We are experiencing more disruption than ever with artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, and autonomous vehicles are no longer science fiction. So what does this mean for construction? Will the building you’re thinking of designing today be obsolete even before it’s completed?

The only way we can avoid obsolescence is through embracing sustainable development. Sustainable development by its very definition helps guide us: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” So how do we firstly ensure our buildings meet the needs of the time in which they will be completed without compromising future generations?

Here are five critical factors to ensuring your building has a future.

1. Flexibility and adaptability

Buildings being designed today need to be built to accommodate the changing way we live and work. The ability for buildings to meet their short term multi-purpose use and then be quickly re-purposed will ensure long-term viability. Building a single-use building with a 50-year life span is no longer sustainable or financially viable.

2. Integration into place

Connecting and integrating our built environment into existing and future infrastructure creates a walkable city with improved productivity and commercial benefits. Buildings need to be integrated vertically into their environmental context. However, the asset’s long term value is enhanced if it is also integrated horizontally, creating pedestrian connection points to infrastructure, adjacent buildings, amenities and public spaces.

3. Physical resilience

Environmental factors are having an ever increasing impact on the buildings built today. Designing buildings with resilience features geared for the future is more critical than ever.

4. Digital engagement and communication

As technology becomes more integrated into the way we live and communicate, incorporating technology into buildings will rapidly evolve. By implementing the right technology, we will be able to increase efficiency, productivity, enjoyment and desirability of place. Your building will no longer be a static object but an organism of connected information that works to improve our way of life.

5. New revenue streams

Thinking beyond the traditional revenue streams is imperative to the financial success of our built environment. One such example is the collection and selling of data. Asset owners can benefit financially from capturing data from occupants and visitors and selling new services and products to truly create “high-performing” buildings.

By embracing future change with sustainable development now, we will make sure any investment in buildings will not be rendered obsolete.

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Sudden shocks in cities can cause significant damage or disruption and chronic stresses can weaken the fabric of a city over time. In terms of stresses there can be high unemployment, lack of affordable housing, youth violence, civil unrest and income inequality. A city won’t be resilient unless it has talked to its residents to understand why some of these things are happening, in order to find a solution. A sustainable neighborhood becomes a resilient one though if designed to respond to these challenges. Neighborhoods need to be in a position to do this. Cities can’t be resilient on their own, and while cities should be leaders in building resilience, the neighborhoods within the cities must be able to support them.

Urban resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow despite the chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. That is a lot to tackle. All of this goes into the 100 Resilient Cities definition of a resilient city — one that can survive and thrive no matter what challenges it faces. The Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities program in 2013 to help 100 cities around the world achieve urban resilience. They are now working in 49 countries in 27 languages. The key aspect of this program is to provide funding to hire a chief resilience officer to lead resilience building efforts in the city.

100 Resilient Cities provides the city support — through their staff and consultants like ArchTam — to develop a resilience building strategy.  This process helps the city understand the threats it’s facing; it’s capability to address those threats; and what it needs to do to bridge that gap. ArchTam is lucky enough to be working with over 30 of the cities in the network, carrying out a resilience assessment and developing a resilience strategy.

The first step in developing a resilience strategy is to undertake a preliminary resilience assessment in order to understand all the challenges and risks that a city faces, and where those challenges are most geographically acute. This process allows cities to understand where shocks and stresses might be co-dependent, so that any one solution or action can provide multiple benefits.

Most, if not all, of the cities that ArchTam have worked with under the 100 Resilient Cities processes have gained a deeper understanding of what they know and, more importantly, what they don’t know about their vulnerabilities. A lot of this comes from an extensive amount of stakeholder engagement and collaboration, especially with the community, but also across all departments of cities, regional agencies and with utilities. This program gives the cities the ability to look more thoroughly at the interdependencies between departments and issues, which is an opportunity they might not have had before.

All of these steps have relevance to the concept of sustainable communities — from getting appropriate input into city decision making, to supporting more affordable housing and facilitating people to stay through adapting to sea level rise. Key issues of resilience need to be tackled and supported at multiple scales through different levels of government policy and programs from the national level down to the local level. The challenge to us urbanists is to consider how our projects should be helping cities take on their biggest challenges.

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Despite employees’ competing responsibilities, ethics training is important and can have an impact on business, the company’s reputation, and daily office morale. A company cannot afford to leave ethical decision making to chance because one hasty or ill-conceived action by an employee can harm an entire organization.

For instance, treating a client to a seemingly innocent meal while competing for his/her business could land the employee, the company and the potential client in hot water. Depending on the specific circumstances, this might reasonably be interpreted by the recipient as a reward for preferential treatment in order to create an obligation to the other party.

Effective ethics training is less skills-based and more focused on setting expectations of behavior in a variety of contexts. Therefore, it’s helpful to use dilemma or scenario-based training of varying complexity that is reinforced regularly so employees can spot issues and make the right choices.

For example, what does harassment in the work place look like? How do you react when a client requests a personal benefit? Is the customer always right? Or do we have established boundaries that can’t be crossed?

Employees usually know the answers to these questions in an abstract setting, but when an important contract or critical customer relationship is on the line, employees can feel pressured. This is why effective ethics training is more a matter of instilling values and promoting positive behaviors rather than solving any particular problem or reciting a dogmatic list of rules. The aim is to help employees make sense of what, at a glance, might seem like a convoluted situation and determine the ethical choice.

ArchTam requires all employees to complete ethics training and encourages them to think of it as something that is necessary for business operations, similar to established processes such as completing expense reports. Additionally, the firm’s comprehensive ethics-and-compliance training program requires employees to acknowledge their understanding and commitment to the organization’s purpose and core values annually.

The majority of ArchTam’s success in getting employees to take ethics training seriously can be attributed to a handful of factors. It starts with the company’s strong “Tone at the Top” — which is the level of support and communication from senior executives and other leaders within the organization. Another factor is the company’s culture — the support and encouragement employees receive from their peers in treating ethics training as an important business process. One way for managers to harness the power of positive peer pressure is to offer an incentive – perhaps a team lunch – to the first group that completes training.

However, the single-most-important factor in getting employees to recognize the importance of ethics training is a manager who models the right behavior. If a manager consciously promotes ethics training as a priority, then it is more likely to resonate with his or her employees or project staff. What better way to get employees to renew their ethics training than by having their manager complete his or her training first and then saying “I’ve completed my Ethics training, have you?” That manager can then more effectively communicate, both formally and informally, to his or her direct reports on how valuable ethics training really is.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of ethics training because it’s part of the foundation of ArchTam’s ethics and compliance program. Indeed, it’s one of the most important ways we can preserve the company’s reputation, support our long-term prosperity and promote our values.

Comment below to share why you think ethics is important as well as what factors create a successful ethics and compliance program!

Monique Nguyen, director of ethics and compliance training and integration, is based in ArchTam’s Arlington, Virginia, office. Monique has spent the last four years working in the company’s ethics and compliance office, most recently, heading the company’s global compliance-training program. She has been with the company for more than seven years and has a background in human resources for U.S. government contracting.

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Not so.

Not in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia — mate.

Elements of the Henley on Todd “fun crowd” arrive.

Here, a boat regatta is run on a dry river bed, in the ancient sand of the Todd River. Here, you put on a wig and a dress, be you man or woman, and lace up your sneakers. Because there is no water to speak of, these boat races are powered by the feet of people dressed as Vikings and pirates. All of the sunlight and the absurdity make the Henley on Todd event a comical show in the desert — and it was my first boat race.

We did not win.

ArchTam sponsored this event because nearly 100 percent of the contribution goes to local charities, which benefit many aboriginal communities. Alice Springs is nuts over sports (because there is nothing else to do) and sponsorship of sporting events is a big deal.

I and seven other people were picked by the project manager based on the fact that we looked like we would not have a coronary running 100 meters. It was a mix of Aussies and Americans, six males and one female. I took over the captaincy of the vessel based on nothing but my own slightly aggressive personality and my poor background in team sports (motocross, son!). My first act as team captain was to dictate a practice time, to get a feel for the trim of our new vessel. My second act was to dismiss an Aussie runner (my friend) and try to replace him, for insubordination and poor moral. My third act was to rehire the dismissed Aussie, and apologize for the “misunderstanding.”

It was going great. Hearts were being bruised, tempers were rising – we were becoming a team.

ArchTam sailors, calmly facing the raging sands of the Todd river. ‘Holdfast ye lads!’

Race day: First we wandered through the Todd Mall in a mini parade, carrying our freshly minted boat proudly, looking like fit and handsome men and woman of the sea. The ArchTam corporate brass beamed, the pure white banner with the ArchTam logo shining bright and true. We started our warm-up by hydrating, then doing lunges.

Our first heat consisted of three boats. There was a barrel about 30 meters out that the boats had to race to, around, and back from — in ankle deep sand. We smoked ’em. No problem. The final consisted of us, a group of teenage boys, and a crew of Australian Navy men and women. We were in the center lane. We got a good jump, and had the lead by a nose over the teens. We had the Navy boat by half a boat length going into the turn. We started our turn, it looked good – for about a step or two – then the Navy vessel started to swing around in order to make their turn. Boom! Our metal framed bow (front) smashed into their portside stern (left rear). There was a loud clash of metal and we staggered back. The Navy vessel, wobbled, lurched and sank. We did not stop to pick up survivors. Instead, like true competitors, we ran hard to catch those dang teens and ended up with second place for the day.

The grand finale featuring the pirates versus Vikings versus the Navy.

It was a fun and amusing time, and even though ArchTam didn’t take home the gold, it was all for a very good cause – to help the Fred Hollows Foundation in its fight to end trachoma by 2020. We also made a name for ourselves as those guys who sank the Australian Navy — and then gave them high fives.

Below is a short Vine clip from the Henley on Todd event.

Matthew “Captain Bligh” Butcher is an environmental engineer with ArchTam management services group, currently based in Australia. He is an avid motocross racer, staff sergeant in the Army National Guard, and would-be sports writer.
LinkedIn: Matthew Butcher

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I believe we all have experienced unconscious bias — an implicit association or attitude (about race or gender, for example) that operates beyond our control and awareness, informs our perception of a person or social group, and can influence our decision-making and behavior toward the target of the bias. It is a normal part of how our brain filters information, which is not necessarily a bad thing; however, in the workplace, this can lead to bad decisions if we are unaware of our filters.

In my 35-year career, there has been a lot of progress in gender diversity in engineering companies, and we can celebrate that women can now be more authentic in their work lives. I don’t think anyone intentionally tries to be discriminatory. But once you are aware of it, you need to take action and spread awareness to start the chain of making a difference. Fortunately, we are now working at a time when it is okay to have conversations about unconscious bias. It is important that we take advantage of this opportunity if we want our companies to thrive in the long-term.

Gender diversity is not just a feel-good thing; data confirms that gender-diverse teams improve business performance. Inclusiveness and diversity create business value as organizations with the most gender diversity at the leadership and board levels have higher shareholder return, higher revenue, more customers, and greater market share than homogeneous teams.

My advice related to unconscious bias includes:

• Once we become aware of unconscious biases, we can talk about it, make changes and take action. Don’t be afraid to bring your own personal biases into your awareness and confront them.

• If your group is stuck in decision-making, consider bringing in someone who can offer a different perspective. Diversity can include gender, age, global experience, background and/or ethnicity; we have so many ways to engage our diversity.

• Consider diversity when composing teams. There are many studies indicating that diverse teams are more innovative, more productive, and more likely to stay on schedule and budget.

• Be an advocate for inclusion. Sometimes it just takes one person to say something. This is a conversation we need to be comfortable having.

As a member of ArchTam’s Global Diversity + Inclusion Taskforce, I am continuously pushed to examine my own thinking and to have serious conversations about unconscious biases within the company and with our clients. I am passionate and committed to diversity and inclusion at ArchTam and believe we are progressing in this space. I am a strong proponent that an increased focus on diversity and inclusion will not only improve our company, but will make the world a better place.

Jill Bruning is executive vice president and general manager within ArchTam’s intelligence community and services department. She is an accomplished speaker in the Washington, D.C., area, was selected for the Leadership Foundry in 2012, and won the Women in Technology Leadership award for large business in 2011. She and her husband Jeff own a farm in rural Missouri and have five children and four grandchildren. 

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I recently noticed a tree trimmer who exhibited a great example of quality — putting on his safety gear with care, having his partner check it, explaining his next steps, then upon completion, cleaning up the area.  He demonstrated a behavior-based approach that is the essence of a quality and safety-focused culture.

I have observed similar attitudes with some of my colleagues throughout my professional life. These individuals take pride in their work and the work of their teams. At times, enforcing quality requires employees to step out of their comfort zones.  For example, a manager didn’t deliver a proposal to a potential client because it hadn’t received an adequate amount of review from the proposal team.

Our success as a company depends on our ability to deliver quality work products as scoped to our clients — safely, on time and within the agreed-upon budget. Furthermore, consistent delivery of high-quality projects shows our clients that they can count on us to address their global needs at any time. When that trust is lost, all is lost.

An effective organizational quality management program is critical to ArchTam’s long-term success.  Such a program provides the structure necessary to focus organizational energy to achieve its objectives. The program must establish policies, procedures and enabling tools such that a dynamic, ever-changing organization knows what and how work must be done to deliver quality services to internal and external clients.

However, one cannot expect that just providing policies, procedures and tools will lead to quality outcomes consistently. There is a required foundational ingredient, the energy, which is a human element. One aspect is leadership where a company’s leaders set the expectation, communicate it and practice the principles. The other potentially more-important aspect is a focus on organizational culture based on individual ownership.

I am passionate about the subject because I’ve experienced firsthand the costs of lack of attention to quality management, and the benefits of greater attention to quality management.  The costs include personal stress associated with addressing problems on short notice and under potential financial and legal threat, rework leading to unplanned cost and schedule impacts that reduce profitability and unhappy clients who cut off future work, negatively affect our organizational reputation, and the cost of litigation.

When I led a quality management team, we developed a set of essential quality principles required for a strong quality culture: Focus on the customer, plan your work, collaborate, follow procedures, manage documentation, check your work and improve continually. When this becomes a habit, it becomes the company’s organizational culture using policies, procedures and tools proactively to deliver quality and compliance.

Raj Rangaraj is vice president, client care program, and is based in ArchTam’s Santa Ana, California, United States, office.  He has served in various leadership positions — most recently as the quality officer for the infrastructure and environment division.
LinkedIn: Raj Rangaraj

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Many of the children placed in the Bahcelievler Orphanage used to live in violent homes, were abandoned by parents or don’t have parents at all. Some children still have families but live at the orphanage because their parents cannot financially afford to look after them, choosing to have them stay at Bahcelievler and then visit them regularly.

One of the reasons the basement was created was to allow these parents to spend quality time with their children on weekends. If, in time, the family becomes financially stable, they can opt to take the child back home under specific conditions approved by the government that ensure that the parents can safely look after the child.

The Bahcelievler Orphanage’s mission is to provide orphans with the opportunity to grow up in a healthy, happy family environment and with the resources to become responsible and independent adults. The aim of our CSR event was to build a nice place for the children to meet with their parents, as well as to participate in other self-improving social activities such as reading, painting, theatre and drama club, and a small self-improvement laboratory.

ArchTam volunteers pose with the children in front of the Bahcelievler Orphanage in Istanbul, Turkey, following the CSR event. 

This was the first time I was in an orphanage or interacting with orphans. Children between the ages of 4 and 13 worked with ArchTam employees to paint the basement, and we all had so much fun playing with the paint on our hands and faces. Although painting together with the children was the most fulfilling part of the event for me, it meant so much more than simply painting. During the two short hours we spent there, I felt honoured to be the cause of someone’s smile, joy and happiness. I was told that this type of event was the first in these children’s lives.

The reason I am so passionate about helping orphans is because these children have faced enormous challenges in their lives that no child should have to experience.

With all of the resources in this world, we have the capacity to look after these children, but we, as a society, are failing them. I believe that it’s because many people aren’t aware of their plight. I desperately want these children to experience love, joy and the other blessings that life has to offer.

Looking back at this event, I feel peaceful, and my heart fills with joy because now these sweet children have a comfortable place that will make them feel more at home. At the end of the day, there were only a few walls of fresh paint but, more important, there were so many memories, stories to share, and happy faces.

UNICEF statistics show that there are 163 million orphaned children waiting for hope. Also, every 18 seconds, a child becomes an orphan without a mother or father. I believe that, together, we can make a difference in an orphaned child’s life, and our team plans to continue working with orphanages as much as we can. I hope you will consider it as well.

Asli Canyurt is the marketing manager for ArchTam in Turkey. She is responsible for all business lines, including environment, construction services, building engineering and transportation. Asli has been married for nine years with no children, but has two cute puppies. She is fond of riding her motorbike, reading and listening to jazz music.

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We were born to an Armenian family and raised in Tehran, Iran. As teenagers, we immigrated to the United States with our parents in 2004. We clearly recall our first day of school in California, carrying a dictionary to our math class. We remember completing all of the problems at the end of the chapters since, oddly enough, we did not understand the meaning of “odd numbers only.” We received praise for going above and beyond the required assignment, yet, little did anyone know that we struggled to comprehend simple directions given in English.

As teenagers, we thought learning English was the most difficult thing in the world, until we attended college and took thermodynamics. As first-generation college students, this was the beginning of our journey into the mysterious world of mechanical engineering. For quite a while, the word “diversity” was ambiguous to both of us until we joined the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Upon serving as officers of SWE, we became involved in the community and helped inspire younger female students to truly enjoy their physics and math classes.

Before graduating from college, I (Meline) completed an internship at a waste-to-energy power plant while pursuing my master’s degree specializing in thermo-fluids. Simultaneously, I (Arsine) had the opportunity to move to the state of Washington for the summer and join the team working on the Hanford Nuclear Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.

From left: Arsine and Meline Baghdasarian by the Columbia River in Richland, Washington. Protecting the river and the surrounding community is one of the goals of their current project with ArchTam at the Hanford Site.

After receiving our degrees from California State University, Los Angeles, we both relocated to Richland, Washington, as cognizant system engineers at ArchTam to work on the construction of the world’s largest nuclear waste treatment plant. This was the turning point in our professional careers.

A total of 56 million gallons of nuclear waste is stored underground at the Hanford Site — the remains of the plutonium production from World War II and the Cold War era. Many of these tanks have leaked, threatening the Columbia River and the surrounding community. The project’s ongoing efforts are to stabilize the waste by building and commissioning a nuclear waste immobilization facility.

We started our careers with the Plant Engineering department, working on mechanical handing systems to justify that high radiation and contamination areas can be maintained remotely in the future. Being part of ArchTam has given us the opportunity to collaborate with a talented team to solve one of the most critical environmental efforts of all time. Upon graduating from college, we were both determined to pursue a career with a valuable purpose, work with a wonderful team, and learn how to cook while living on our own! ArchTam has granted us the opportunity to achieve all three of these goals.

An image of the Hanford Nuclear Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant with the tank farms shown at top left. (Photo courtesy of Vit Plant)

We have now realized that challenges are opportunities not to be avoided but to be embraced. Embracing these challenges leads to discovery — discovery of new people, discovery of information, and discovery of ourselves. Through all these years, we’ve written valuable chapters in our lives, and this is just the beginning of a new one.

Meline Baghdasarian is a cognizant system engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant in Washington, United States. She also has a journal publication in Physics of Fluids on numerical modeling of thermally stratified spin up flows and is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma engineering honor societies. One of Meline’s greatest enjoyments is exploring the tri-cities through her 30-mile bike-rides near the Columbia River.
LinkedIn: Meline Baghdasarian

Arsine Baghdasarian is a cognizant system engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant and is the lead author of an American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference paper on experimental research of energy efficiency in buildings. Arsine is a lifetime member of Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma engineering honor societies. Aside from her role as an engineer, she enjoys painting, swimming, and hiking the Badger Mountain.
LinkedIn: Arsine Baghdasarian

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Whilst there is a proven business case for greater diversity, the need for diversity is more personal for me. At the tender age of 16, I was struggling to identify what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had picked math and science subjects for my higher education because I enjoyed these areas of study, and I had a natural aptitude for them. I loved seeing tall, majestic skyscrapers and sweeping bridges, as well as the smaller things that made our everyday lives just a little bit easier.

I had a somewhat romanticised view of civil engineering, and never truly considered it as a viable profession. Research into the profession confirmed my suspicions — girls like me generally don’t do things like engineering. In the U.K., engineering was all about Isambard Brunel and James Watt — inspiring figures who all seemed to fit the same mold and, fundamentally, did not represent me. This was the catalyst for me; if I wanted to see a change, I would have to become that change.

With the pressure mounting from issues such as climate change, adequate global sanitation, and limited food and water supplies, there is a clear need for more engineers and more creativity. To put this plainly, to respond to the wide range of economic, social and environmental challenges of the coming century, we need more engineers and, inherently, we need more diversity.

It has been reported that, with the huge amounts of expected growth in infrastructure needs in the U.K., we need about 87,000 new graduate engineers each year, but we only produce around 25,000. Whilst I have provided U.K.-based statistics, this is a global problem. The U.K., however, does present a special case in terms of its lack of diversity.

In 2014, women accounted for only 14 percent of engineering graduates, despite the fact that nearly half of physics general certificate of secondary education pupils were female. Add to this that more than half of the end users of the projects we undertake are women, and you start getting a scale of the issue. Even worse than this, only 7 percent of the professional engineering workforce in the U.K. is women and 6 percent come from ethnic minority groups^[1].

As engineers, we all strive for that eureka moment of finding the optimal solution. For me, so many of these moments have occurred in the middle of a brainstorming session or a conversation with my peers and colleagues. We all generate ideas using our understanding of the complexities of a problem as well as our past experiences. As individuals, we are the product of our personal and cultural experiences. A more diverse group, whether this is in terms of gender, race or socio-economic background, will provide a richer tapestry of ideas and innovation. It is imperative that the people designing the solutions for the problems of tomorrow reflect the diversity within our communities.

Now, after spending eight years as an engineer, I can see the small flutters of change in the attitudes of our professionals and the wider perception of engineering. The benefits of diversity are obvious; we can develop more creative and innovative solutions to problems all over the world. I believe if we want to drive engineering as a desirable profession, we must appeal to a wider audience and attract talent from all walks of life.

At ArchTam, we are in a unique position to tackle the stereotypes and push through boundaries in terms of engineering and diversity.  Being the largest global engineering design firm gives us a platform to lead the way in terms of diversity.

^[1]http://www.raeng.org.uk/policy/diversity-in-engineering/what-is-diversity

Nayera Aslam is a principal consultant on ArchTam’s transportation team in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She works on the preliminary designs of local and national highway schemes, which has included the 2012 London Olympics. Aslam’s inspiration to become an engineer was her father, who made her believe that being female should never restrict her ambitions.
LinkedIn: Nayera Aslam

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Child pedestrian casualties remain the second-leading cause of unintentional injury-related death among 5 to 14 year olds in Great Britain. More than 69 percent of all children killed on its roads are pedestrians. Yet, this area is lagging behind in casualty reduction.

This is why I am extremely passionate about my research investigating the factors that result in increased casualty risk associated with male children. I firmly believe that increasing the knowledge behind the causes for child pedestrian casualties will help to implement new safety guidance to reduce child deaths on our roads, which is vital to helping to reduce overall accident statistics.

During my final year of university, I researched the relationship between gender and pedestrian casualty rates of children ages 0 to 15. Previous studies implicated gender as a potential risk factor, suggesting that male children were at an increased risk of injury. However, no research was found specifically relating to gender and its impact on child pedestrian casualties.

Percentage of children injured in pedestrian-vehicle collisions within six local authorities of the U.K. 

The methodology used logistic regression modelling, producing statistically significant evidence suggesting that younger casualties were more likely to be male. Further findings suggest that males are more at risk when crossing away from pedestrian crossings, as well as crossing while masked by a parked vehicle. In regards to vehicle manoeuvre, this study found that males have an increased risk when a car is slowing, stopped or waiting.

Flowchart depicting the research methodology used in the study.

The reasoning behind this is complex and, ultimately, the findings are a result of behaviour, intellectual and cognitive development, risk taking and hazard perception differences in males and females. Thus, males make different, more-hazardous road safety decisions and ultimately, this increases male casualty numbers.

While it is not possible to design infrastructure for males and females separately, I do believe that we can use my research to help alter our approach to education. I believe that males and females should be educated in different ways in order to target specific risk factors associated with each gender, thus helping to improve all casualty rates.

Since carrying out this study, I have presented my findings to a number of target audiences, including the Society of Road Safety Auditors. I am hopeful that through further investigation, this study will help civil engineers design safer road networks for use by the younger generation.

I believe that civil engineers have a duty to ensure that every design is as safe as possible for all users. In order to do this, we must continue to adapt and learn from vital research being done on this subject. If each of us makes it our duty to learn from the data, then I am positive we will create a safer environment for everyone.

Lindsey McConnell is a civil engineering graduate working in ArchTam’s highways sector. After falling in love with Newcastle in England while visiting her sister, Lindsey left Northern Island and moved to the city to study. She graduated in July 2014 with a first-class master’s degree from Newcastle University and is currently working on publishing her first paper on this topic.
LinkedIn: Lindsey McConnell

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