Today marked the start for the 5th team of this year’s CHIC edition: Team Fribourg. Composed of 4 students from the School of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg, HEIA-FR, as well as two from the School of Management Fribourg, HEG-FR, the team was immersed in a one-day mini-version of the entire CHIC program.
Unlike their peers in Lausanne, they started with an entire day dedicated to quick ideation, rapid prototyping and especially learning about the limits and possibilities of other disciplines.
Based on a random combination of four cards displaying a topic, a value, an aesthetic and a technological component, the students had to brainstorm for as many ideas as possible responding to these categories. They then selected the most promising one and implemented a first quick and dirty “Pre-totype” in order to get user feedback from people on the street. Despite the snowy weather on a Sunday, this group presenting a pet management device was able to conduct 7 user interviews in just 30 minutes. Their idea was a cube which automatically feeds, supervises and plays with your domestic animals while you’re away from home.
With the feedback they got in the morning, the groups continued after lunch to refine their prototypes and even added some technological feature to it. In only two hours, the trio who had to work on the problem space of “tattoos” and “training/practice” put together a functional demonstrator of their “skinmulate” – an artificial substitute for human skin which can be used to practice the art of tattooing without hurting an actual person. If the needle is applied too deeply, he device would give an alert to the trainee, indicating them that this would cause significant pain to their customer. The alert is represented with a red light in this video: prototyping_day-fr4.
In a week, team Fribourg will have their ideation day, where they are going to define the real problem universe for their CHIC project. Stay tuned for more updates from their side!