Dozens of McMaster students filled the auditorium at McMaster’s downtown campus to present their work on Monday for the MacChangers Program end-of-year presentations.
Many of this year’s projects focused on addressing food security issues among the student population, improvements to buildings to address heat issues and bird strikes, and pedestrain safety.
The MacChangers program is a non-credit co-cirrcular activity offered to McMaster University students.
Teams work on projects within one of four themes: Clean & Green Cities, Healthy & Safe Cities, Communities Arts & Culture, and Infrastructure & the Built Environment.
For many of the students, this is their first project that ends in a poster presentation. Poster presentations are common at academic conferences, and it is a skill that will benefit the students who continue onward into graduate studies.
The presentation that caught my eye was on the topic of lighting in libraries. It was novel and can be implemented.
Long story short, university libraries continue to use commercial fluorescent tube lighting. The students documented the negative impacts of that lighting on people, the benefits of LED lighting, and recommend the inclusion of user-controlled LED lamps at individual study carrels.
As someone who routinely reads reference materials in libraries, I have to admit I never gave much thought to how poor lighting contributes to making me feel tired after a few hours of reviewing old documents.