16th September 2026, 10am - 4pm

University of Sheffield, UK

What is a Co-design day?

Training is more effective when the people who will be benefiting from it are included in the design, both the content and the delivery. This day was part of a number of Co-design days run by ACIT Hub to find out what training the community needs.

This Co-design day built on the discussions and priorities identified in previous ACIT Hub Co-design events, where research infrastructure engineers (RIEs) highlighted key training topics and preferred formats (e-learning, hackathons, webinars, in person courses). The focus of this day was to move from “what we need” to “how we design it”; developing concrete training plans that ACIT Hub can take forward into course and event development.

The day combined short, scene-setting talks and structured interactive sessions where participants explored and developed RIE training ideas.

During the interactive sessions, participants worked together to develop training plans on specific topics, including:

• Target audience and pre-requisites
• Learning objectives
• Format
• Topic description
• Learning activities

Participants explored what skills RIEs need and gained practical experience of developing training plans; they alsohad the opportunity to meet other RIEs and directly impact the training developed by ACIT Hub.

Featured talks

Talks from RIEs made up a significant part of the day and lead to core discussions amongst attendees.

Slides from the talks are linked below:

• Automating Block Storage Encryption for Trusted Research Environments using Kubernetes, CSI, and Vault - Babatunde Oyewo, University of Cambridge
• Managing Security and CVEs on complex research platforms - Jon Wakelin, University of Birmingham
• Single-Site to Cross-Site RoCE Network - Salih MSA, University of Birmingham
• Slingshot RDMA on Kubernetes: Serving LLMs with KServe on Isambard-AI - David John, University of Brisol
• Designing our cluster deployment using fluxCD - Jake Watson, University of Bristol