Striking the right note for sustainable construction

Case study overview

As a teenager, Brittany wanted to be on the stage. Now, she uses her performance skills to communicate big ideas in order to engage people in more sustainable engineering and construction practices. The ELS gave her the first taste of interacting with different engineering disciplines, and she now has her own company to improve collaborative working and sustainability.

Building foundations

Volunteering in Uganda after her A levels helped Brittany appreciate the role of infrastructure in society. “It’s why I ended up committing to civil engineering and slowly moved to look at alternative sanitation. My career has spiralled from there,”
she says. Brittany spent her ELS funding working in Hong Kong on placements with Arup and Laing O’Rourke, and after graduating, spent the remaining money learning Spanish in Madrid, before going to work with Engineers Without Borders in Peru. 

She then joined Buro Happold as a water engineer and did a secondment in geotechnics. “It was during that time that I realised the engineering industry often designs based on core fundamentals rather than data,” she says. “So, we’re not assessing whether what we designed had the impact we expected and whether there are ways to improve that.”

New horizons

While volunteering for World Merit, which works with the United Nations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, Brittany met Jade, who was working as an environmental advisor for Skanska on Crossrail, tracking materials into site as well as energy and water consumption.

They teamed up to start a new company, Qualis Flow, with the aim of improving sustainability in construction by taking a datadriven approach. The company has automated data capture tasks, such as quality checks,
done on site so it can be fed back to engineering teams in a useful format and help them make informed decisions. “This means it can be instantly used on the construction site to make a project more sustainable,”
Brittany explains.

The ELS throws you into situations where you were meeting engineers from completely different parts of the industry, and you very quickly

Using her voice for good

Brittany has helped organize a sustainability conference for engineers and sits on steering committees looking at how the engineering and construction industries can achieve net zero carbon emissions. “I’m
really trying to bring all the different institutions together to understand how we, together, can deliver on these terrifying and important global goals to achieve a more sustainable future,” she says.

Being a storyteller

The ELS gave Brittany her first taste of interacting with different engineering disciplines, while her love of musical theatre has played a starring role in her career too. “Although musical theatre can be incredibly silly, the communication skills that come with being able to tell a story and to really engage people in something that is bigger than them, are invaluable, particularly with what I’m doing now,” she says.

Qualis Flow’s quantitative approach to sustainability is new to much of the civil engineering community “so, that storytelling and being able to help them identify their role within that narrative is just so important. I’d love to see more engineers do musical theatre, because I think that communication is a bit that’s missing in the curriculum.”