One of the goals of the project is to build a PEOPLE Community – an enlarged knowledge alliance between higher education, research, and industry at the local levels and wider regional, EU and wider international environment. Our aim is to facilitate and encourage the exchange, flow and co-creation of knowledge between partners of the community. One of the target groups are also other EU projects, dealing with similar topics or taking up similar approaches. The PEOPLE team connected with an Erasmus+ project GREB and were recently invited by the Construction Cluster of Slovenia to share their experiences and knowledge with GREB project participants (see how we have already exchanged best practices with the WEXHE project Consortium in February 2018).

GREB, Modernization of the Curricula in sphere of smart building engineering, is an Erasmus+ Capacity Building in the field of Higher Education project. Five European University are working to update and increase the quality of curricula in sphere of information and construction engineering, focusing on high-tech green buildings, in Russian Federation, Mongolia and Uzbekistan, in order to meet the needs of sustainable development of a global world. On Thursday, 21 June 2018, PEOPLE team members Gregor Cerinšek (IRI UL), Jure Vetršek, MSc (IRI UL), and Dr Sara Arko (Metronik) delivered a lecture and workshop, organised as part of a training programme hosted by the European partners of GREB for academic staff of partners from Russian Federation, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia. The goal of the GREB training is to support the participants in the preparation of new courses.

PEOPLE team presented the aims and goals of the PEOPLE project and explained the functioning of the PEOPLE Learning Cycles, where students are involved in energy and sustainability projects, co-mentored by industry and academic mentors. They presented the rationale behind higher education – industry cooperation in problem-based learning. A specific focus was placed on the benefits of working in interdisciplinary teams: the team explained how anthropologists and other social scientists bring valuable insights for the development of products or services. In particular, they shared the experiences from the Slovenian case study, where students and their mentors were using people-centred development approaches to study MePIS Energy, Metronik’s energy information system in a “smart building” of the University of Ljubljana (read more on our case studies here and in our 3^rd Newsletter).

Together with the training participants, they explored how anthropological methods and approaches can be applied to study the energy efficiency and energy management in buildings, healthy indoor environment, people-building interactions, as well as how those findings are translated to industry- or business-relevant insights and development recommendations. The participants also shared their own experiences in high-tech buildings and teaching models from Russia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan, making the three-hour training a valuable experience for the PEOPLE team as well.