The Science of Crowds: Movement, Behaviour and Design

The first half of the course will teach you the science of crowds: how they behave, how they can be modelled and measured, and the impacts that design changes can have on them. This will involve you learning elements of maths, physics, engineering and design, computing, sociology and psychology. This will enable you to analyse crowds and building designs through pedestrian dynamics concepts.The first half of the course will be delivered through online videos and workshops. Online videos will be available to watch a week in advance of the lecture. The workshops will begin with discussions between students and lecturers to clarify the concepts introduced in the online videos. Group activities are at the core of the workshops.

The second half of the module comprises of a group design project - you will work as a group to develop crowd-science based design solutions relating to a real-life design problem. You will be free to select the topic based upon your choice as a group. For example, you could design new evacuation procedures for the intensive care unit of a hospital, or propose how to optimise evacuation procedures in a particular building at Imperial College London. You will be expected to attend online sessions each week where you will present progress updates on your design solutions and receive feedback on them. In the final session of the course, you will present your design solutions to the rest of the class in person. The VR session and the final session are both in person, the remainder of the module is online.

For the first 5 weeks this course will follow a 'flipped classroom' approach, where you will watch a series of videos online before attending the weekly workshop sessions. In each of these weekly sessions you will complete a workshop aimed at developing your knowledge and understanding of the course content, before taking a quiz on the material you have just learned. During these workshops you will be asked to perform a variety of tasks, from experiments to theoretical and numerical calculations.  In weeks 6 students will participate in an immersive virtual reality environment exercise which is based upon an evacuation from an Underground station.

Further to this you will take part in a group project, meeting in classes and independently to propose design solutions. This will be a self-directed project, based on the material learned in the initial 5 weeks.