The Engine Room: a smart building project enabling employer collaboration at Derby College Group.
Inside the Engine Room at Derby College Group, a space designed to strengthen employer partnerships, support modern collaboration and quietly embed smart building technology into everyday use.
The challenge: creating a dedicated employer engagement space in further education.
Derby College Group works closely with employers across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to help shape curriculum, address skills gaps and support local economic growth.
Before the Engine Room project, this engagement was effective but fragmented. Meetings with employers took place across different campuses, in ad-hoc rooms, or at external business locations. There was no single, professional environment designed specifically to bring employers into the college and support consistent, meaningful collaboration.
At the same time, the college was responding to wider pressures:
- increasing demand for hybrid meetings
- a growing focus on wellbeing and the quality of working environments
- the need to demonstrate sustainability and long-term value from investment
- the challenge of integrating modern technology into a historic education building
Derby College Group needed a credible business centre that employers would actively want to use, while also laying the foundations for a more adaptable, data-led approach to space over time.
The approach: designing a smart, behaviour-led business centre.
The Engine Room was designed around a simple but deliberate principle: design for behaviour first, then enable it with technology.
Rather than creating generic meeting rooms, the space was planned around clear functional intent. Different areas of the Engine Room were designed to support different ways of working, helping remove ambiguity and encouraging appropriate use of each space.
From the outset, the project aligned with wider college strategies around digital transformation and infrastructure. The Engine Room was conceived not just as a finished space, but as a platform that could evolve – capturing data, informing decisions and supporting future improvements.
Delivering this vision required careful coordination across multiple technologies and delivery partners, while maintaining a clear focus on how the space was intended to be used. The emphasis was on integration and long-term value, rather than standalone systems or short-term fixes.
The solution: integrated smart building technology for collaboration and wellbeing.
Scenariio delivered an integrated smart building solution that brought together lighting, collaboration technology, sensors and data into a single, joined-up environment.
An intelligent lighting system was installed throughout the Engine Room, designed to support comfort, productivity and energy efficiency.
The system runs on Power over Ethernet (PoE), meaning power and data are delivered through network cabling rather than traditional mains wiring. This enables precise control of lighting levels and colour temperature, while significantly reducing unnecessary energy use.
Lighting automatically adjusts throughout the day in response to occupancy and time of day, creating a more natural working environment while operating at far lower output levels than traditional lighting systems – often in ways that are barely noticed by users.
Meeting rooms within the Engine Room were equipped with Microsoft Teams Rooms, enabling seamless hybrid meetings.
This allows employers, curriculum teams and college staff to collaborate effectively regardless of location, with reliable audio and video creating a consistent meeting experience for both in-room and remote participants.
A room booking system integrated with Outlook and Microsoft Teams enables users to book spaces remotely.
Beyond convenience, the system provides visibility of demand and usage, creating a foundation for understanding how the space is used over time.
A network of sensors was installed to monitor:
- room occupancy
- desk usage
- air quality and temperature
This data feeds into a central dashboard, giving the college visibility of both environmental conditions and space utilisation.
As George Pritchard, Technical Director at Scenariio, explains:
“The real benefit of the technology is the ability to understand how spaces are used.
That data allows the college to monitor KPIs, optimise the workspace and link usage to energy and cost savings.”
Delivering smart building technology within a historic education building.
The Engine Room is located within the Roundhouse — a historic building that required a sensitive, retrofit-led approach.
To minimise disruption and preserve the character of the space, Scenariio worked closely with the college to deploy a mix of wired and wireless technologies, using surface-mounted fixtures where required.
As Ian McCormick, IT Director at Derby College Group later reflected:
“It could have been very separate, but it was managed in a way that meant everything fitted together and complemented each other.”
Strong coordination ensured that multiple technologies and partners came together as a single, coherent environment, rather than a collection of individual systems.
The result: a data-led, hybrid-ready business centre for employers.
At completion, the Engine Room delivered:
- a professional, employer-facing business centre
- high-quality hybrid meeting spaces
- improved comfort and wellbeing for users
- reduced energy consumption through intelligent lighting
- visibility of space usage and environmental conditions
For Derby College Group, the Engine Room created an environment that employers actively wanted to use, while also establishing a data-rich foundation for future optimisation and development.
Designed for longevity: a smart building platform that continues to evolve.
From the outset, the Engine Room was designed with longevity in mind.
By embedding smart building technology into the fabric of the space and capturing meaningful data from day one, Derby College Group created a platform that could adapt as working patterns, expectations and requirements evolved.
This case study documents the starting point of that journey.
The Engine Room continues to develop as the space matures – with learning, behaviour and use becoming as important as the technology itself.
What happened next.
The Engine Room was designed as a platform that could evolve over time.
Two years later, the space has become a reference point for collaboration across Derby College Group — influencing how people meet, work and use shared environments.
Explore how behaviour, expectations and technology adoption have developed since the original project.
