A former Face Your Elephant researcher has helped design a new bridge for the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Mark Hammond worked on the Face Your Elephant project between July 2010 and February 2011 after finishing a Bachelor of Architecture degree, and has gone on to use his skills in partnership with our friends at Festival Republic.

Over last summer we collected a whole range of survey data from all our guests at festivals, including carbon footprints and asking people what they thought they knew about climate change. De Montfort University researcher Richard Fletcher has been trawling over the data and is in the process of analysing all the gathered information.

During 2010 Face Your Elephant travelled to festivals in the UK to educate festival-goers about the science and engineering of climate change. As part of this we encouraged people to calculate their carbon footprint. Now that the festival season is over, we can begin analysing the data collected by our volunteers. We undertook 2 surveys; one to deduce the annual emissions of festival-goers, and another to gauge what the visitors to our tent knew and their attitude towards climate change.

The Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development at De Montfort University is the home of some really exciting research into ways of reducing our burden on the environment using cutting edge science and engineering. Some of these have made blogs about their projects to share an insight into the fields they are studying.

The DUALL project at De Montfort University is looking into methods which enable building users to access energy consumption data in order to change behaviour. Central to this is understanding the role that presenting real-time information on energy consumption to building users modifies or affects behaviour. 

Obviously nothing can compare to the real festival experience like the ones the Face Your Elephant team are having at Summer Sundae and Venturer Camp this week, but we've created a small taste of what we do when out on the road.

Another amazing weekend of brilliant bands, comedians and authors in the baking suffolk countryside. Probably the politest place on earth for one weekend of the year, the Face Your Elephant Team descended on Latitude for another round of carbon foot-printing, scientific discussion and the odd bicycle smoothie. Thanks to the unprecedented number of people who came along to see us, and we hope to see you at another festival soon!