Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#73 - Olivia Swann & Dan Bowers: Echo Chambers and Interlopers: Breaking Down Built Environment Barriers
What happens when a pediatrician who codes and a psychologist studying technology acceptance walk into a built environment conference? Sometimes the most illuminating perspectives come from the margins.
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Olivia Swan, a pediatric infectious disease consultant and data scientist, and Dan Bowers, head of Psychology at the University of South Wales, to explore the fascinating intersection of human behaviour, health, and our built spaces.
Livvy shares how her frustration with seeing the same children repeatedly hospitalised with respiratory issues from cold, damp homes drove her to harness data science to find solutions. "Preschool children are like canaries in the coal mine," she explains, with their rapid breathing rates making them particularly vulnerable to poor indoor air quality. These early exposures can set children up for lifelong respiratory problems, yet medical training rarely focuses on housing as a critical health factor.
Meanwhile, Dan reveals fascinating insights from his research on technology acceptance in social housing. What happens when new ventilation or heating systems are installed without adequate tenant engagement? The psychological dynamics of adoption become crucial, especially when residents lack agency in the decision-making process. "It's not just what the technology does," Bowers explains, "but what your neighbours and community think about it that drives acceptance."
The conversation tackles a perplexing question: why doesn't indoor air quality receive the same attention as other comparable health risks like smoking, despite causing similar harm? The invisible nature of air pollution creates a psychological blind spot, especially when many sources of indoor pollutants (cooking, candles, cleaning products) are associated with positive experiences.
This episode illuminates how truly interdisciplinary approaches might finally move the needle on these complex challenges. Whether you're a healthcare professional, work in housing, or simply care about creating healthier living environments, this conversation offers fresh perspectives on putting humans at the centre of the built environment.
Olivia Swann - LinkedIn
Dan Bowers - LinkedIn
Homes, Heat and Healthy Kids Study
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. We already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Olivia Swan, a welcome early career fellow at the Centre of Medical Informatics at the Usher Institute and a paediatric infectious disease consultant in Edinburgh, and Dan Bowers, head of Psychology at the University of South Wales. It was recorded on location at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow from a symposium on healthy net zero housing and the role of digitization. We talk about echo chambers in the built environment, and I don't mean the physical ones but the literal ones, or is it the other way around? I can't remember. Anyway, I sat down with two experts from entirely different fields accidental interlopers, as they put it, in the built environment, but with the same interest at heart People, us humans at the centre of the built environment. I wonder sometimes if we haven't been getting this wrong, that we have seen the challenges of air quality as an engineering problem and not the human one that it might be. There are some fascinating insights here from the perspectives of health and behaviour, and perhaps a reflection of the interdisciplinary approach that will ultimately be required to move the needle.
Simon:We were all a bit frazzled at the end of an intense couple of days and it seems everyone there had either proposals to finish off or submit or events to organise the next day on top of the two days itself. So I couldn't have been more grateful for Dan and Livvy to share their time with me. I think this was a really great conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Please don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. To check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.
Simon:This is a conversation with olivia swan and dan bowers, I suppose, for, for listeners joining us, um, I've pulled you two poor souls out of two days worth of symposium and workshops. Uh, and we're all a bit frazzled, so we'll keep it short and sweet today. But I thought because of the theme of the conference, which has been this kind of looking at multi-disciplinary approaches to the built environment and this kind of net zero drive health that we're increasingly tying into our built environment, but also these digital data sets and how we use data and technology in that equation as well. That's what the theme of these two days have been about, and I thought the value of pulling Livy and Dan out particularly was you're from those multi-disciplines as we talk about it.
Dan:We're definitely interlopers. We're definitely interlopers.
Simon:Yeah, yeah, interlopers in the built environment, and I think that's a really fascinating perspective to look at, to say, right, okay, what, what is the view from the outside into the built environment and what are the fields that you're doing that has this connection to the built environment? So probably the best place to start is and I don't normally do this, because people would normally be within our sectors They'd have a good idea of who you are, but perhaps explain a little bit about who you are and what you do and what this connection is, particularly to this type of topic. So maybe we start with you Livvy about where you come from, what you're doing.
Olivia:Yeah, so I'm Livvy Swan. I am a children's doctor and a data scientist and I work in the hospital, in children's hospital in Edinburgh, but mostly in the University of Edinburgh, in the Usher Institute. So I'm here because I was fed up. I'm here because I was fed up of seeing the same children again and again who were coming in with respiratory problems, respiratory infections or wheeze, and whose parents were telling me that their homes were cold and damp and that they couldn't afford to heat them or that they were having troubles kind of getting their home to a standard that they were comfortable with.
Olivia:But then also another group of parents who were telling us that they had had interventions in their homes. They had had, for example, kind of insulation, and things hadn't got better, they got worse. So it kind of sent me down on a bit of a journey, as I say, as a data scientist as well as a doctor. So I wear a lot of hats. But I knew that if I could find the right data sets and bring them together, that I could try and answer some of these questions and try and avoid these children coming back again and again. So I'm I don't know if you want me to say a bit more just now no I think that's brilliant.
Simon:I mean I was looking at your title and I got the pediatric doctor part but the the data scientist part. There was quite a bit in that title. Perhaps unpack a little bit about what you're doing in data science uh.
Olivia:so I'm a nerd, I code and um, I. I love it when people say well, you don't look like a data scientist, because I think we need more women in data science and I think we need more medics in data science. I think we need more pediatricians in data science. So, actually knowing what you can do once you've got one data set, you can link it to another data set and then, if you've got the clinical knowledge behind you, you can then work out what questions you can answer from those data sets. So I'm a medical doctor, but I also have done a PhD. In fact, my PhD was in malaria. It was completely different. So my specialty is infectious disease, paediatric infectious disease. So I did my PhD in malaria, having worked in Malawi, and then, during COVID, I kind of moved to data science. I learned how to code on my sofa during lockdown because there was some data that needed analysing and I, just as you do, as you do, learn to code.
Olivia:I promise you, if I can learn to code, anybody can learn to code. So um, so yeah, so that's what I do I guess you're.
Simon:You're a rare breed. Are you in medicine data scientists?
Olivia:I think. I think there's probably I think I am for my, for my vintage, but I think there's more of them more of us coming through um, because I think that we're really beginning to realize the value of data science in clinical medicine and the fact that if you can speak both languages, if you can understand the clinical problems and you can actually work out how to look at them with you know the huge amount of data that society is generating, you know exponentially at the moment that actually that's really powerful, because if you go in, if you go into big data sets without the clinical knowledge, there is a danger that you can make assumptions or you can ask questions that don't make clinical sense. They don't make, yeah, um, so you kind of. So having both of those things is is great and and it's certainly becoming more of the part of the undergraduate curriculum in edinburgh and in in other medical schools in the UK.
Simon:So was it that interesting data that joined some of those dots between the built environment and the illnesses that you were seeing? Or was it more anecdotal and typical kind of symptoms, symptomatic conversations with parents and families that were joining those, or combinations?
Olivia:So it was a combination, so it was certainly kind of it was set off by the patients that I met in the emergency department, the patients I saw in the wards again and again, as I say, kind of recognizing the same faces and having these conversations with families about what was going on in the background. And we've spoken today as well about the fact that, um, as medics, we are not really, we're not really trained to talk so much about housing. In our training we are taught to ask about smoking, we're taught to ask about occupations, but actually we don't really. We've never really been that focused on what somebody's home environment is. And as a child particularly the group that I'm looking at, which are preschool children they spend so much time at home that it's to not ask about it is to only get you know a tiny fraction of the story.
Simon:Yeah, interesting. And what about you, Dom? How did you? How did you kind of? What's your background, what did you do? I think is the first question, I suppose. And then, where's this connection with housing come from and technology?
Dan:So I'm Dan Bowers, I'm Head of psychology at the University of South Wales and I lead a fairly newly formed research network that we've established over the last 12 months in South Wales. And really this was drawn from a kind of strategic decision we took as a department, which was we should be outside of the four walls of the university more than we're in it, as much as possible and trying to be impactful and doing things, and so we started proactively trying to make friends and then we by accident made lots of friends in housing and the more we spoke to people, the more we realized that actually it's just psychology everywhere in terms of the work that they were trying to do, and in particular, social housing was a real focus for us Through doing some projects with them, looking at things like the reintegration into shared kind of communal living for all the people after COVID. So people had locked down in their rooms ostensibly, and then the purpose of living somewhere like an extra care scheme, is that you come back together and you've got a community and you're not isolated or lonely. Well, actually after COVID that was quite hard. So we did some projects like that and then got introduced to people in the NHS and started talking to people from. So Gareth Morgan from Howaldale Health Board has been particularly kind of interesting because he is doing a Bevan exemplar project on housing and health and the intersection between the two.
Dan:So I remember having a conversation with him and he was. He was talking about you know, someone should really set something up around you know, in Wales for bringing those bits of the world together. So naively we said, oh, we'll have a go at that. Oh, yeah, come on, let's go. And so we did. And and then from there we we've done a series of kind of things around figuring out who we are and what we should be.
Dan:So, uh, november 23 we ran a consensus event which brought together all of our new friends, ostensibly. So we brought everyone together and within that you had welsh gov? Um people like community housing, cymru, public health w Wales, range of different housing associations, all in the same room. And we said, right, so you've told us, health and housing it's big intersection, what should we be looking at? Tell us what we should prioritize. And we sort of forced them through the mangle. So we use these consensus techniques for a day and said, right, you need to make some decisions and these are the ways we might use that we might get you to that point and by the end of the day what we had was five priority areas and that really forms like what we do, um.
Dan:So there's thriving as a function of your housing in your community. There's evidencing um housing as a precursor to or predictor of health outcomes technology, and ai, which is where this stuff comes in, kind of physical needs now and in the future for social housing. So in Wales you've got lots of very hard to adapt properties like you know, kind of lots of miners, cottages in South Wales valleys, that getting a wheelchair through the front doors, it's not that easy getting it so you can turn it around in the corridor even harder, and then one around kind of you know, trying to find ways to integrate the the different players in the sector. So we are pretty early on in that journey. We've we've delivered a couple of projects.
Dan:The one that I was here talking about today was looking at technology acceptance in social housing and obviously there's a there's a world of kind of new stuff happening there where new technologies are being embedded in social housing and not necessarily out of the active choice of the tenant.
Dan:And if you look at technology acceptance generally.
Dan:That's not necessarily the best way to approach getting people to want and engage with something, getting people to want and engage with something. So we've been really interested in looking at that and also kind of the process by which that happens across the sector. Because fundamentally, what happens at the end is you've got a tenant who is probably talking to a neighborhood officer who is saying, oh, you're going to have this new piece of technology and it's going to go in and it's going to do this for you, but then you know how you track that back and how you maintain a feedback loop back to the design stage and kind of keep that system. All conversing back and forth is really challenging and what that leads to then is a lot of disengagement at the front end, people saying I don't understand what this is, people saying I don't really want to have it. And that's a challenge because clearly technology has got a massive role to play and can be, could be doing brilliant things. But you know how that happens is really of interest to us.
Simon:So it sounds like there's quite an intersection, even within your two disciplines of psychology and health, in behaviour and habits and interactions with the environment, and adoption and changes in behaviour. It's quite a heady mix.
Olivia:before you bring the building into the equation, even Definitely, and I think, as an example, just in terms of the movement in medicine over the past probably 20, 30 years, from a paternalistic this is what you should be doing to actually kind of working with the patient as a partner in their own care, has been like really phenomenal. It's been really, really strong. So actually moving from telling people what to do to actually ensuring that people have control and autonomy in their health decisions so that, I think, speaks to a lot of the stuff that we are doing in in medicine and it sounds like actually there's a lot of that learning that can be um can can be built to the built environment as well in terms of digital technology, where yeah, I've had this conversation with medical practice.
Simon:I had a guy called john mccurn on who's quite prolific in kind of health care and ventilation very similar story to you. He was an A&E consultant, was just fed up with dealing with constant I think it was allergies, mainly asthmatic type allergies that were constantly coming across his desk and he was going. It's got to be something that would tell me why the building isn't a good story for this picture, kind of a wake-up call, much like yourself. But he was talking about this change in the move from this deference to medical professions to more of a partnership process. But that changes everything from the psychology to the communications to how we interact with people. Much more analogous to what we're talking about here, with the built environment as well, is that everything is changing in that sense, isn't it?
Olivia:yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, um, I mean you're, you're the psychologist, so I'm not. I'll stay in my lane, but but I think it's. That's true.
Olivia:That's what these days have been about haven't they everyone just mingling um, but you, you so in my, so in my kind of day job, I work with children with all sorts of different infections. I work with children with tuberculosis, with HIV, all sorts of things. And if you don't have that longstanding relationship with patients going forward, if you don't have that trust and they don't understand why you're asking certain things of them, they won't do it, even if they you know, even if you can see why they should. So, uh, yeah, those those long-term relationships, particularly for the patients who've got lifelong or kind of hard to treat illnesses, is really, really important. So it's the same thing with a house. Do you know? You're not going to pop in and out of a house, you're going to live there for quite some time. So you know, having that, um, that same level of of trust and autonomy and trust is what we spoke about yesterday as well, didn't?
Dan:yeah? And I think, like the, you know, people aren't necessarily rational actors, right? They're not. They're not receiving information from a doctor or from a social housing, uh, from a landlord, uh. And because they're telling you oh, this is right and this is the evidence, and this is why you should have this, it's not necessarily how people are really responding to that in practice, and trust is massive in that.
Dan:It's huge, huge, huge in that, and it's also about what the relevant others in that kind of situation think as well. So it's what do your friends think about this new technology? Or is anyone else in your community using this technology? Have they had a good experience? Have they had a bad experience? Did it cost them more money or did they save money? These are all factors that are inherently social and psychological, that are going to influence people's decision making, the degree to which they adopt new technology, the degree to which they kind of adapt to and engage with it. That go beyond whether it works, which is which is important, and it shouldn't be there if it doesn't work, but fundamentally is, it's one of a number of complex factors which will drive engagement we talked about these ideas as being infectious, didn't?
Olivia:I really like that? I really like kind of comes full circle, these kind of infectious ideas of of your peers and your, you know, kind of your neighborhood or your kind of families experiences of all these things, and there's there's so much of that in in medicine as well, in terms of, um, kind of building, yeah, building trust with different communities too, but uh, consensus and and resonance and nudge theory and like there's all these things at play that move people, move the dial for people, the other interesting thing on that that we spoke about today was the fact that, um, sometimes people may find it hard to make decisions for themselves, but actually they can.
Olivia:They can find it easier to make decisions to benefit people that they love. So, children being a really good example of a group who are um you know who, who rely on their, their families and caregivers to keep them safe. But actually being able to just not to use children that's the wrong word but like to actually kind of be able to, um, to enable people to make kind of better decisions, not just for themselves but for other people that they love, actually can be more powerful and more effective well, I think the interesting thing about children is is the agency thing.
Simon:I mean, children are one of the cohorts that don't have control over the environment that they're in, whether we're talking, like today, about schools or whether we're talking about home. So there is that potential that to leave on the people that do have control of that environment. So there's an imperative to do it anyway, because ultimately, a child isn't going to be able to spend money to improve ventilation in their own home or to open windows in the morning when they get up and things like that. So we have to act on behalf of children particularly so they're really they're really fascinating cohort in that sense and I think anybody that's a parent understands the do, as I say, not as I do mentality to parenting.
Simon:So so there is an element of you can.
Olivia:You can direct behavior in a way that you can then go down the pub and flatly ignore later on and I know I've said this kind of till I'm blue in the face these two days, but just for the benefit of your listeners as well in terms of the importance of children as little canaries in the coal mine for this problem so preschool children almost as a barometer of housing quality, because they are really impacted in terms of their indoor air quality and in terms of the kind of damp and mold, in terms of the pollutants and things.
Olivia:Small babies breathe very fast. They can breathe up to 60 times a minute compared to 12 to 15 times a minute for grown-ups. They are at a point where their immune systems and their lungs are developing and we know that if you have lots of respiratory infections early on in your life, you're more likely to develop asthma as a grown-up and you're more likely to die early from a respiratory problem, which is really sobering. So it's a lifelong thing we're setting folk up for and respiratory infections are the most common problem in well, they're the biggest cause of admissions in paediatrics, full stop, do you know? So they're the biggest cause of antibiotic use in this age group and they're really for families to actually look after children who have respiratory infections and kind of including kind of wheezy kind of viral infections with that as well, then having to take time off from work to look after your kids as well, it's really disruptive and depending on what your job is you can can, if you're in a precarious situation, can be like financially, a big problem too.
Simon:so it's massive yeah, there's some interesting angles there. The, the canaries are really interesting analogy, because these sentient animals that we've used over time have always been very good markers for predisposing potential health risks. And we know that smaller animals, and birds in particular, do suffer from respiratory conditions much earlier and we can see that. But we also see that in cats and dogs and smaller animals. And the point you make about children is very true, and it's not just that they. They breathe more, it's their dose ratio is higher because they weigh less. You know so that while they're breathing more, that their dose response is is much more than we experience.
Olivia:I mean I could. I could go on about this forever. There's loads of other things as well in terms of um. So smaller children have that. Their breathing tubes are smaller. So if you imagine, if you get um, if you get a bit of a wheezy episode with a cough or a cold, your breathing tube is a is a decent size. Your trachea, your bronchi, which are the ones that branch off, they're all pretty decent size. So if they get bunged up with a bit of what's basically snot, you know kind of mucus and snot it's not a big problem. But actually, thinking back to physics, you know kind of your um, diameter, of kind of radius and your flow, the very radius of your um, of your bronchus. If you, if it's already small to start with, and you stick a plug of mucus in it or it gets inflamed, you're in big trouble because that flow is disproportionately impacted.
Simon:So these little babies with little breathing tubes have a massive um, a massive impact and when we talk about this impact on later life, one of the things we now know, particularly with things like particulate matter, that is, it's a multi-systemic disease. We now know that particles can transfer across every cell tissue in the body, which means we're setting up the foundations for poor systemic illnesses, chronic illnesses, in later life. It's a bit like a mortgage the earlier you start, the more you end up with at the end. Very similar, I think, to chronic exposure to environmental conditions the earlier you start saving those pollutants up, the harder it's going to hit later on. You know, and that's the challenge with kids. I think it's unique, but, but with kids particularly, there's also a really interesting psychological element to it, because you've, you've, there's co-dependence, you know, and lots of different stakeholders involved in the environments that they're operating in um, as we were talking about today. They can also be the most engaged yeah, and I think that's wonderful I don't know.
Simon:What do you want to?
Olivia:talk about that, because I think that is really some of the examples today from from danny brown were yeah, they were great.
Dan:Yeah, you know kids as kids, as kind of climate scientists and air quality scientists, you know, and then being the drivers of it and you know taking those messages back to their house to say, actually, we really need to take care of this stuff. You know, absolutely brilliant, I think. One of the things that's really interesting in terms of air quality, though, is I'm not sure that people are necessarily seeing it as the risk that it is in practice, and I would be interested it's a study that I've been formulating over the last couple of days whilst we've been here in getting people to almost rank what they think the the health risks are in terms of their perception of them. Um, and I wonder where indoor air quality in particular comes, because home, psychologically, is safe, nice, I control it. My environment, um, it's not the dirty road, because that's outside, that's over there somewhere. You know, my house is my house and I look after it and it's mine, and you said earlier, excuse me, and as you said earlier, it smells nice.
Dan:Yeah, I look after it.
Simon:Yeah, it's you know we were having that conversation the other evening where I said actually a lot of the things that generate risk or are associated with risk indoors we associate actually with positive reinforcement the smell of an open fire, candles, incense burners, fresh deodorants and cleaning products. Cooking we know cooking is the biggest generator of particulate matter. Biggest generator of particulate matter. That smell of bacon wafting upstairs in the morning is actually the smell of polyaromatic hydrocarbons and particulate matter wafting up the stairs, you know. So we just there's not that association.
Simon:So it is a fascinating, you know we were discussing at length like where is that disconnect? Because the evidence suggests, certainly at a public health level, that when we talk about things like DALIs and listeners of the podcast that recall Ben Jones and Max Sherman's stuff around harm intensities, we can associate DALIs of about 2,200 years lost to death and disability per 100,000 of the population, which is equivalent to smoking and twice as harmful as alcoholism and road traffic deaths. So it's right up there. This is an intolerable level of risk, yet almost zero funding comparatively to those other risk factors in dealing with the problem. And there's this weird psychological thing that I was talking to you about, that this, this chronic, esoteric nature of air quality that people just can't quite join the dots. Change simple behaviors to mitigate long-term risk because, it's invisible.
Simon:Because it's invisible and we were talking about the fact that, because it's a basic instinct to take a breath, you basically you don't have agency to make a choice not to breathe. So I think somehow there's a mental wiring going on that makes people not think about air quality because they just simply don't have a choice. They have to breathe. And I think that perhaps extends in then to the some some of the longer term chronic risk mitigation, because I can't see another, any other way of painting it. We know it's the same with radon. You can't give a radon test away. Yeah, and there there is a nurse I joke, it's the slam dun dunkiest of donkey. Air quality pollutants. Because we know the source, we know the harm it causes, we can measure it cheaply, we can solve the problem, like there isn't a pollutant that has a more direct straight line to a particular health outcome than radon. And we know, and it can't be mistaken for anything else, and we can measure it easily.
Dan:And yet we're still sitting here today with radon in people's homes. But again, that's that's where that's where the psychology comes into, that you know, the the reality is that there are probably four or five, more visible, easier to comprehend, more well known, understood about, talked about, socialized, you know, as being acceptable go and do some exercise, or unacceptable smoking, um, whereas this I don't, you know, I don't think that this has reached the public consciousness in quite the same way, um, and I think, like that's, that's probably a big part of the, the shift that would be required. Here I'm talking as a, as a relative outsider. You know, thinking about, thinking about how it might work together. But the reality is that what a lot of the behavioral change that might be required to improve a lot of this stuff is.
Dan:It's another chore in the day for people. You've got to open your windows, you've got to make sure you're ventilating this, you've got to not use that, and I would be interested to kind of quantify that in people's experiences of their daily lives. So if you think, you know, you've got to not use that, you've got to, um, and I would be interested to kind of quantify that in in people's experiences of their daily lives. So if you think you know you've got to get up, you've got to, you know, get your kids out of bed. You've got to get their school uniform ready. You've got to do the dishes. You've got to unpack the dishwasher from the night before all of a sudden.
Simon:You know, maybe now I've got to put the cook hood on. Yeah right, yeah, yeah so so here's here.
Dan:Here are three or four other things that you need to fold in because you have to do this. But if people are seeing this as the sixth, seventh, eighth most important health thing, and they're already eating well and they're already doing exercise and they already have stopped smoking and they're already cut down on their drinking, it's hard then to motivate people to go again and and and vote the next.
Simon:But you must see that in health, all this, I mean you know you're talking about the difference between preventative health and active health measures, and again you're competing for people's times to change dietary behaviors, cleaning behaviors, you know, whatever the behaviors that might be putting them at risk for you know, respiratory conditions, for example, changing hoovering in a different way or whatever it is. So there's a lot of experience, isn't there on the ground, at a kind of a public health measure, of how do we get these ideas to compete in a way and compete for people's bandwidth?
Olivia:yeah, absolutely, and I think maybe competes is the wrong word, because I think you, I mean certainly there are definitely times when in clinic, we we kind of try and focus on a one thing at one at one point. You know, kind of, you know, until I see you next, this is the one thing I really want you to try and do. You know, I know that you've got lots on your plate, but this is the one thing. So I guess having having different things that are important at different times is maybe one, one way forward. But I would, I think I would respectfully disagree with you down that.
Olivia:Actually I think that the public consciousness of indoor air quality is rising and I think part of that has been the, the tragic case of our bishak and the, the visibility of damp and mold as one of the kind of proxies for indoor air quality.
Olivia:Within that sphere of of um, kind of that we can talk about it. So I think that has, I think that has made people very aware. So you know, I I don't normally get people coming and chatting to me about my research at the school gates, but you know people want to know, they really want to talk about it and everybody has a story and I think that actually I I would agree that we needed. We need to work as a community on our narrative in terms of trying to kind of uh, to get almost the pr of um indoor air quality and housing conditions, kind of just to find it a way that is not nagging that is um going to get that message out there, but I do think that people are really ready to hear it and want to make changes where they have agency.
Olivia:So that's the other thing.
Simon:Yeah, and the interesting thing about damp and mould is that there's a couple of villains in the pieces with damp and mould that we don't have with some of the other air quality. One is cost. There's a physical maintenance cost associated with damp and mould that you don't have with particulate matter necessarily, or high levels of NOx in a space. You don't have to wipe your walls down or redecorate because of NOx. You know traffic pollution in a bedroom. The other thing about damp and mould, going back to kind of basic instinct stuff, is that we are predisposed to be fearful of mold that you don't, rightly so we've avoided eating and consuming things that look furry and green for good reason, like we understand that that is not a good.
Simon:We've evolved. We've evolved to understand. You know moldy, slimy stuff is not good. Um, so I think there's that. So that's. I think that there's a. That's a good lever. It's like you say. It can often be a a proxy, and I always say that you know if you've got high levels of damp and mold in a property, it's going to keep bad company. There are going to be other. There's a lot. You're likely under ventilating the space. You're likely to be exposed to other pollutants too, and we've all any of us that have been in these damp and mold properties know they're invariably associated with high levels of deodorants and bleach smells and disinfectors, because people are trying to manage it and are exposed to those as well at an unhealthy level. You walk out of properties and you feel it in your sinuses and in your lungs and you can feel sick. They're really awful places to be some of them. So this stuff really matters.
Olivia:Yeah, it absolutely does.
Simon:I'd like to borrow your attention for just a moment to discuss ACO, a partner of this podcast. Aco, an EI company, specialises in pioneering new technologies in fire, carbon monoxide alarms and Internet of Things technology. Many know them as the go-to company for these products. In fact, this year they're celebrating 35 years in business. I particularly know them for their outstanding work in the housing sector, with their Homelink offerings, aiming to solve some of the industry's most serious challenges. The technology incorporates environmental sensors and a gateway to offer connected home solutions, which has a proven track record in helping landlords reduce operational costs and carbon emissions while improving residents' well-being and safety.
Simon:Issues at the heart of the housing sector, like damp and mould, fuel poverty and energy efficiency, are all in the crosshairs of ACO. I've been amazed at how they are innovating here with a laser focus on unpacking some of the complex nature of these challenges in a way that answers the what next question we so desperately need at the moment. They have a great network of experts and installers. If you're in housing, they are definitely worth talking to. Trusted is a overused word, but not here. Ask around and AICO are synonymous with it. Details are in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet and at AICO. That's a-i-c-ocouk. Now Back to the podcast.
Olivia:I don't think I can have mentioned in terms of the actual work that we're doing at the moment, just to kind of put that into context, and what other insights we hopefully can get from the study that I'm running, which is the Homes Heat and Healthy Kids study, which is linking up children's health care data with individual property level data so you can see every home that they've ever lived in. So we're asking some of those questions together on a high level. So the first one we're focusing first on under-heated homes, so on cold, damp homes, then looking to see how many respiratory infections we think are due to that, so that could be avoided if every home was properly heated, and then moving on to almost a proxy for air quality. So looking at the different retrofitting approaches for homes across Scotland and this is four million child years and quarter million homes across Scotland so looking at ways that have been undertaken to make homes warmer or to kind of to reduce the chance of, yeah, but primarily warmer are they, is that increased air tightness in some of those situations. Is that then associated with worse respiratory outcomes? So, though your homes are warmer, you're increasing the air tightness. You're trapping in the mold, the smoke, the viruses, the particulate matter, everything else. So we should.
Olivia:That's, that's what the study that I'm running at the moment is is focusing on, and it will be very broad, very high level, but I think it's actually going to help us. Um, look again at the what we're talking about before, about these bringing together health and housing and showing the co-benefits of some of these, um, some of the interventions. So, can you, you know, can we find the best way to reduce fuel poverty, to reduce uh carbon emissions, meet our net zero targets and make kids healthier? Brilliant, do you know? I'd buy that. So so that's I there. There are so many overlaps and I appreciate that that. You know, dampness is not. It's not it's. It's sometimes thought of as separate to indoor air quality, but I think that actually we really need to to consider them all together.
Simon:Yeah, and it's a good marker as well. Yeah, and I was interested in the work that you were doing, dan, because you touched on it, but I'd like to unpack it a little bit more. Asking people to accept a air quality monitor or a change of ventilation system or a heat pump, going in all these things that have these potential impacts, there's a journey we've got to take people on that often starts well before a plumber turns up at your door with a piece of gear, sticking it in, going I'm here to install the so and so. Um, tell me a little bit about that work and some of the things you were kind of finding when you were looking into these, like how are people getting to the point of knowing what they're getting and where is? Where is it failing and where is it succeeding?
Dan:yeah. So this is. This is really new. I think we did this last month, so we're kind of working trawling through the data now. So what we were interested in was mapping the process. So this falls back on a piece of research we did a couple of years ago.
Dan:One of my PhD students for a PhD was looking at technology acceptance for a new powered wheelchair controller and what she ended up doing was a grounded theory which mapped across all the different stakeholders across, almost like Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, so kind of the individual at the center and then kind of outward circles there. And what she found was that it's a kind of ongoing acceptance and engagement piece. When you bring a new piece of technology and it's not just the end user who's got to accept and engage with that technology. Everyone across the cycle of it going into a person's house, has to also accept and adopt and understand that piece of technology and then pass that to the next person. So if you think about social housing, what we did was we brought together a group of about 30 stakeholders. Within that we had people from Welsh government. We had a range of people who were in social housing, so people who were in procurement, in social housing, people who were in installation, in those teams who were organizing the installation and being on the desk to speak to people about I've got a question about this technology and then tenant engagement people as well as manufacturers, and we asked them to engage in this thing called value stream mapping, which basically takes a process from start to finish and all the different stakeholders, and they all demonstrate by writing in their color, because this is my role, this is what I do, this is the context in which it sits and this is how I pass my bit of information to whoever the next person is. And what you would hope although in vain hope for almost anything that's like this is that the people who are across that thing would be able to articulate that really cleanly, able to articulate that really cleanly.
Dan:Um, and what we found was that it was, it was there were lots and lots of challenges associated with doing that. Um, and the challenge is that if the if, what you've got is um, people who are designing technology that isn't necessarily for the uh, for the sec that is going into or for the end user that is going into, they're just creating something that isn't for that. Well, that instantly means that when you're procuring it. That changes the type of conversation that you're having there, and what you need to do is a piece of acceptance there to then pass it to the next person who's going to be the installer, and they need to understand these are all the benefits of this thing. This is how it's going to be used, this is how we're going to monitor the data and they pass it to the next person.
Dan:But the reality is like all of these people are in really fast-paced, difficult jobs. Um, they're not all necessarily tech experts. They're not all necessarily people who are, um, living and breathing and real enthusiasts around this stuff. Um, and it's therefore a complicated thing to take from start to finish. And where you've got at the end of the process, then tenants who who say, I don't know what this thing is or how I use it or how I engage with it To some degree unsurprising because it's been through this, diluted and diluted, and I think there's a problem.
Dan:I think, from my perspective, what I'd like to do with that is, once we've got to the bottom of that data and we really know what's in it, is to then start thinking about okay, well, what are the points where you could intervene from a psychological perspective and you could say you need to have this conversation and that's going to help this next bit go along, or you need to find ways of making sure that that information carries on in a in a way that takes the value with it. Um, so I that's. That's kind of where we've got to with that. It's pretty early stages, but I think there's a kind of interesting set of social dynamics that may well enhance people's general happiness to have new pieces of technology in their house at the end.
Simon:I can imagine at an academic level that's quite a complex thing to do, but I suppose a lot of practitioners in the built environment are already doing that day to day. There's some kind of basic 101 stuff that people should be trying to think about psychologically when it comes to adoption of anything. So if you're a local housing, so if you're a, like you say, local housing officer or you're a procurement specialist or you're a project manager for a particular rollout of retrofit or something and you're starting to introduce a new thing or a new way of doing something to a group of people, are there some basic go-tos that people should be thinking? Because I imagine there's. There's a lot of that going on all the time.
Simon:And I joked yesterday, you know, somebody else on the podcast said there's like there's more pilots in social housing than there are in british airways and it's true, like there's so much going on all the time in housing but there's probably not a lot of people like you engaged in those processes. And then we keep getting to the end of a lot of this stuff and wondering why nobody understands why they don't like the heat pumps we've put in, like what, what, what don't they understand? We gave them a one-page leaflet when we installed it.
Dan:I think, like I, you know some of the, there's not loads and loads of evidence out there in terms of social housing. We ran a systematic review. We found quite not many papers really that was specifically looking at the intersection of new technologies in social housing. And I'm particularly interested in that intersection because of the choice and agency that you maybe don't have in social housing. It's not me going, I'm going to go find the funds, apply for that part of money and go and decide that I am going to off my own back, put this piece of technology and it's the um. The housing association has gone. Well, you know, in wales via the optimized retrofit program they've gone. We've accessed this which means we can do this bit of retrofit work for this area or community or streets or whatever um. So I'm really interested in the in that particular combination of factors.
Olivia:I think there's there's a lot to unpack there because because the other one is more of a purchasing this somebody's arriving at a decision to adopt something commercially, I guess there are a lot fewer stages between the kind of like the product and the person, aren't they if you're choosing it yourself and that actually what you're doing is kind of like the product and the person, aren't they if you're choosing it yourself and that actually what you're doing is kind of sandwiching in so many other kind of people who have, who've made these decisions for you?
Olivia:and as you're saying as well, in terms of the, the level of agency, if you are having something kind of you've been told that you have to have something in social housing, versus if you are, um, choosing, as an owner, occupier, to, yeah, to buy it because you believe in it there's.
Dan:There's a few things to unpack there, I think, where you look at the evidence that is out there in terms of, like, people who've done this because they've, they've decided to. Well, it's in their identity, it's who they are like. They wanted to do it, they were interested in it, they could see that it's important, they think it's valuable enough to spend money on. Of course, they're going to be more inclined to adopt it. They're they're enthusiasts, um, whereas in social housing, like and I wouldn't want to kind of suggest that what's happening is that people are forcing technology on people that's not really what's happening. What's what is happening, though, is, if you're in the social housing sector, if your housing is provided by a social housing landlord, um, over the next 10 years, it's going to be pretty much unavoidable that you go into a house that doesn't have this, because where there are voids, they're retrofitting those voids, primarily. So I think you know in terms of key things to think about. I think, really, you know, and you can wrap this up in all manner of different ways.
Dan:From a psychological perspective, there are a load of predictors that would make it more likely that someone would engage with technology, things like their own sense of capability. How much do I feel I could control and use and engage with this technology? That will be a predictor. The opportunity the amount of opportunity and time that they've got, is likely to be a predictor. Their motivation Do I think it's good? Do I think it's valuable? They're do I think it's good? Do I think it's valuable? They're all predictors of behavior. Is there a health impact? You?
Simon:know, is there a?
Dan:health impact there's. There's, if you look at things like you taught to, which is a different kind of theoretical model. There's things like perceived ease of use. Does it seem easy? Um, hedonic pleasure. Is it nice to use? Does it look rubbish and is it horrible on my wall? Or does it look nice and can I? You know that bit where you know you unlock your phone. It makes that nice click and a little tiny vibrate in your hand. That's hedonic pleasure, right, it's like, oh, that's really nice, your dopamine hits, that's the right. So so there's, there's all manner of ways in which you can.
Dan:You can do that, but fundamentally, I think the thing that is likely the biggest predictor here is what do people who are like me think about it? What do my neighbors and my family and my friends and the community that I live in is, do they see this as a as a broadly positive thing? And I think, where you do, where there are papers as a paper last year came out looking at orp, specifically in social housing, I think it was done in swansea um, good, tenant engagement is, is the key, like driver, is where you're the person who's who's engaged with those talents, knows the talents, is engaged with them, has worked with them, um, they're, they're. I think, really, that's probably going to be one of the major ways that that this this becomes adopted is is people who are people who I perceive as being like me, um, are on board.
Simon:Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
Olivia:If I may, just so, I was having a chat with Gronja McGill, who put the last two days fantastic days together just giving a quick shout out for Gronja. And she was just saying and we were talking about the differences between architecture and medicine and how we approach particularly new studies, research studies and I was explaining that whenever we do that, we we tend to start well, we should definitely be starting do not always happen, but we tend to start with patient engagement at the very beginning. So that's what. That's how you design your research questions. It's how you design your interventions. If you're doing a trial, it's how so you take it at the beginning. You go before you start to do any of the rest of the stuff is you make sure that your priorities are aligned with the people who's going to impact the most and that the interventions that you're thinking about are acceptable.
Olivia:And she was saying that actually, in terms of some of the built environment interventions, that that has historically and I'm sorry if I'm maybe talking out of turn, but historically that that has been a kind of nice to have at the end of quite a lot of work, rather than being an integral part of um pilots or or um kind of rollouts from the beginning and it sounds like that is you know kind of that. That would really help if I'm, and, as I say, this is not know kind of that. That would really help if I'm, and, as I say, if this is not my area, so if that's already done no, but I think that's the whole.
Simon:The beauty of multidisciplinary kind of approaches is that you know one of one of the, the I don't know if it's a trope from the medical world, but the assumption from the built environment is that there's a lot of feedback loops in medicine, like there's a lot of self-criticism and post-evaluation of outcomes and reflection and re-evaluation, and there's a lot of that goes on and there's almost none of that in construction. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, it really is. We like to build something and then run away as fast as we possibly can and never look back. So I think there's some elements in that.
Simon:How do you navigate, particularly at the professional end, the professional end of things, this critical feedback loop of of the outcomes, of what, what we're doing to improve and reiterate and nudge and all of the things that enable us to make the right decisions? Because construction is a is a little bit like medicine is. It's quite conservative and can be quite cautious and slow moving because there's a lot of risk and money wrapped up in stuff and liability obviously, and you know, assets have always been highly, more highly valued than life generally speaking, so they're very cautious about being associated with that kind of a risk. But you don't see any of the level of stuff that you see in medicine of review boards and, where there's failures, how you break that down and learn and that you can fail in medicine and have a process that improves, learns from it, whereas the failure in construction, unless it's catastrophic and happens at a regulatory level, you don't seem to see that self-learning.
Olivia:So I mean, we, at the simplest level, we have so much of that built in on the day-to-day. And this is talking outside of research now, this is just talking on on the wards. If, for example, somebody maybe writes down the wrong dose of a drug, so if it, even if it isn't given, that will be flagged up, as you know, as a near miss. It goes into a, you know, kind of a. You collect all of these near misses in a um, in a blame-free culture, and that's really important. And I think we have got to a point. It's taken some years, but I think we have got to a point where people are now oh okay, fine, you know, I'll just fill that in about myself. I'm just going to fill this form in about myself. I wrote this right down wrong. This is what happened, and then you can actually look at the, the infrastructure underneath that's allowed that to happen do you know?
Simon:yeah, my wife's a nurse. A lot often she comes back late and I go. What happened? Ah, the drug trolley. There was a mix-up on this, so I've had to fill out a load of forms at the end of the day to kind of, there's five near misses.
Olivia:It's a pain but it but it. It really helps with the kind of um, the systems level learning. And I think once you can get beyond that, um, that level of caution or kind of like self-preservation and worries about blame, that there's just so much to learn from failing historically not the construction industry not being good at going back and looking to see how things have happened, maybe now we're more aware of the health outcomes that come from some of the some of those interventions that have been made that there's a much stronger argument for that to have to happen, almost in the way of there would be if I was doing a trial of a drug. Do you know? So, now that we know about the health and housing uh links, we know how much we're aware of that, that strength that actually there is an ethical obligation to to go back and to investigate what has happened, what the health outcomes have been, not just that and we're definitely we're moving into an environment where we've got performance data sets on buildings for the first time.
Simon:You know, know smart meters, studies that have looked at it. We were talking in the workshop this morning about the lack of ventilation data that's out there at the moment. But you know those gaps are being filled that perhaps aren't there in some other disciplines and I think, as we have more of a rich data set to look and correlate performance with outcomes, that we that that critical nature, because so far mostly it's been anecdotal out of the built environment. We tend to run buildings to failure and we don't tend to. We tend to fix stuff when we can afford it and as part of programs. We're not critically looking at the performance of buildings and adjusting and iterating.
Olivia:I find that so surprising. I find that really and, as you're saying, like sorry, asking for thoughts as an outsider, I just find that staggering, just because that is completely at odds with with everything that I have grown up with.
Simon:I find. Well, I'm in it and I find it. I mean, you know it's, it's one of the biggest assets we own as human beings, as our home or the buildings that we manage and so on. So they're hugely important structures in our life, financial investments in time and resources, um, and yet we know almost nothing about them, whereas lower down the echelon, something like like a car, for years we've been recording data on accidents. You take your car into a mechanics, they plug it into a computer that's used to diagnose problems, but that data is going back to the manufacturer to help them improve the product statistically. That same data is going to the government, you know so we've been, and that's just something that's worth. You know, 20 to 50 grand, you know, never mind the value of a home or an office building and so on, and that so the level of data.
Simon:So we, we were joking 10 years ago. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to walk up to a house, plug a usb in to a laptop and have a look at the performance of the building, like the fact that we weren't there 10 years ago. We were doing that with. Cars was bananas then, and so it was. But that's changing and I think that I say often on on this show that data from the built environment changes everything, because it changes the narrative, changes the framing, changes the agency. People are in possession of the facts and are able to make decisions in buildings in ways that they haven't been able to in the past, and part of that is the evolution of the technology. You know we've got environmental sensors that we can use that we wouldn't. We were joking earlier about wheeling suitcases of data loggers in to understand basic provisions. Now you just go around sticking them on walls and they connect via mobile phone signals and they're your way. You know it's really interesting.
Olivia:Just just what you're saying there just reminded me of something we work with a fantastic group of parents from across scotland who are living in kind of underheated um or hard to heat homes, and one of them, uh, really wisely said so data is just what makes the invisible visible, and I was like, yes, that's, I'm writing that down, that's exactly what it is, and it's it's the same thing, isn't it? It's um, it's moving from anecdotes to evidence and it's moving, it's, it's a way of um. I also talk about it as storytelling with numbers, and just that is, it's. It's what, as you're saying, the ventilation data is is missing, and there are lots of other things that are missing, but they are. We're slowly getting it we we do.
Simon:I was involved in a very interesting project years ago in thames mid. It was called the thames we damp and constant damp, mold and condensation cdm project and one of the interesting outcomes of that is the very early days of sensor data from social housing. It was a switchy product which you might know. The product and one of the things that it enabled the housing officers to do was to go to the home with the data from the home and have a context-based discussion with the homeowners about how to manage heating and condensation risk in their home. They were able to see whether those interventions made a difference and, when they went back, able to have another in context conversation and it changed everything, the framing of everything, and meant it meant some more. And it reminded me of something you said earlier.
Simon:We had a guy on podcast about this time last year called dan hyde, and he he's he's a ux expert, a user experience expert. His company is called user is User Experience, which is really apt, but we don't bring the user, the stakeholder, into these conversations enough. You're doing it with your heat project and you do it all the time with the work that you do. That seems to be a big gap to me that you do. Um, that seems to be a big gap to me and I imagine you must see that, looking in to the built environment of the, we build buildings for people. Where are the people in this conversation, like we've had? We've had two days of a conference here and there hasn't been any users in that conversation, which is very typical. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not the fault of this, but like, who's missing from these conversations?
Dan:I, I completely agree with you and I think, like that's one of the things that we, as as fairly new to housing, as a group of psychologists, we've found that hard to to bring people. So we've we've put these events on and we've done these things and we've invited tenants and we just thought this would be great. Everyone will turn out, the tenants will be there. But, um, I think part of this is make if where you are trying to engage with tenants is doing it on their terms, on their turf and uh. So one of the things we're doing next week, I think, is going out to, to, to uh, into a community, in the community hall where they are, and talking to them about some of the tech acceptance stuff and trying to extend it, because I think we are, you know, reflecting on our own research. We found it really hard to engage tenants in the way that we've tried to so far.
Olivia:So, like part of it is is switching up and and and being much more proactive in terms of making sure we do get that, because and I think you've hit the nail on the head with another thing there in terms of you know, we've been talking recently about um, the terminology of groups who are hard to reach, and trying to relabel them as easy to ignore and actually so for example, the families that we're working with on the project I'm doing at the moment. So if, classically, if you want a group of um patients or public for to be involved in the research study, you put out an advert somewhere buried on a university website and you get I mean honestly, you get kind of retired professors and people who you know kind of like you know fancy an amazon voucher and they're not representative and no offense to my colleagues, but they're often not representative of the people that you're trying to to target. So in this situation it was we didn't want to do it that way. So we um, we kind of did lots of different things, but kind of through poverty alliance, through energy saving, trust, through words of mouth, through one of my holidays to lewis, you know, kind of these kind of things, um and kind of, and then and then peer um kind of person to person.
Olivia:You know, have you, have you heard about this? So it's about, it's not just about um kind of people not coming, but it's about um what you want. It's it's well, it's it's not hard to reach, it's it's easy to know. You know that, I know that. But actually what we're if? If you just want bums on seats, you'll end up with the wrong people, is what I'm saying.
Simon:Yeah, totally, and there's a massive science to citizen engagement, citizen science stuff, sarah Weston from the Stockholm Institute, and there's all these different levels of engagement and right away from the kind of people that go and count birds on a weekend morning one April morning, that is me.
Simon:As I and all the way to you know, the public actually being involved in writing, the research question, like at a very fundamental question, and that kind of level of engagement and and I think professionals are very nervous about bringing the, the general public, into their world when that's exactly what they should be doing, because you feel like you're losing control and yeah, yes, but brilliant.
Olivia:But you should do, because we need to seed some of that control, as you were saying earlier on about autonomy and about control, and that these, these are not our research topics. These are people's lives, do you know? So actually having them in from the beginning is yeah.
Simon:I don't understand why you wouldn't so what's been your kind of general perspective as interlopers into the built environment, kind of looking in at the kind of the engineers and the, the aerosol scientists and the u-value and the fluid dynamics and you know all of this kind of stuff, and it is it. What have you seen as that? I mean, it's interested you enough that you've turned up to these types of things and they're getting engaged. So you see, you see some potential in us somewhere yeah, I, I mean, I I would completely agree.
Dan:I mean, like some of the terminology is impenetrable.
Dan:You know, you kind of as a, as a, as a an engaged outsider, you're just kind of clinging on to some of the conversations going on don't understand, yeah, yeah yeah, it sounds good, but I I don't, and I think like there's a reality that that probably reflects then as you go forward, right. So, um, the, the, there's definitely something around finding a communal language, um, for everyone in that, in that thing, and it's hard and obviously, like everything's kind of culturally bound and you know, you'd have a medical language and I've got a psychological language and you've got a built environment language, but, um, you know, if we're going to try and come together in a truly multidisciplinary way, then we probably do need to try and find ways of talking at least on the same terms, um, and I think that's a.
Olivia:That's quite a one of my takeaways although I don't know whether you found the same, but I actually find it really liberating, because you kind of go and you go. I don't understand. Can you just talk to me like I'm a five-year-old and you can't do that in most of the parts of your life, can you? But actually you can go oh sorry, I'm the token medic or whatever and and actually you can ask the stupid questions and sometimes that's quite insightful because you know if you are coming at it with completely fresh eyes and you're kind of asking things which are dogma or which kind of haven't really been thought about Sometimes that's helpful, but I find it quite liberating. Yeah, I know what you mean.
Dan:There's something about also kind of articulating something that is almost automatic in the way you talk about it. So it's so ingrained when you say don't just use the term, explain it to me it makes people think slightly differently sometimes about what they really mean about that. I mean, we were doing some training with the housing association a few months ago and one of the things we were asking them to do is to kind of reflect on how they would have dealt with this simulated scenario that we put them in um and they wrote down their responses and they fired off we would do this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And then when you look at it and you go as again as a kind of relative outsider to that, you go that's unbelievably impressive that you've done all of that stuff. And we kind of made them unpack all of the layers and all of the decisions and all of the ways. They had to kind of consider that and it's amazing.
Dan:That being almost at brainstem level for them it's amazing, once you take it out of that just communal shared language, what it does to the way people talk about things, and I think that's probably part, again, part of the rationale for as liberating as it is, finding finding ways to to disrupt it.
Olivia:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah the other thing I would say and I hope you've felt the same is just that I so, having been I've been involved in lots of different kind of areas of bits and pieces over my career I find this area incredibly collaborative, really cohesive and socially minded and I just it's an I feel like I've come home, do you?
Olivia:know I feel like I'm surrounded by all these people. I don't speak exactly the same language as them, but I just feel that it is a it's a corner of um, of work and research, which is which is really aimed at making the world a better place. I really believe that people you know kind of that everybody is just so nice. They're really nice and we have a similar. We've all got a similar kind of outlook on on what we want to achieve, even though we've got different ideas of how to do it. So, yeah, I think that I would definitely say that about as an outsider for the corporate listeners.
Dan:Uh, that's mission driven sorry do good stuff because it's good yeah, yeah, yeah.
Olivia:If you start saying let's circle back, I'm gonna leave back.
Simon:This is mission driven yeah, blue sky thinking, I think. I think what's really interesting for me about this multidisciplinary angle is that it puts you in a much better position to tell the stories. And it's storytelling that breaks barriers and boundaries and makes change. It's being able to put things in a way, bring the complex down to a level where we can tell stories and build heroes and villains and missions and challenges in a way that people can reflect and understand that.
Simon:And storytelling and communication is such an important part of what we're doing because nobody has the time to be even a minor expert in half the stuff that we look at. You know they've got other shit to do and the only way that we're going to be able to resonate with people at a fundamental level, I think, personally, is through through that, through stories. You know I've been able to, like you say, can I see myself and my community and what I'm being told here? Can I see myself using this product or like my teenagers and if, unless it's an iphone, they're not interested, you know that they've got to see themselves in this journey and we'll only do that through stories and association yeah, definitely, and I think I maybe was trying to do earlier on about the, about trying to make the information accessible to every stakeholder.
Olivia:So I'm running an event tomorrow which was supposed to be a small event and it's kind of grown arms and legs. We've now got 130 folk from 50 different organisations with all sorts of different expertise and, like, some are from academia, some from policy, some for industry, third sector, public sector, you name it, and everybody there has got their own little pocket of expertise, you name it, and everybody there has got their own little pocket of expertise. And one of the ways that we sort of like, right, well, how are we going to make this? You know, how are we going to make this accessible to everybody? Because there's loads of stuff like, like you values, you know that the culture that the folk won't have ever heard of.
Olivia:So one of the things we're doing is we've got a graphic illustrator to in real to do real-time illustration of, like the high level points of what's happening in each of the talks so that you can follow it in different ways. You can either listen to what they're saying, you can look at the presenter slides or you can look at this real time, kind of like beans up onto the screen, you know, and it's in a cartoon, because I'm a pediatrician, but you know it's great. So, but actually trying to find different ways, not just saying, okay, well, we speak different languages, but that's another way, I suppose, of you saying like trying to find a communal language, isn't it? It's just to try and and to bring it down to the simplest bits and to make it as accessible to everybody as possible, with nobody being embarrassed to ask the silly questions.
Simon:So but yeah, well, it's gone three. Uh, I'd say with the days that you've had, you probably deserve a little lie down at the very least if only zone out on the train.
Simon:Look at your phone for a couple of hours. Um, dan liby, thanks so much for coming in and chatting. I think it's been really, really refreshing conversation. Thanks a million. Not at all awesome, thank you. Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed the podcast and know someone else that might enjoy it too, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. The podcast was brought to you in partnership with eurovent, eco, erico, ultra protect, 21 degrees and imbiot all great companies who share the vision of this podcast, and your support of them helps them support this show. Do check them out in the show notes at airqualitymattersnet and do also check out the YouTube channel by the same name, with loads of extra content appearing on there weekly. Thanks a million. See you again next week.
