A truly pragmatic approach at DIRECTION’s 5th progress meeting
This was our battle cry throughout the meeting as delegates not only reported on the progress of each work package, but moreover participated in practical sessions and workshops designed to plan the finer details of DIRECTION’s outreach. The first day featured an exploitation workshop led by Carlos Bárcena Martín from DRAGADOS. It covered a wide range of issues including identification and characterisation of results, IPRs, risk assessment at results level and business plans incorporating further developments after the project ends. It is extremely important at this stage of the project to ensure all the partners are conversant with the means of transferring results to relevant stakeholders, introducing best practices, influencing clients and basically raising the profile of DIRECTION’s benefits for end-users. On the second day, two parallel working sessions were held on specific issues that are important for the next stages of DIRECTION – training and workshops; and selection and visualization of key performance indicators on the Internet and the BIXS. The session on training looked at three workshops to be planned for 2015; they will be very much focussed on local, highly interested stakeholders selected from a curriculum of architects, engineers and designers of low energy buildings, who will guarantee the replication of the DIRECTION business model. A training toolkit would include webinars based on the actual workshops, addressing a wider European audience in order to boost impacts. The other session dealt with the different ways to select and then display KPIs to various audiences. For example, these could include visualisation of KPIs from a comfort perspective, or from a component perspective, depending to the targeted audience and the media used. The session was designed to raise awareness of these issues and to look ahead to the coming months when outreach will be the consortium’s watchword. The second day was also the opportunity to have a working session about the Best Practices Book which is another of DIRECTION’s communication assets. The book will feature the project’s results in the form of best practices for wider adoption and distribution. It is our hope that it will contribute significantly to shaping future policy developments in the same field as our project, and it will target industry, small businesses, research and public institutions. And finally, the consortium was given the chance to visit the CARTIF III building which serves as one of DIRECTION’s demonstration sites. Contact: DIRECTION Communication Secretariat – email: secretariat@direction-fp7.eu. DIRECTION is coordinated by Fundación CARTIF (Boecillo – Valladolid) and developed in cooperation with other 10 partners: DRAGADOS and 1A Ingenieros ; EURAC, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano and Claudio Lucchin & Architetti Associati; Domagk Gewerbepark, Fraunhofer Institut für Bauphysik and FACIT; Enginsoft SpA ; youris.com G.E.I.E . This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 285443
Countries
Spain