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October saw the activity on the project gather pace as we continued to refine our methods and begin to collect data. I travelled to Sweden to help our project partners at Lund with an event we held as part of Lund University’s ‘Future Week’. Our event was hosted by the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) and involved a ‘Cafe Discussion’ on heating today and in the future. We explored participants’ own experiences with heating and sought their views on how we generate heat now and how it should be generated in future in the future.
As part of the event the participants visited the basement of the IIIEE building to learn about the heat exchanger that transfers heat from the external district heating pipes to the buildings own heating system. The opportunity to see this source of heat and its inner workings up close provided valuable insights for the participants. Given the differing levels of knowledge and experience that were held by the multi-generational set of participants, it helped to generate interesting discussions around how we can heat our buildings. Sustainability was at the heart of these discussions around future energy but there was no clear consensus as to what pathway held the most promise.
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| Learning about the heat exchanger at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics | |
Alongside the café discussion and visit to the heat exchanger, we also piloted the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that has been developed for this project. The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts. For this project we are interested in comparing associations between fossil fuel sources and other energy sources (such as solar, wind, energy from waste). These associations are thought to link to the implicit beliefs of an individual, in contrast to, for example, questionnaires that measure explicit beliefs.
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| Completing the IAT | |
My trip also gave me the opportunity to hear about the plans for our next two walking tours. The first one, on the 14th November will be in Brunnshög, which is a new neighbourhood in Lund. The world’s largest low temperature district heating system has been developed here and provides a fascinating location for this walk. Our second walk in November will take place on the 28th in the Sofielund district of Malmö. We’ll provide a further write up of these events in later in the month.
Written by Stephen Parkes