IOA's WES Lottie Tour for Tomorrows Engineers Week

by Vicky Wills, Associate Acoustics Consultant, AtkinsRéalis

This week is Tomorrows Engineers Week (https://www.teweek.org.uk/), which is an annual national campaign run by Engineering UK, with the aim to shine a spotlight on engineering, engineering careers and engineering professionals. This year the focus of the campaign is around local challenges and turning a passion into a career, and this certainly sounds like something that acoustics professionals can get on board with.

The Women’s Engineering Society (WES) run an annual campaign, the WES Lottie Tour (https://www.weslottietour.org.uk/), where volunteers take a 'Lottie' doll to many different locations to show Lottie the work that they do in engineering and related careers. Lottie's experiences are shared across social media using #WESLottieTour, especially during TEWeek.

This year the IOA STEM committee have joined in with the Lottie Tour, providing a number of dolls for the members to use, along with accessories like hard hats, yellow hi-vis vests and hearing protection. We were particularly lucky to start the tour when we did, as ANV Measurement Systems were able to provide each doll with a mini Sound Level Meter

At least 25 different organisations have joined the tour since mid-September including ANV, speaker manufacturers, noise and vibration isolation system specialists, educators and acoustic consultants.

Lottie has been to conferences, tried her hand at underwater acoustics, been on noise surveys, tried noise modelling, designed speakers, carried out acoustic tests and we have even seen dolls on tour in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

See all the brilliant things that Lottie has been up to in the video below, and support the tour by following #WESLottieTour and our tag #AcousticianonaMission on Social Media.

This is an annual campaign and hopefully something that we will continue to support going forward. If you have any questions about our tour please contact STEM@ioa.org.uk.

If you want to find out more about acoustics try our Springpod Virtual Work Experience Programme Acoustics with the Institute of Acoustics (springpod.com) or enter our Secondary School Competition

Huge thanks to all of the amazing organisations that took part: AECOM, Aercoustics Engineering Limited in Canada, ANV Measurement Solutions, Apex, Arup, AtkinsRéalis, BSRIA, Clarke Saunders, Create Consulting Engineers, CDM Stravitec, Delta Simons, Dyson, Edinburgh Airport, Kings College London, KP Acoustics, Loughborough University, Marshall Day in Australia, Masimo (Bowers and Wilkins), NDY in New Zealand, Ramboll, RBA Acoustics, RPS Group, Sandy Brown, SRL Technical Services, Stantec, Sustainable Acoustics, Thales, Tymphany, University of Sussex, Vanguardia (A Buro Happold Company) and WSP, as well as the ANC and UKAN+ for promoting it.