree in Energy Engineering to his International MBA, and recently AI, Blockchain, and current IoT business strategy training at MIT.

Ethos Engineering has has designed, delivered and provided master planning services for 45 data centres, including 23 in Ireland. The firm has also completed 9.6 million sq. ft. of office space (including shell & core and fit outs), 4 million sq. ft. of mixed-use developments, 14 Linac Accelerators, 8,562 residential units, 7,200 student beds, 2,000 dwellings, 1,700 hotel beds, 1,100 prison cells, 3,000 healthcare beds and 30 operating theatres - in Ireland and internationally.

Contact details

https://www.ethoseng.ie/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-hayden-mba-chartered-engineer-7339b514/

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Transcription text

For your convenience, here is a 90% accurate automated transcript of the podcast.

Dusty Rhodes  0:01 

Right now on amplified the engineers journal podcast we're about to meet the CEO of ethos engineering, Greg Hayden,

Greg Hayden  0:08 

engineers are often accused to be not very fun loving. They actually said the two most boring professions are engineering and accountancy. My wife's an accountant. So that probably says a lot for us.

Dusty Rhodes  0:41 

Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to the engineers Ireland podcast where we're chatting with our community of creative professionals across the country, about how engineers are delivering sustainable solutions for society both for now and in the future to come. Joining us today is one of the founders of a company which has spent the last 17 years doing some amazing work with data centers in particular as well as smart buildings for offices and accommodation and plenty of other things. He is a big believer in innovation and continuing personal development and asides from his engineering degrees. He has recently added AI blockchain and Internet of Things qualifications to his training for a very real look in engineering today. And tomorrow, it's a pleasure to welcome the CEO of ethos, engineering, Greg, Hayden, Hayden, Greg, it on those things. Delighted to be here. So listen, give me give me a quick overview of ethos, engineering, and where you guys are at in the market.

Greg Hayden  1:34 

As you said, their ethos engineering 17 years old, we still think we're we're very young guys and girls, we started out in 2005, three really good years, and then the whole crash happened. And we've found herself in the to survive in the Middle East and North Africa, like many other Irish companies, and we were probably the first to start implying, again back in 2010. But I suppose what we learned then was that never rest on your laurels and always look to reinvent yourself. So we're always changing in ethos is all about change everything we do we actually embrace change. It's been a roller coaster has been up and up and down last 17 years. But it's it's a fantastic company full of fantastic people.

Dusty Rhodes  2:21 

Tell me what kind of one of the main areas that you work in?

Greg Hayden  2:24 

Well, as you said, there, its data center, smart buildings, corporate headquarters, nearly all different sectors. And in the last two years, we started our own digital consultancy.

Dusty Rhodes  2:35 

So tell me what is the company plan then for the next three years?

Greg Hayden  2:39 

Right, we launched a whole rebranding of ethos last September. And we've done a course for enterprise Ireland called Global for growth. And after that, we got our five year plan. The whole five year plan was to double the size of the company. Within five years, it was also to bring up the next level of ethos leadership, we talked to our clients and asked our clients, our top lines, what do they want from me to us, a lot of our clients wanted innovation, they want us to bring something fresh and something new. So our whole plan was, you know, everything we do has to be innovation. It has to bring values that look at problems or pain points, or clients pain points, and see can we actually look at ideas to solve those problems. So the next five years is all about doubling the size company, bringing people on board, getting people being inclusive with innovation, everyone has to be part of it. It's not just a innovation team, like from graduates coming in to me CEO, everyone has to be involved. So we have an innovation wallet at ethos, people put up ideas of helping improve how we operate internally, how can we offer better services for our clients. So the next five years up to 2025, is to be the most innovative MEP company in Europe,

Dusty Rhodes  3:59 

getting new projects in can be challenging, because everybody wants to you know, it's it's a big job. And there's so many things that have to be done. But then when you have clients also saying we want something innovative, just kind of add on to it. How do you handle that challenge?

Greg Hayden  4:13 

I think I think we're very, very lucky. We're working in many different sectors with many different clients. And it's really what you see with different clients and taking some ideas and bring it to somewhere else. So innovation isn't creating something to me, it's not creating something new. It's taking an idea that you see somewhere else, and reapplying of the

Dusty Rhodes  4:35 

project you're working on at the moment, which is posing the biggest challenge or what's the biggest challenge you're facing? Without naming names? Of course.

Greg Hayden  4:41 

Yeah, yeah, I suppose. There's a number of challenges and that we all know, I suppose the biggest challenge for all of us at the moment is saving the planet. Climate change decarbonisation then, and we all have a role to play in that. All different sectors. And I think the solution around that is collaboration. is working together, not pointing the finger, you know, at different sectors. And if we actually look at data of everything we use, we can curtail our consumption of limited resources. And then you look at you bring in innovation and and you look at ideas of how can we do things better, and everything driving towards sustainable solutions. So I think those three things mixed, you know, data, innovation, sustainability, but doing it in a collaborative way, is the solution.

Dusty Rhodes  5:30 

Do you find that clients are coming to you saying that they need sustainability? And as a I mean, a company is being very capitalist about it. It's all about profit for shareholders, why are they interested in sustainability?

Greg Hayden  5:44 

I think I think everyone has actually woken off to sustainable buildings, the way forward. I think the way we built things in the past, we can't do that going forward. And everyone's aware of that. And I think there's a freshness about it. It's not greenwashing, everyone wants to be part of it. And the clients, we're working for the very forward thinking in their products and their their solutions and their buildings, and they want them as green as possible. You've

Dusty Rhodes  6:14 

spoken quite a bit about data and internet and numbers and statistics and sustainability. And the whole thing, and data centers or smart buildings is a is a big thing for you in your professional life, what what attracts you to that area in particular,

Greg Hayden  6:29 

I think limited resources attracts me. And I think, how we use our resources, if we really is like being in the car, you're not, you need to know you need to find out your drive and your speeds, you know, the air temperature, the air temperature, you need to have all these facts and figures. And I think if you know what you're using in real time, you can actually curtail your use or make better use of your resource, wherever you don't know you're going to consume and you're going to consume. So I think what drove me in is actually the technology to say like, there's a lot of what we do, and ethos engineer and that's repetition. So we can get something that's the we don't have to do young engineers coming in young, female or male graduates coming in that they don't have to do the repetition work that we can get technology to do that for us, whether that's, you know, AI or machine learning to do the repetition, and they feel their career is progressing more, because they're not just size and pipes or a size and dock seal day in, day out. They're actually adding real value at a very early stage of their career. And I think to embrace technology. And to bring that into our business, I think construction is absolutely ripe for digitalization. So we're embracing that. And you mentioned their children locked down. And, you know, I found a little bit of time on my hands, I studied three different courses in MIT in Boston, and one of those being blockchain and not an AI in the Internet of Things. Because I knew a little bit about and didn't know a whole lot. And I always find in life that the more you study something, the more you realize, you don't still fully understand it. But we're working there, we're working there. And we're free, very lucky that we have clients that are pushing that same agenda. And they don't have all the solutions. They know we don't have all the solutions. But together we're getting there.

Dusty Rhodes  8:30 

So with all of this digitization, you've got more information, and you cut out a lot of the repetition for the designers as well. In reality, how does it make a difference to a building, say a regular building that would have been built, let's just say 10 or 15 years ago, not that not on an ancient building, and something that will be deemed a smart building. Now, I mean, what's the real difference?

Greg Hayden  8:51 

The real difference is to know what's going on when you're building in real time. And you don't even have to compare the building back in the day to now, if myself and yourself had two different houses, and we built exactly the same, how I use my space and how you use your space is going to be totally different. The user experience what you want from your space, and what I want for my space is probably going to be totally different. So it's trying to tap into that how do you use your space? How can you better use your space? How are you using the energy in the space, the quality of the air in the space and then tweaking that to the users requirements to get the best user experience out of their built acid

Dusty Rhodes  9:36 

when I think of smart building, because I'm more the consumer and I'm thinking you know kind of Alexa and turn on the lights and that kind of stuff or whatever when you think of smart buildings. What do you think?

Greg Hayden  9:48 

We'll probably like that. It's it's, it's having a mobile phone here. It's, it's everything that your smartphone can do. So you should be able to, like walk into a building and maybe only Have your phone that, you know, you can book ahead, you book your space, you don't even have to touch the elevator yet, you offer your phone up to the elevator that will take you to the floor. There's that length. So by the way, there's a vegan in the house. So make sure there's that food ready, you know, if you're cycling into work, that there's enough cycling stations for everyone to pack up their bike. So it's absolutely everything of how you use your building, and how you'd like to use your building. So even in the COVID world, you know, where you don't want to touch anything, you can make that possible, if you want, like at the moment we were actually finding in our own space areas and in our office, are free on under utilized. So now we can repurpose that, for something that would be utilized an awful lot more.

Dusty Rhodes  10:47 

When a COVID hit us, of course, everything changed. And all of a sudden everybody's discovering zoom and working from home. And then now it's kind of rolling back to working in the office are a bit of a hybrid. You guys are quite proud of the way you work you refer to your office as a as a digitized office or a living lab. And can you describe to me how it works?

Greg Hayden  11:08 

We're trying to drive the Digital Agenda for our office at the same time COVID here. And we brought some smart people in from other other sectors to look at our office and look at how can we make this smart? How can we use it better. And we made a living lab to just record anything that we can record in real time on the air quality of our office, but then also how to use our office, I think we had everyone back in our office. Now the office isn't big enough for for everyone. So when you want to go to the office, you book your desk, you can book your parking spot, you can actually see who else is in, maybe you want to work with one of your co workers. And you need that little bit of collaboration space. So you can find out who else is in there. And maybe I'll book the table beside him or her because I want to I want to work with Dusty, we're driving the Digital Agenda smart buildings for our clients, where better to start than our own office. So we're finding out how we're using our own office, how we should design before, I would have always designed from my experience. Now I'm actually designing from the information that we're getting from our space. And it's a different way of designing. So we're very proud. And then we put the office true for the well, performance rating. And we're the only business in the world that has actually got that benchmark for our office, where we're measuring the quality of water air temperature in real time, we know what's actually happening in our office in real time. And then we can tweak our offers to make it more efficient or more better experience for the user.

Dusty Rhodes  12:51 

For you as a managing director and the man who's kind of at the top looking down, how does this then improve things for the company?

Greg Hayden  12:59 

That's a good question that I think I think all of our staff feel they're on the cusp of something very fresh and very new. And I mentioned to you that we're driving the innovation idea. And to us like it's innovation with capital I that everyone has a say I started my career, dusty, where I said, Well, how are things done around here? And could you change this? Or could you change that? And I was actually told we'll get back into your box because, you know, you're only a young guy, you don't have any experience. And we'll tell you how things are done. And we wanted to turn that on its head. We always have both. We have an innovation while a digital innovation while and from ground up. You aren't we're saying put your ideas down your what you hate about your work. And Anita has put the ideas down or what would you change, and not all ideas, make it all the way through, you know, some that they won't get there. But now a lot of really, really good ideas are coming from the young people that are coming from college, and they're saying, Okay, this bit this business has gone 17 years, but would they not consider this or would not consider that, as somebody ideas that are coming out are absolutely fantastic. Unbelievable. And they're saying back to us I can't believe I just come home from college and the CEO on the other executive directors from ethos are asking us grads, how should we run our company?

Dusty Rhodes  14:27 

Let's move on to data centers because you know, Athos are very involved in data centers and as this is a three pronged question on a rarely asked them our data centers are they're known for being power hungry, okay, and it's been in the news and everything. Can you tell us how power hungry they are? Why there's been an official pullback on them, and how can you design them so that they are more sustainable? They're the three things were to ask you about starting with how power hungry, our data centers actually

Greg Hayden  14:58 

it's amazing. There's this be in an awful lot of data center bashing. And it's sad, it really, really gets to me, right? Because you have to decouple the data from the center, right? We all know that data is the future, and the use of data will actually help us curtail our use of limited resources. And that has to reside somewhere. But there's a lot of people out there that would welcome the cloud, but then they give valuable data centers and attune to the same things. So for a lot of the clients, the clients we we work with, they're all about investing in renewables, they're, you know, they've they've a role in in to play and stabilize and the issues that we have with our grid, and to me that the powerhouses of digital solutions. So it's a difficult one, because I think there's so much good that comes out of data centers. But you have to start with why we're collecting this data. First. I think if you roll it back 10 or 15 years, we all had our Comms Room, we all had our own little data centers in our offices. And that was so so inefficient. So now they're all it's been collected, it's been centralized, it's run by people that really know their business, they're really really, you know, energy conscious. So it's going in the right direction, but you need the centers for the data.

Dusty Rhodes  16:28 

So it's kind of like even though they're they're sucking up so much energy with the use of the the actual computers and the the aircon and everything to keep them cool. For the benefit that we get. It's like a factory, isn't it? Yeah, essentially, why has there been an official pullback in Ireland where they're kind of going right? No more data centers for what

Greg Hayden  16:47 

it's the lack of power isn't that we've we haven't invested in our network and our current network for a very long, long time. So back in the day, we put big investment into your roads across Ireland. And we need the same investment into our energy infrastructure.

Dusty Rhodes  17:06 

Why are so many of the data centers in and around the Dublin area

Greg Hayden  17:10 

I suppose like any business, yeah, it's clustering. And people want to be beside people that they do business with, when you're looking at data centers and data centers around the world. They're all in different cities, whether it's, you know, it's Frankfurt, it's Amsterdam, it's London, it's, it's Paris, and it's Dublin. And if we drive them out to Dublin all the time, maybe the center doesn't come to Ireland, it goes to Frankfurt, or it goes to Amsterdam.

Dusty Rhodes  17:40 

But how realistic is that are not even how realistic is how big in the global scale when it comes to data centers? Is Ireland? How popular is

Greg Hayden  17:48 

it? It's very big. It's like it's it's one of the big five in Europe.

Dusty Rhodes  17:53 

So it's gonna say, Yeah, we're way up there. We always punch above our weight or Irish. I love that. My third part, then to that question is how can we design data centers so that they are more sustainable?

Greg Hayden  18:04 

While this is happening, happening? Day in, day out? Does the, as I said, the very forward thinking clients, they're getting their energy, green energy, they're looking to run their facilities, yes, as efficiently as possible to come up with new, innovative solutions. So that's happening day in day out. And our first data center we designed was probably around 2008. And that's miles away from what we're designing now, from an efficiency point of view, is so so much more efficiently? Can you give me an example, just the energy use the energy use for the cooling? It's calmed down so much over over the years?

Dusty Rhodes  18:46 

Personally speaking, you live by the motto innovator die. Girl that's very angry. I bet you even have a T shirt that says the innovator Diana dear.

Greg Hayden  18:56 

Well, I have to I stole that phrase from this lecture. And in DCU Farrago Brophy, who done a bit of work with back in 2019, and we were doing the Go Global for growth course, which was awesome, probably 10 or 15. Other companies looking at Go Global for growth with enterprise, Ireland, and all the different courses we done. That's the one that grabbed me and figureheads, that statement, innovate or die. And I just realized that we never, you know, when you think of innovation think, yeah, I can innovate for a product. But can I innovate for a solution? It took me a while to get my head around that. And then I was thinking, you know, we've been innovating or change. And since we started in 2005, we just didn't call innovation. And to me is like, what got us here won't get us to where we want to go. So we have to change the world has changed and so, so fast, and not only keep up with it, you need to surpass us and you'll bring something new and fresh And the only way you can do that is innovation. So it's finding the pain points, what are your clients or your own pain points, coming up with ideas, always coming up with ideas, and then evaluating those ideas and putting them together and mixing them with technology and coming up with a solution.

Dusty Rhodes  20:16 

You've mentioned before that you studied a couple of things that are going to become enormous ly important in engineering, artificial intelligence, blockchain and IoT, which is the Internet of Things. How do you think engineers should be thinking of these digital assets or tools when they're thinking about buildings in five or 10 years time? I mean, when you put your your little black to the future goggles, how do you see the world in 2050, applying artificial intelligence and IoT,

Greg Hayden  20:47 

I think, to me, it's to embrace it, not to be scared of it, it's, you know, there's this whole fear that AI will take all of our, all of our jobs and time, like, that's, that's not going to happen, it's going to take away what we don't like to do, and then leave us working on the areas that we do like to do. So to me, it's, it's, it's embracing, it's using it, and not being scared, but because I think it is the future, we have limited resources and people are, are so limited. That's the whole debate of as has the world population topped out. So we're seeing shortages since COVID, in all different sectors where businesses cannot get the talent they cannot get people in. And I think that's just gonna get worse, they'll stay in time. So we have to embrace the technology to take on those areas where the technology can do maybe didn't an awful lot better than us. And they're probably areas that we don't like to do anyway,

Dusty Rhodes  21:49 

give me example, in your own engineering office, because you had mentioned before, where repetitive tasks are being taken away from people and allows them to be more innovative and creative. So what kind of repetitive tasks? Are you using AI and IoT, etcetera, etcetera to do?

Greg Hayden  22:06 

Oh, it's, it's anything from any of our sizing calculations, in our buildings, where the COBie so many cables size and so many duct sizes, then when you bring all that together, into one building is the final where all the clashes are. So there's a lot that if there's certain rules that can be followed, AI or machine learning, you know, can do an awful lot quicker than Austin repetitive stuff. So really, that's where we're using them, we're trying to come up with ideas where we can bring in that technology that takes away our date, so nearly have to deep construct what we do day in day out, and then see, can this be done better? With the use of AI or machine learning?

Dusty Rhodes  22:54 

There are three quite complex areas. So Internet of Things, my understanding is like the Alexa is in our lives where you can tell it to turn the lights on and off, or draw the curtains if you've gone that far. Artificial Intelligence is, as you say, where it's monitoring and taking all the data and it's then able to kind of predict how many vegan meals you need next week, that kind of a way. Blockchain then is a whole worlds to itself. Do you think that engineers should be looking at these areas as part of their CPD?

Greg Hayden  23:23 

Yes, without a shadow of a doubt? Definitely. It's very new to a lot of people, but it's very, very new to engineers. And I think clients are looking for the solution. So we as engineers, have to understand this technology. And the capability that it has to allow us to apply it apply it to our day to day service offering and to bring those solutions to to our clients.

Dusty Rhodes  23:49 

And is this something that you look for when you're taking on new people at the moment to see if they've already studied that in college?

Greg Hayden  23:54 

That's a very good question. What we've actually found since we've gone down this route, is that we're taking on people that we wouldn't even even considered that they had a role in their company. So we're taking on people that are maybe not engineers, and maybe they've come from to come to the IT route. Or they've come from physics route science route, that they're not mechanical, electrical engineers, but they have a role to bring this whole Jigsaw together and to offer this this service. Yeah, so I think it's actually opened up a whole new horizon for us for the quality people that we can attract into ethos.

Dusty Rhodes  24:35 

So are you aware of any particular subjects or courses that you would like to see prospective engineers getting interested in?

Greg Hayden  24:42 

Well, the ones I've done in in MIT are free, good on free shorter. I think there were nine week horses each

Dusty Rhodes  24:50 

and you didn't have to travel over there for them. No, no, didn't have

Greg Hayden  24:53 

to travel. At the time you did. They did want you you know there was nine I think one of the weeks you were meant to travel over because of cold but we didn't. It's online learning, you can do it at your own speed. But then at the weekends, you have to do your homework and you have to submit your homework. It's quite intensive balance that which are your home life and your work life. But it covers a lot of the areas very, very quickly.

Dusty Rhodes  25:17 

Let me ask you about engineers, Ireland, because you know, they're very big on on career development. What's one of the most useful things that you've gotten from being in engineers, Ireland,

Greg Hayden  25:27 

I think personally, you know, just probably me and and the company, personally, is probably the engineers are on to get asked me to get involved with interview would be chartered engineers. And it was absolutely fantastic. So you'd sit there with two or two other engineers, and you'd have young people coming in and putting their careers in front of you, and you're helping them along to become chartered. I found that very rewarding personally. And then for the company, I think it's the whole CPD, you know, it's their continued professional development, and the log, and we've embraced that and in an ethos, and I think engineers are gonna do a great job in that.

Dusty Rhodes  26:08 

Just before we wrap up, is there anything that I haven't asked you about, you'd like to talk about,

Greg Hayden  26:13 

Oh, you haven't asked me about my work life balance. And I have three young kids under 10. I like doing CrossFit, like dunes gain. So balance that all off with your business, and running your business, doing what you like to do in life, looking after your family. And getting that right. I think that's what we're all. That's what we're all aiming for. And I say will eat us engineer, I totally enjoy working with them. And I get the time. And we're hoping that everyone that works with us, finds that time. So to push that we actually, it was one of our innovation just before COVID, we brought a whole office together and say, right, we're really gonna drive innovation. What can we do differently. So here's a task for you, how can a task get down to a four day week, but offer a better service to our clients. So we have a three day weekend because we all want to spend time with our family or do what we like to do. And we came up with some brilliant ideas, and then COVID it. And, you know, we didn't think that you could work from home. But then we had over 100 people working from home. And we've done that, like probably everyone else, we've done that over a space of two weeks. So now we're in a stage where we haven't got down to the four day weekend, we're doing a nine day fortnight. So every second Friday, the good people have it as engineering or offer free Friday. And we make up that time over nine days by how I think going back to working smarter, not harder, collaborating with each other. There's a lot I think we do as engineers that we spend time on, and it's not adding value to our clients. And it's not adding value to us. And it's done, because it was always done that way. So it's trying trying to find out how can we do this differently, and not spend so much time offer better value to our clients? So we're challenging anything we're doing, we're challenging, and we're asking our staff challenged the way this is done. Is there a smarter way of doing this? That will take less time? And those make us more productive? So we're not quite there yet. But we're, we're getting there.

Dusty Rhodes  28:21 

If I'm an engineer, and I want to achieve the four day week or the nine day fortnight, whatever it is okay, and I want to work smarter, not harder. Yeah. Give me one idea that you have applied in your own company that would help me achieve that goal of the four day week.

Greg Hayden  28:37 

We closed the office every second Friday. So it's not a choice that, you know, can I go for this this week, but I have to make up the time. We're trusting people will make up the time will make up the will make up the tasks. I probably the best way to answer that. It's like I'm not really really interested in people doing the time I'm interested in them getting the task done, and the client being happy, and the fellow colleagues being happy under delivering. So hopefully that's done in less time than a normal working week. So every second Friday, we we we closed the app, no, we explained this to our to our clients and all of them embrace that. And all of them are quite happy with it because we were concerned that we're not around on the Friday. So if we're delivering a job that would go out on a Friday, we say to our clients while you're getting it on Thursday night, you're not getting it on Friday, so you get a day earlier. So it's working really well and it's been embraced by all of our staff and it's you know, allows them to have that three day weekend and they're coming in refreshed on the Monday and energized and ready to go we get

Dusty Rhodes  29:49 

I had an actual time management tip that actually works because you know the way they normally go, only taking calls from 10am to 11am. And it doesn't work in the real world. All right. Here's one that actually works. I'm actually She falls in exactly with what you said works for you. If you have a particular thing you want to do in your private life, okay? So say it's you want to go for a walk, get in a walk every day, you put the walk in on your calendar, between two and three o'clock or whatever it is you're going to take, alright, and that takes the priority. So then when people are saying, Look, can we have a meeting at such and such data that can we talk at two o'clock? You just look at your calendar go? No, I'm busy. All right, yeah. So you do your work day, and then you do your walk, which is also important. So it folds in exactly what you say. And that's why I smiled when you said, we closed the office every second Friday. So it's like all of a sudden, everything has to work around that. Yeah. And I think that's

Greg Hayden  30:42 

brilliant. And I think you're I do exactly the same as you. So I do CrossFit. And I do it maybe most times at 10 o'clock. Yeah, in the day. So I have that in from 10 to 1130. Or you do it already. That's a meeting guy and it's very easy when things are you know, getting very, very busy. To you give up looking after yourself. You give up that walked at you Saturday, give up that time have gone to the gym with you put that in to your point. You know, you make that happen.

Dusty Rhodes  31:11 

It has been very illuminating and an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Greg Hayden on our podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you dusty. If you'd like to find out more about what we spoke about on the podcast today, you'll find show notes and link details in the description area of your podcast player right now. And of course, you'll find more information and advanced episodes on our website at engineers ireland.ie. Our podcast today was produced by just pod.io for engineers, Ireland and if you'd like more episodes, do click the Follow button on your podcast player so you get access to all of our past and future shows automatically. Until next time for myself just to thank you so much for listening. Take care

AMPLIFIED: Greg Hayden, CEO at Ethos Engineering

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