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Tasked with the challenge to design for Toronto, first-year EngSci Praxis II students stepped up to the plate and came up with creative, sustainable and feasible innovations to enhance the city’s infrastructure.

At the 2011 Praxis II Showcase, held at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, on April 12, students’ designs tackled everything from retrofitting litter bins, to building roads to connect the city with the waterfront, to improving track lubrication at the Union Station subway loop.

Kevin Shu’s (EngSci 1T4) group was one of several who tackled the latter. His group presented an automated robotic system that helps the TTC efficiently monitor and lubricate the tracks at Union Station – a viable solution that would give many commuters’ ears some much-needed relief when travelling past the Union loop.

“It’s been very overwhelming,” said Shu about the showcase, “But we’re so proud to share what we came up with.”

“It’s been nice to see the five-year evolution of the course,” said Senior Lecturer Jason Foster (EngSci). “We are continuously trying to figure out the right scale of which to have the students look at the city – do we restrict it to the TTC, or can they only look at certain regions? This year, we said, ‘sustainably improve the city of Toronto,’ and that was the end of it. So students came back with everything from TTC issues, to cycling, to improving the waterfront to vermin and pest control, to homelessness.”

A project by Praxis students
One of the “Road to the Waterfront” projects by Praxis students.

Before they could present their completed designs to fellow students, faculty members and media at the showcase, Praxis students had to communicate and engage with community members and civic agencies in order to conceptualize their designs – which is one of many elements that makes Praxis so unique, said Foster.

“It’s not strictly a design and communication course, because those are just the activities we ask the students to pursue, with the bigger goal that it’ll let them figure out, ‘what kind of engineer do I want to be?’”

Read the articles on the Praxis II showcase as they appeared in The Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star and the Daily Commercial News .

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