Alumni Jason Ratcliffe participates in Grand Designs event and receives award for research
Posted on: 22 October, 2024
Jason Ratcliffe, co-founder of Steren Surveyors, TedX Organiser and graduate of UCEM’s MSc Real Estate programme, recently attended the Grand Design Live event in Birmingham, which took place on 5-6 October.
At the event he won Kevin McCloud’s Green Hero Award for his work on the Elemental Cube™: a first-of-its-kind portable climate chamber that can ensure accurately controlled microclimates and deliver innovative approaches to achieving thermal optimisation in buildings.
As Jason told us on his participation in the event:
“I had the pleasure of speaking to Kevin about the Elemental Cube and going through the product, its design and experimentation. He was extremely impressed and stated the built environment desperately needed this type of product to improve the quality of standards and wellbeing, which is exactly what I’m trying to do!”
“I also ran two workshops, one on getting your home winter ready and the other on how different insulation materials are more appropriate for different building types.”
Alongside his participation in the Grand Designs Live event, Jason was also awarded a sponsorship prize at the 2024 Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society (SEEDS) conference.
Jason’s research, titled ‘An Investigation into How the Thermal Performance of a Residential Property Can Change Depending on its Orientation and Providing Initial Insight into Importance of Dynamic Thermal Improvement Strategies’, was completed alongside Matthew Fox and Steve Goodhew, with the award presented by Prof. Saheed Ajayi and Prof. Chris Gorse.
On receiving this award, Jason commented:
“I had the great privilege of being accepted as a speaker within the SEED 2024 Leeds Research Conference, with my research focusing on the importance of the optimisation of thermal efficiency of buildings to enhance the wellbeing for occupants. This research won the Emerald Publishing award at the conference and is the start of the Wellbeing Surveyor personal brand as I focus my attention on improving the quality of wellbeing for those that use buildings through enhancing the buildings themselves.”
