Leaving Dublin for London: Intel Labs and the Internet of Things

The morning I left Dublin, it was lashing rain. Classic. I remember standing at the Luas stop with two suitcases and a backpack full of cables, thinking “what am I actually doing?” I’d spent the bones of four years doing hardware engineering, and now I was moving to London to work on… well, the Internet of Things, whatever that meant in 2014.

The job was at Intel Labs, specifically the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities (ICRI Cities, because everything needs an acronym). It was a joint venture between Intel, UCL, and Imperial College London, housed in a beautiful old building near the British Museum. My title was “Design Technologist,” which I’m fairly sure was invented specifically so nobody could pin down what I was supposed to do.

What a Design Technologist Actually Does

In practice, it meant I sat somewhere between the hardware engineers, the software people, and the designers. I’d prototype things. I’d build sensor boards, write firmware, hack together web dashboards, and then present them to academics who’d stroke their chins and say things like “fascinating, but have you considered the epistemological implications?”

I hadn’t. I was trying to get a temperature sensor to stop reading 140°C in direct sunlight.

The team was brilliant. Dr Sarah Gallacher ran the show with a calm authority that made you forget you were in a room full of people who couldn’t agree on what “smart city” meant. Gawain Morrison brought the design thinking. And I got to be the person who turned Post-it notes into working prototypes, which is honestly the best job description I’ve ever had.

The Internet of School Things

The flagship project I worked on was called the Internet of School Things. The concept was straightforward: put environmental sensors in London schools and let kids actually use the data. CO2 levels in classrooms, temperature, humidity, light levels. Give children aged 8-12 access to real data about their own environment and see what happens.

What happens, it turns out, is that kids are better at spotting patterns than most adults. One class noticed their CO2 levels spiked every afternoon and worked out it was because their teacher kept the windows closed. Another group discovered the warmest spot in their playground was next to the kitchen extraction vent. They’d hang around there at break time. Brilliant.

We deployed sensor kits in the bones of 20 schools across London. Each kit cost around £150 in components: a Raspberry Pi, a custom sensor board, a few breakout sensors, and a case that was supposed to be tamper-proof but absolutely wasn’t. One school’s kit was “repurposed” by a Year 6 student within the first week. I wasn’t even angry, just impressed.

The Shift

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about moving from pure hardware engineering to this kind of interdisciplinary work: you stop being the expert in the room. At Intel in Ireland, I knew my patch. I could debug a PCB layout, optimise a power supply, characterise a sensor. In ICRI Cities, I was suddenly surrounded by urban planners, sociologists, interaction designers, and computer scientists. I was learning something new every single day, which was exhilarating and terrifying in roughly equal measure.

I remember one meeting where a sociologist asked me “but what does the data mean to the community?” and I just stared at her. I’d spent years making sure data was accurate. I’d never once thought about what it meant to someone who wasn’t an engineer.

That question changed how I think about technology. Full stop.

So Why London?

People ask me this a lot. Dublin was (and is) a proper tech hub. Intel, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, they’re all there. Why leave?

Honestly? I wanted to be uncomfortable. Dublin was comfortable. I had my local, my football, my mates. London was chaos. Eight million people, a tube system that’s simultaneously the best and worst public transport on earth, and rent that made me physically wince. My flat in Bethnal Green was £650 a month for a room that could generously be described as “cosy” and more accurately described as “a cupboard with a window.”

But ICRI Cities was doing something I couldn’t find anywhere else: genuinely trying to make cities work better for people, with actual technology, at actual scale. Not a pitch deck. Not a concept video. Real sensors, real data, real schools, real kids.

And I got to solder things. In a research lab. Funded by Intel. With access to Imperial College’s workshops.

Sometimes the rain in Dublin is trying to tell you something. Mine was saying “go.”

The next two years would take me from school sensors to city-wide deployments, from hackathons to academic papers, and eventually back into academia myself. But I’ll save that for another post. For now, I need to go fix a Raspberry Pi that’s been reading 140°C again. In February. In London. Sure look.