From grey to green

Urban ReLeaf, a four-year Horizon Europe funded project, is transforming grey areas within our cities into green, biodiverse spaces and is encouraging residents in Dundee to get involved with data collection. 

Design HOPES aims to make NHS Scotland a ‘greener’ organisation and is using design to tackle the issue of sustainability, supporting the health body to reach Net Zero by 2040. 

Research for these projects is led by Mel Woods, Professor in Creative Intelligence at DJCAD, and they are having a huge impact here in Dundee and wider afield. Urban ReLeaf is collecting data from residents in Dundee through an app which gathers people’s perceptions of green space in the city, and this will help Dundee City Council decide which areas need ‘green investment’. 

And through service design, Design HOPES is tackling multiple themes identified by NHS staff. Pop-up exhibitions providing solutions to day to-day challenges of sustainability have been displayed at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, while a sub-project, Flow, is analysing unscheduled patients’ journeys through hospital.

Both Urban ReLeaf and Design HOPES place significant importance on sustainable urban planning and design to achieve climate goals, and this is where expertise from Mel and her team at DJCAD is drawn upon.

Mel said, “Climate change is a wicked problem that many in DJCAD have been engaged with for
quite some time.

“Our link is in systemic design and technology, and we have been engaged with challenge based research around the environment, health, climate crisis and thinking about the future.

“Our research is transdisciplinary, and goes beyond gathering data, it’s fundamentally about working with communities to translate research into actual change.”

Secrets unlocked through Scotland’s soil

In a previous citizen research project, Mel and colleagues at the University developed sensor kits to monitor temperature, air quality and soil moisture at various locations in Scotland.

The sensors were introduced in community areas, allotments and farmlands to help build up ‘soil data’ and users were also asked to register trees, plants and land usage. The team’s work is now being upscaled through Urban ReLeaf, which sees collaboration between 15 academic and private sector partners in six countries.

Residents across Dundee – alongside those in Athens (Greece), Cascais (Portugal), Mannheim (Germany), Riga (Latvia) and Utrecht (Netherlands) – are joining together to map out and monitor this environmental data in their city.

Data will be collected for two years on grey and green spaces, landscape and air quality, and uploaded to a mobile phone app, where it will be available for all users to see. Following the collection period, local authority planning officers will use the data to decide where to invest in higher quality green areas, which will facilitate biodiversity as well as being areas people can enjoy.

Mel said, “Citizens collecting and monitoring this data themselves gives them involvement in ongoing efforts by the city to improve our green spaces, air quality, noise pollution and the quality of our environment.

“Our previous research tells us, for example, that soil moisture is connected to a reduction in forest fires. People might not think forest fires happen very often in Scotland, but dry soil can impact us in different ways.

“Dry soil can also cause stress to trees and combined with the force of high winds and storms, this can cause trees to fall. We need strategies to manage this.”

The data collection will also be used to identify areas which need additional nature based infrastructure and solutions, such as areas which are prone to flooding.

Climate change and our personal health

A large portion of work around climate change focuses on the health of the planet, however, the impact of climate change on human health is also significant.  Global average temperatures are increasing, and we are experiencing an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events which have direct and indirect impacts on health and wellbeing.

But NHS Scotland, which works tirelessly to treat people in their time of need and is very much valued and treasured by our society, contributes up to 5% of our country’s total carbon output.  In a bid to cut this figure, Design HOPES (Healthy Organisations in a Place-based Ecosystem, Scotland) utilises design-led research to accelerate NHS Scotland’s progress towards achieving Net Zero outputs by 2040. 

Working in line with the NHS Scotland Climate Emergency and Sustainability Strategy, this two-year project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  It is co-directed by Mel and an academic at the University of Strathclyde and works with researchers from universities throughout Scotland, industry partners, and public sector stakeholders. 

Design HOPES is applying a Systemic Design Framework (Design Council) to NHS Scotland through the lens of sustainable design, from patient journeys, to travel and energy use, medical materials and personal protective equipment (PPE) waste.

A vessel to replicate the success of others 

A sub-project of Design Hopes, called Flow, looks at unscheduled patient journeys to reduce waiting times and manage resources. It is hoped this work will allow shared success across all health boards, fostering collaboration. NHS Tayside has for many years worked towards excellence in urgent and unscheduled care (UUC) and the national redesign of  the UUC programme allowed pre-existing measures to be expanded in Tayside. 

Mel said, “Ninewells Hospital has achieved this by doing something quite innovative – they’ve put the consultant right at the start of the decision-making process.”

Multiple specialities – from paramedics, GPs and community pharmacy – actively control incoming patients to manage demand. Alongside this, there are continued efforts 
in downstream wards and local health and social care partnerships to achieve flow at every stage. 

The impact of this decision has seen a reduced number of journeys to hospital alongside patients having early assess to local community-based services – estimated to save up to 50 tonnes of CO2 in the region annually. By supporting patients to be cared for at home or closer to home, or to return home earlier, this can free up the whole system, meaning those with greatest acute need are able to flow through the hospital and receive the care required.

NHS Tayside already had this strategy in place, but collaborative Flow allows a framework to challenge current practice and model future improvement ideas before implementation.

For more information on Design HOPES visit the website designhopes.org and for information on Urban ReLeaf, visit the Urban ReLeaf website.