Internet of Things with Swisscom (2015)
Team Bell, their 'eden' concept device components and their online interface design.
Introduction
Ten design students were asked to participate in iPole 2015: ‘The Internet of Things’ for client Swisscom. This project run by the Applied University of North West Switzerland, with other participating Universities Merz Akademie, (Stuttgart, Germany) and Southeast University China..
‘Integrated Project Oriented Learning Environment’ (iPole) is an international interdisciplinary study platform that permits the development of innovation projects in co-operation with industry partners to facilitate multi-disciplinary collaborative project-oriented working within a multicultural environment.
Creative Challenge
The ongoing deployment of Low Power Networks (LPNs) enables a wide range of novel applications in the areas of M2M (machine-to-machine) and IoT (internet of things). The goal of this iPOLE project was to invent, prototype, explore, and demonstrate applications of sensors and machine-to-machine communication in a Swisscom’s newly deployed LPN for the business-to-business environment.
Applications ideas were only limited by the students' imagination and creativity. They could include fleet management, infrastructure, asset and utility management, facility management, navigation, tracking, transportation, logistics, flow control, and much more. Swisscom provided the infrastructure, SDKs and APIs to help realise the students' visions.
Intense team building through idea generation and planning during the physical kick-off.
Process
6 teams of 5-6 students worked over a 12 week period on their research, concepts, development and prototyping. Each multi-disciplinary team was made up of at least one student from each of the 4 Universities taking part. Each team was assigned an academic 'coach' (lecturer) from one of the participating Universities. Group communication and project management took place through online tools such as Slack and Trello.
Each team created value propositions to identify problems and value their potential solutions. Many groups also created service blueprints to look analytically at how their solution would work as part of a holistic service.
Teams often developed complex system flows, 3D model drawings to encase electronics and sensors, and sophisticated high fidelity user interfaces.
Client presentations took place every 4 weeks. In between time activity was divided into agile sprints, during which time each team shared out tasks and role played.
Solutions
Teams were required to create a series of in-depth and executive summary presentations, design documents and digital/physical prototypes. The presentations were made in Brügg, Switzerland made over a day to clients at Swisscom and then to a wider audience of researchers and facluty members from the Applied University of Northwest Switzerland.
The whole project and each team's process was documented for the client. Each team often dedicated a member to this important task and required deliverable.
6 imaginative and plausible solutions were created that combined physical sensors with digital interfaces.
The client, the teams and their coaches.