Newsmail #36, 2022-09-22

Dear all,

The adaptation process of our former combustion engines lab towards the new prototyping center gets delayed. The “moving circus” gets messy, we need to store things in the labhall, the upgrade of the ventilation system in the A-building needs to be done in parallel, student lab activities and HK projects gets affected. At the same time, this is the first semester in three years where we plan for all activities on-site, post-pandemic. With a new setup of the workshop and prototyping center, without the former HK-corridor, without the offices on ground floor that we used previously. See Shakedown (testing) - Wikipedia for more details.

You have noticed that the furniture in lunch areas, meeting rooms etc are being replaced now. The new furniture should give a better paus-environment in the paus-areas. The furniture in the meeting rooms are chosen to facilitate various work so that we can use these areas more efficient, for individual work, for meetings etc. Even though we released two of our corridors, we now have more desk spaces than before, we have room for everyone including guests. We will have more variations in office environments, to meet various needs.

Anton Boström is in charge of all of our common lab-spaces. He is allocating square meters according to need. If you need space in the lab hall, he needs to know this yesterday, otherwise the space is allocated to someone else. Early planning makes opportunities.

We reserve our meeting rooms for our staff use and for external meetings. Teaching activities is done in teaching buildings on campus, we do not block our meeting rooms for teaching activities that can be held in KTH-common teaching spaces. We all want to be able to book a meeting room with short notice. More individual supervision of thesis students, HK-teams etc is done in the rooms we now have provided for that purpose, in the new HK-corridor.

The prototyping center, including the workshop, is better prepared than ever before in handling the needs of all student teams and projects this fall, and with early planning the team will be able to provide more builds than before, for all the demos we look forward to see in December.

For the above to succeed, it is crucial that course directors inform students of the various processes, that unit managers inform staff, that we all inform our external guests and collaborators. That we raises concerns and suggestions for improvements in our MMK processes. With that said, I have full confidence that the shakedown will be successful.

Best,

Martin