Expert Week Summary
- BLUElab Thailand
- May 23, 2017
- 3 min read
Hello, Allison again, ready to give not another blog post but give an all-inclusive post/photo recollection for the WEEK. For starters, here is a picture of me and Alex where there’s a 20% chance I’m laughing at him because of food, a 80% chance I’m happy because of food and 100% chance that he has food.
After a week of interviewing Mae Chan officials, setting up meetings with Chiang Mai University professors allowed us to expand our understanding of environmental and engineering principles as well as discuss our findings and ideas with their expertise.
Wednesday (5.17) : Water Pollution & Transportation talk, CMU Student Meeting, NSTDA, Needs Statements Succeeding Dr. Sopajaree and Dr. Pholchan, we met with CMU’s Asst. Professor Manop Kaewmoracharoen of Civil Engineering and Construction Management Monday morning to talk about water pollution and landscaping in Mae Klong Sae and then cover transportation plans for Chiang Mai’s future. We were inspired by a grad thesis’ modeling for her proposal on how we may map Mae Chan, made aware of how detrimental water pollution can be (like Bangkok’s Klong canal) and we discussed common methods of transportation and a potential metro system (that may be in place for future generations of BLUElab Thailand?!? ).
I just finger painted on my iPad a Venn diagram stemmed from a discussion with the other CMU students (whom we also updated on our needs statement filtering as we met for Mae Chan). We had to contrast the common transportation around town and campus for Chiang Mai and Ann Arbor. (click to view and enjoy the supplementary photos of us plus the common transportation in action)
Speaking of transportation: (aka think about moving forward down unprecedented streets)
1.) Our team met with NSTDA, an organization that funds science and technology programs for Northern Thailand, allowing us to not only consider future partnerships and sponsors but move away from linearly thinking of “what project can we do to match what needs” but also “what needs and projects have been done or are ongoing right now?”
(^2 Civils bonding over fertilizer and Alex stealing the spotlight once again with a new ‘do and purloining fertilizer)
2.) After compiling and reviewing needs statements, we have determined to pursue a flood mitigation project!!
Thursday (5.18): Energy, Data Privacy, Needs Filtering II
Asst. Prof.Chatchawan Chaichana talked to us about energy conservation and renewable energy, bringing up questions of power sources and what stakeholders/government controls and pays for it. Since BLUElab focuses on sustainability, finding an efficient, lasting power source will prove to be crucial to our future project, and it was good to gain an understanding of the energy and biogas situation in Thailand.
In the afternoon, we were happy to turn to a new concept (open data and data privacy) with a familiar face: Assoc. Prof. Juggapong Natwichai, who visited us at the University of Michigan at a BLUElab meeting last fall! Some interesting allusions we brought up were Snowden (who actually had video called into a UMich class this year?!) and the Wannacry virus outbreak (that less excitingly, I started getting anti-virus notifications about later that day after not having heard of it before).
At the grueling but avant-garde team meeting, after narrowing down to 15 Needs Statements (observed criteria that community users need or would want), we held a long team discussion and allowed our CMU partner students to observe and participate. With a decision matrix, we scored the needs based on weighted categories for perceived community/stakeholder interest/urgency, team interest, potential for new innovation and available intellectual and physical resources.
Friday (5.19):
With this in mind, we were ready to proceed with filtering our project scope (…and ready for a weekend excursion break… and then ready to proceed with our last trip to Mae Chan this following week!?!)
That’s a wrap!
-A.C.
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