Jiajing Feng
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Postgraduate Research Student
Areas of interest
- Building adaptation
- Health and safety
- Digital technology
Research centres and groups
Organisation, People and Technology Research GroupResearch projects
Understanding interactions between users and minor building adaptations in changing use scenarios.
How a building is adapted has been studied mostly from its design stage in terms of improving its physical attributes to benefit the future. While this process is also influenced by other social aspects, such as how building users make decisions to adapt to changing situations or the actual practice after building has been constructed. During this stage, heterogeneous network of human or non-human actors will play their part, especially in public buildings where diverse adaptations are made. Different users also have different authorities or power to make changes. This research, therefore, invites the lens of actor-network theory (ANT) to view this process. Using ethnographic observation method in a public building to identify building adaptation incidents in daily, planned, and emergency scenarios.
Background
I started my PhD shortly after I finished my MSc in Project management from the University of Reading. Before that, I was in a different area of Business Administration for my Bachelor’s degree, where surprisingly I gained some interest in low carbon community research. Therefore, I changed my pathway to the built environment area at Reading for my MSc. For the MSc dissertation, I still focused on the low carbon community research and further looked at how different stakeholders actually influence the delivery of such community. For my PhD, at the beginning, I was interested in the digital technology’s application in emergency situations such as virtual reality’s adoption in fire emergencies. Then the Covid-19 came, I tweaked and expanded my topic into understanding the relationship between human behaviour and the surrounding space. Finally, I focused on my PhD thesis of understanding minor adaptation’s interaction with building users under different scenarios.
During my PhD, I worked as a student demonstrator for undergraduate projects and master students’ module of BIM. I also run tutorials for undergraduate module of Construction technology. This gave me experience of teaching and working in a collaborative way
Websites/blogs
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jiajing-Feng-4
LinkedIn page: www.linkedin.com/in/jiajing-feng-639798158