Emma Frost, director of innovation, London Legacy Development Corporation
It’s 10 years since London hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Yet for Emma Frost, director of innovation at London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the long-term influence of these world sports activities occasions stays on the core of her every day working life.
Frost’s dedication pre-dates the Games. In 2009, she joined LLDC, which was charged with turning the house used for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games into Queen Elizabeth Park in east London. A decade after the Games, the park is now dwelling to 5 world-class venues, 1000’s of residents, and can present work for 40,000 folks by 2025.
As head of innovation, Frost sits on the coronary heart of this continued transformation course of. With her colleagues at LLDC, she’s utilizing data-led innovation to create a profitable and sustainable future for the park and the individuals who reside and work there. Frost appears again on her journey with satisfaction and affection.
“I feel incredibly fortunate. It’s been such an exciting and diverse project. The scale is massive and there are loads of different opportunities and work streams. It’s one that always keeps things interesting. The change and the challenge are different every year and that’s why I’ve stayed for so long,” she says.
“My role has changed six or seven times within that period. It’s brilliant to be involved in something that everyone can relate to and that had such strong, long-term commitments from the outset. That keeps you on your toes.”
Stepping up into new tasks
Until fairly not too long ago, Frost’s position additionally encompassed oversight of sustainability and communities, in addition to innovation. While she recognises her portfolio was broad, she mentioned it was essential to have had oversight of all of these completely different interrelating components.
“All too often they’re not working together, or they’re not seen as part of the mix. So that oversight involved everything from community development, outreach and education work that we’ve led around the park, right through to building new neighbourhoods and establishing new communities and integrating with existing areas of the park,” she says.
Frost says sustainability is paramount throughout all areas of her position. Key ideas, corresponding to web zero and biodiversity enhancement, proceed to tell the work she undertakes. Now, as she focuses extra particularly on innovation, sustainability will proceed to be central to the actions of the LLDC.
“We need to think about how we can use the fast-growing innovation economy, and the critical mass of different private, public and academic sector players that are now based on the park, to try to deliver better investments and innovations,” she says.
“That work will involve the way we design and deliver venues, the way we do facilities management, the way we build homes, the way we think about getting around cities, the way we think about the health of cities, and the way we think about wellbeing in cities and what it means to be an active citizen. So, it’s still a very broad-reaching agenda.”
Supporting a shift in emphasis
Frost says her new, single-minded deal with innovation may be defined by the launch of Shift, a brand new innovation programme and partnership for the park. A gaggle of organisations based mostly on the park have come collectively to create an innovation district.
“It’s about utilising the park as a testbed to drive inclusive innovation that delivers better urban futures. There’s radical need and disruption at the moment around how we move in cities, how we live in cities, the health and wellbeing agenda in cities, and the climate adaptation in cities,” says Frost.
“We’ve got a good spread of public, private and academic partners, all committed to the long-term outlook of the park and reframing its vision towards being focused on inclusive innovation”
Emma Frost, London Legacy Development Corporation
“We’re really hoping to push forward on those different themes by bringing together the different partners that are already based on the park – and they’re increasingly basing their activity on the park, too.”
Along with LLDC, the seven founding companions for Shift are Lendlease, Here East and Plexal, that are all personal sector companions, alongside three educational establishments: University College London, UAL’s London College of Fashion and Loughborough University London.
“We’ve got a good spread of public, private and academic partners, all committed to the long-term outlook of the park over the next 10 years and reframing its vision towards being focused on inclusive innovation.”
Running ground-breaking trials
Frost says Shift goals to search out sensible solutions to urgent questions by means of collaboration and creativity. She provides the instance of an innovation trial that’s being run in the mean time, which makes use of sensors and a know-how platform to watch audibility inside public venues.
“Hearing wellness is an increasingly important science – it’s something we’ve really not prioritised enough in lots of our building design and our disability design,” she says. “Hearing wellness and hearing abilities tend to be under-researched, so we’re now starting to monitor the audio quality of public spaces.”
Frost’s crew has run a trial utilizing sensors in 5 completely different venues on the park to evaluate the baseline audio high quality of these public venues. The baseline will assist folks related to Shift take into consideration applied sciences that may very well be applied to spice up audibility by way of different acoustic specialists.
“That might include different types of panelling, surface design and the installation of sound-booth features to improve audio quality. So far, as a direct result of this trial, we’ve seen dwell times increase in public venues. We’ve seen retail rates and takings improve, and huge improvements in both customer and staff satisfaction,” she says.
“Already we’re seeing that using digital and data technology to complete tests in real time in public spaces on the park allows us to not only understand the agenda better, but make practical changes that have direct benefits to the operators and the users inside the venues.”
Using information to enhance processes
Frost provides one other instance of a pioneering trial that has been undertaken by LLDC. For the previous two years, the organisation has plugged 32 CCTV cameras into a synthetic intelligence (AI) platform from laptop imaginative and prescient specialist Fyma. Frost says this association helps LLDC to create new insights into how the park and its amenities are used.
“Fyma came to us as part of the Shift initiative,” she says. “They recognised that we were doing a lot of interesting things with innovation trials on the park and that we were using the environment as a testbed. We struck a deal for a trial over a six-month period that ran from May to November last year.”
As many as 43 million objects have been detected within the park to this point. Frost has been impressed with the ethics of the platform. Fyma blurs out human faces on photos used to coach its AI system, whereas camera-feed information is mechanically deleted as soon as it passes by means of the platform.
Insights from the AI system, which gives analysis on transport use and particulars on the circulate of folks throughout the park and related retail areas, corresponding to close by Westfield Stratford City, will assist LLDC in its persevering with efforts to make the surroundings extra accessible, user-friendly and sustainable sooner or later.
“The park is basically a new piece of city. It’s all been designed and built within the past 10 years. It’s changing rapidly. Our roads, our network, our layout, even some of the bridges, will change every other week in terms of being rerouted,” she says, earlier than outlining how the trial will likely be prolonged within the coming months.
“In terms of where we want to take it, a good example is that we’re going to be using the next level of work to help inform our retail strategy. We’re trying to analyse the movement activity and trends of people walking in and around the park and how that can inform retailing,” she says.
Building a digital twin
While it could be 10 years for the reason that London Olympics and Paralympics passed off, Frost and her colleagues at LLDC nonetheless have many thrilling plans for the event of the park – and digital know-how and information play a key position in these explorations.
“We’re just at the very beginning of this work,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to over-claim that we are fully digitally enabled at this point. What we do have is all of the hard infrastructure in terms of the digital capacity and the provision.”
Frost says one train LLDC is within the course of of enterprise is an audit of information capacities throughout the park. While she says the mission ought to be easy, attempting to determine the gaps and take into consideration utilisation and optimisation is a big effort.
“That piece of work will help us design a brief for creating a digital twin across the whole of the park. So, if you were to speak with me again in four years’ time, I’d love to say: ‘Well, this is how we run our data strategy across the park. And here’s our digital twin that allows us to do that and here’s how we optimise it to enable our innovation priorities’.”
Rather than simply being a passive information storage facility, Frost envisages this digital twin as an interactive, playable platform, the place LLDC workers and its companions can entry, discover and manipulate information by way of a mannequin of the park.
“There would be interoperability between data feeds, so everything can be seen in the same lens. An example would be one of our venues on the park: getting an accurate view of energy efficiency at the London Aquatics Centre – knowing what its energy efficiency readings are and how that fluctuates over a 24-hour period,” she says.
“We’d be able to analyse changes in response to weather dynamics or user dynamics, and be able to interrogate that data a little bit more and then apply innovation tests to it. That will help us potentially run the centre more efficiently. So it has a direct feed on facilities management, and cost savings or environmental efficiencies.”
