EcoEngineers – Designing Sustainable Green Spaces

Look around your neighbourhood – between the busy roads and buildings, you’ll find little patches of green: parks, gardens, and urban forests. They give us fresh air, shade, and a home for birds, insects, and other creatures. But keeping these spaces alive isn’t always easy. Sometimes water is hard to get, sometimes people forget to care for them, and sometimes they just need a bit of creative engineering magic. That’s where you come in. Your challenge? Design a clever, eco-friendly solution to help a green space in your neighborhood thrive. It could be a way to water plants, improve soil, collect rainwater, create shade, or even get the local community involved. You’ll explore ideas, sketch them out, and build a working prototype or scale model. Your design might use pedal power, cranks, sunlight, wind, or something completely unexpected—you decide! In the project lecture, you will learn about and use first principles thinking – a way of breaking down problems to their basics so you can design better solutions. You’ll also learn about how water moves, how to work with the local environment, and how to think about all the people and resources involved.