Guido

First of all what is an innovation park ?

According to the EPFL an Innovation Park is devoted to housing start-ups, SMEs, research teams and innovation cells from major companies that operate in fields as diverse as information technology, computing, health and nutrition, engineering, transport, telecommunications or materials. The whole process occur in an inspiring environment, with access to cutting-edge research, world-class faculty and students and a large network of serial entrepreneurs.

Hong Kong and Shenzhen are part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. They are an important economic zone. Guangdong is one of the richest province of China and leader in exportation. This is partly due to the way that Shenzhen grew up a lot lately. Which ultimately gave us his nickname of “electronic capital”. This is also why a lot of start-ups show interest in Shenzhen, it is very easy there to cut down manufacturing as well as research costs. Although we can find makerspaces easily like MakerBay, SEGfablab, Litchee Lab, x.Factory (where we worked), etc. China has only showed interest in innovation parks very recently.

Hong Kong is in advance thanks to their universities like the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology that allowed an enterprise like DJI to grow and become the leader in the world in aerial photography. Hong Kong also owns the Hong Kong Science Park that take advantages of the Greater Bay Area to ensure the fast development of new talents and enterprises by creating innovation.

Today, when we search for Innovation Park in Shenzhen or in Hong Kong, there is one name that comes back everytime : Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park (HKSTP). This enormous park of 100 hectares wich is currently being buily will be located at Lok Ma Chau Loop, at the border of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. This allows innovators to have direct access to the supply chain and to China resources. Making innovation faster. Hong Kong shows his wish to invest into this innovation park by creating a new line for an underground train from Lok Ma Chau Loop to the center of Hong Kong. The underground train would make the time of travel between the two points down to 14 minutes. Of course, there are a lot of issues to solve regarding visas. Creating a new mixed area like Lok Ma Chau that will attract hundreds of thousands of people every day will create a need for new automated and transparent authentication systems. Crossing the border is already a pain nowadays, so China and Hong-Kong will have to work together to find a solution.

China or more specifically the Chinese government puts a lot of effort into making sure that access to press and Internet in the mainland is limited. This is different in Hong Kong.

The contrast is an illustration of the “one country, two systems” policy that has been in place since the former British colony reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.

Censorship in the media is quite difficult to deal with when you’ve spent most of your life in Switzerland, a country which has one of the most direct forms of democracy and actively defends free press & media. If you don’t pay attention, in China and to a certain extent Hong Kong, it’s easy not to realize that all the information you’re digesting is being filtered to suit a certain agenda. For us at CHIC, it was also quite inconvenient because working in Shenzhen & Hong Kong required us to do research and stay up-to-date with what was happening in the world for our various assignments.

In order to provide a complete picture, let’s have a look at the different types of media and break them down.

Television

As Hong Kong is a relatively stable zone, modern with a democracy, where everybody still watches TV, whether at home or in the metro on their smartphones.

The television in Hong Kong is broadcasted in two official languages which are Mandarin and Chinese. Many TV channels are totally free, for instance ATV World (Asia Television World), TVB (Television Broadcast). The above-mentioned channels offer English programs and have a Mandarin counterpart called ATV Home and TVB Home. As in Switzerland, a lot of various TV shows are provided : American TV series, sport, international news as well as small local news. It is interesting to note that some programs are broadcasted in Mandarin with English subtitles in addition.

In China, the broadcasting of TV shows is managed by a public company called CCTV (China Central Television). The majority of the TV programs are news, social education, entertainment, comedy and documentary. CCTV belongs to the Communist Party of China, which validates all the broadcasts. This means that the freedom of expression in such a TV is sometimes stifled.

CCTV is part of the “central tree” with the others being Chine National Radio and China Radio International. A large number of public or pay TV channels are proposed by the broadcaster (16 public channels and 18 pay channels). Among them, we can cite CCTV 1, the general channel, CCTV2 for the finance, CCTV5 for the Sports and CCTV8 for the TV series

Nowadays, CCTV at the instigation of the Chinese government continues to grow. This is reflected for example by the launch of an international TV channel in Arabic in 2009.

Radio

The main radio stations in Hong Kong are RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), Commercial Radio and Commercial Radio. As for the TV channels, the radio stations broadcast programs predominantly in English and in Mandarin. Unlike some well-established public broadcasters such as the BBC and NHK, which are primarily funded via a licence fee system, RTHK is directly funded by an annual government allocation, and operates as a department of the government (similar to the CBC) under the Communications Authority.

As of September 2017, there are three licensed broadcasters of terrestrial radio in Hong Kong, broadcasting on both AM and FM bands. An underground radio station “Citizens’ Radio” also broadcasts on FM without a license. 7 radio stations are owned by the government (RTHK radio).

In China, there is over 3’000 radio stations ! The Central People’s Broadcasting Station, which is the official radio station of the Chinese nation, has eight channels and broadcasts for a total of over 200 hours per day via satellite. Every province, municipality or autonomous region in China has its own local radio stations. The CRI (China Radio International) is the official radio broadcaster and is state-owned. The CRI is beamed in 38 languages all around the world and broadcasts for a total of 2’700 hours every day, including news, economy, culture, science or technology. This is currently the third most important broadcaster in the world.

Newspapers & Press

Newspapers and the written press is probably one of the oldest forms of media to push out information to the public.

According to Wikipedia, the number of newspapers in China has increased from “42, virtually all Communist Party papers, in 1968 to 382 in 1980 and finally to more than 2,200 today. In 2006, China was the largest market for daily newspapers, with 96.6 million copies sold daily, followed by India with 78.7m, Japan with 69.7m, the US with 53.3m, and Germany with 21.5m. China newspaper advertisement revenues increased by 128% from 2001 to 2006! Basically,  between 1950 and today, the number of Chinese newspapers has multiplied over 10 times.”

Press in Hong Kong has also followed a similar evolution despite being a much smaller territory. What’s interesting to note is that public confidence in the freedom of Hong Kong press has dropped to an all-time low due to pressure from Beijing being a rising contributing factor in. These were the results of the Press Freedom Index, which measures public feeling on the subject.

Back in April 2018, Chris Yeung Kin-hing – Chairman of the Journalists Association, said “The room for press freedom has been shrinking… In the public eye […] the ‘Hong Kong system’ is shrinking and that includes the most important things, such as freedom of expression and the press.”

The Journalists Association chairman also argued that with more red lines being drawn by Beijing, more related topics such as independence would be viewed as sensitive, or even become forbidden areas in media reports.

As Swiss students visiting Shenzhen & Hong Kong, we could sense that both systems were aligning themselves in order to fulfill a long-term vision that goes further than 2020 or even 2030. There is no doubt about the fact that China & Hong Kong have a long-term plan for their region and citizens. And as per our observations, media & press are important tools that push forward a well-planned agenda on a global scale. Unfortunately, the decreasing differences in the China/Hong-Kong media may have serious effects such as the erosion of critical thinking.

In order to write this article, we went and talked to as many citizens from both sides as we could. In the end, we are relieved to say that many citizens realize certain tactics are being used to manipulate innocent people.

In their opinion especially over the past few months, given all the controversies originating in the West with Donald Trump, Russia and the state of the US media, what’s happening in China is no worse than what’s happening on our side of the world… If China’s aim is to become the most powerful economy in the world, most agree that Hong Kong serves as a gateway to reach its goals by attracting top talent and innovative new ideas from around the world all the while media is being used to push a large-scale marketing campaign to make all this happen.

Tim & Vignesh

Sources:

https://www.isentia.com/hong-kong-eng/insights/insights-services/media-analysis-report?mediaGroup=O

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2141319/public-fears-pressure-beijing-leading-end-press-freedom-hong

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/01/352747590/one-system-two-media-how-china-hong-kong-are-covering-the-protests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_China

http://chinamediaproject.org/

Dear CHIC community,
Wednesday 18 was the last entire day of work we had at x.factory. Every team was under pressure because it was the day to finally show to x.factory what we accomplished in this two weeks !! During this pitch we will finally show them for what we bothered them with our question during two weeks 😉
Some teams were in an advanced stage like Core who had a functional prototype and an app or Flowlin who had a functional prototype too. Others teams were a bit late like Guido. The time flew until the pitches. The presentation room was full with our teams, people working in x.factory and visitors.

Then it started.

This time we saw different people pitching like Siqi, Berk, Marjane or Thomas. They all did well and although some was a bit nervous at the beginning, they all gained confidence and gave their best. As the audience were essentially Chinese people some of them didn’t speak English very well so they had the chance that Siqi is Chinese and she explained her project to them in Chinese.

It was a fun moment although that we didn’t understand a thing. All the projects were awesome and everybody could be proud but it was not the time to relax. The demo time is Thursday, get back to work !!

We would like to thanks one more time the team of x.factory for their help. They were really really nice and helpful. All projects advanced a lot due to their disponibility.

Dear CHIC community,

Yesterday was quite an important day for us, aside from having visited Tencent we also had to finish our prototype.

Clearly having a full working prototype wasn’t realistic. Choices were made, we wanted to have at least a system that could work on battery, have a working (and non crashing) firmware as well as a led matrix fully completed.

While Mehmed and Gabriel went at the x.factory pcb factory to assemble boards I had to deal with memory issues in freeRTOS. Joanne had to mold some silicon, Romain and Vignesh had to do business card and updates on the user manual.

The PCB that had just been received two days ago had never been reviewed by anyone else that Mehmed which made it. Wich means that there was a high risk of a fail somewhere. Nevertheless a board was built. It is only after that that M.Beuchat made an inspection on the schematics and PCB, but had nothing to say against them. A good point.

During that same amount of time I managed to find the cause of our endless hard faults issues that were caused by bad stack size allocation.

At this point I took the freshly assembled PCB and tried to program it. And it worked, from the first time ! We thought that we just broke the primary rule of a PCB maker “the first version will never work”, but even is the system seemed to work properly a hidden mistake suddenly make surface. We use a BGA chip type microcontroller, which means that pads are located under the chip. Because of the high density, some chips pads were directly putted above vias. Vias that we forgot to ask to be filled. And so after tests we realize that almost all of these pins above vias were faulty. We then choosed to re-purpose some of these pads that aren’t above vias to drive our led Matrix. Some wires after the trick was done and worked.

In less than 24 hours we went from nothing to a first non complete but functional prototype.

Hello everybody!

We presented our progress at MS3 about a month ago. Since then, we’ve been working hard trying to deconstruct and implement all the feedback from our supervisors. Here’s a summary of what happened.

Our starting point for this milestone was the following MVP:

Build a device that makes music learning fun for kids.

The only problem now was that none of us in the team were actually good musicians, let alone knew how to teach music! This meant that we had no other choice than to reach out to established music teachers and schools to understand the current ecosystem. Given that we had started collaborating with Espace Musical (a DIP-accredited music school for students up to 16 years old), we did everything we could to be invited back to attend a music theory course. One week later, we were in a classroom with children between 4 and 6 years old and watching them learn. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for opening their doors to our team, we learned a lot and the experience really helped build a foundation on which to build our prototypes!

So…What happened at MS3?

Well, this time at HEPIA, we presented Sonica to our supervisors. A slightly better prototype built after the use case presented at our demo for MS2. While preparing for the third milestone, we really concentrated on developing and presenting an interesting business model, demo & use case. The engineers came up with a cool and functional prototype while the designers focused on 3D printing and researching materials compatible with the tiny hands of kids. A few days before the deadline, we had a meeting to bring everything together. That day, we were able to come up with a pitch showcasing progress from each team and a few slides at the end presenting the prototype.

Demo slide from our MS3 presentation

At the end of our presentation, we realized that our pitch had not really hooked any of the supervisors. The issue was that we were showing off our work rather than the product itself.

The first and most insightful feedback was from Lysianne Léchot Hirt from HEAD:

Less is more! You have too much information and not enough storytelling of the product.

That was true. On the business side, there was too much information to digest on the slides in addition to explanations. Also, the elevator pitch needed to be simplified.

On the technical side, the explanations and diagrams were maybe oversimplified.

On the design side, the supervisors liked what they heard but remarked that our visual presentation needed improvement. We had to really start thinking about the branding, actual interaction and basic sound design for feedback.

All in all, the presentation contained over-whelming details which were not always relevant and cluttered the essence of the device. The key take-away for our team from this third milestone was that verbal communication about the product is as important as what we created visually and physically. Keep it simple, functional and interactive.

With all that to take into consideration, we got to work on the next prototype for the next milestone. That’s it for now!

Stay tuned for our posts about MS4 and other recent developments!

Cheers!

Team IKARE

Hi everyone,
We went yesterday to the Espace Musical. For most of us it was our first introduction to the solfege and rythmic world. This experience made us realise what children does feel when they’re learning music. We learned how to read some notes on a partition, how to play in rhythm and now we’re more than ever ready to move forward and implement some exercises on our prototype.

A+

Hi everyone !
We hope that getting back to school was as much fun for you than it was for us!
This week after MS2, we took a break from CHIC in order to take a step back and digest everything we learned.
These two days of workshops with the teams from other cities were extremely rewarding for us as it enabled us to fully realize the work we’ve done since the start of this adventure! It was a great experience to interact with all the interesting people and discover the ECAL LAB.

Right before the MS2, we were stressed because we had just pivoted from our main idea. It was definite that we were not pursuing the world of festivals.
Since that decision, we had some meaningful interviews about our new idea but we were late in our work and deadlines. During this pas week and week-end, we worked like hell and we made a gigantic leap ahead in our project!
Most of our key learnings came from the different feedback we got from coordinators and other CHIC participants. They were sometimes contradictory but always useful to keep developing our product. Furthermore, we increased our team self-confidence for the following milestones!
Just so your up to date with our team’s product, our MVP at this moment is:
“A product for children that makes music learning playful”

We are all confident in this idea it will be a pleasure to continue this project.
Stay tuned for the next post!
Team Ikare

Today, Thursday 1st February, our team met up to test our prototypes in an objective way. We tested 2 prototypes:

– bones conduction device

– buzzers bracelet

Bones conduction devices brings a new interesting way to hear without hears, sound quality is passable but our main concern is about power consumption, these devices are really power “hungry”.

Buzzers bracelet is interesting, but the main problem with those devices is that you can’t really feel which one is activated.

After multiples talks, we thought that making a break in our current idea may be interesting. So we decided to leave ourselves 4 days (until Monday morning) to find completely new ideas.

We have to say that a lot of us are bored with our current project and so, letting the opportunity to the ones who wanted to bring new ideas to the team would be fair.

If any of the new proposition seems interesting to everyone we may completely change our project and as we are now 2 weeks from the MS2, it really is the last moment if we wanted to change our minds.

Though, our work for our first idea isn’t lost, and if we though those new ideas as being dead ends we rill roll back and present the first idea to the MS2.

Bye !

Hey!

This week, Monday 29th January, Joanne and Romain worked on the questions we had raised the previous week. With this new direction, two prototypes are in the process of being created. Hopefully, we’ll be able to try it this Thursday with the rest of the team.

The two prototypes are:

– a vibrating bracelet thats able to track movement

– earphones that can transmit sound through bone conduction

Additionally, the designers also worked on three designs taking the form of “Festival Goodies” that are able to integrate with our technology and user experience.

To be a little more specific, we are working on a pair of sunglasses, a cap and a scarf/bandana that can transmit sound through bone conduction.

This is definitely an exciting turn of events and we’re very excited !

Stay tuned for more!
Yours truly,

Team Ikare

Hi everybody!

We met up last week on January 25th at the HEAD with the rest of the team. This meeting was definitely a revelation for the team. It allowed us to have an honest conversation about the frustrations each of us was facing at this point of the adventure.

Everything started with one simple but crucial question:

What’s our minimum viable product and what is it composed of?

Why is this question important now? Because, although we’re collecting positive feedback from potential users, deep down, we are wondering if we are heading in the right direction.

Indeed, in terms of user experience, Romain is wondering what should the user should feel when he’s using the product? And what are we really bringing to the users of our product that makes their life easier or better?

On the other side, it seemed that for engineers, there is a real pressure to deliver a technical prototype as fast as possible especially due to their specific milestones fixed by their supervisor. In addition to this, their schedules are really quite tight which doesn’t allow them too much time to play around.

To answer these important questions, Vignesh and Romain tried to figure out for who the product actually creates value.

• Is it more important to solve the problems of the organizer or the ones of the festival participant?
• Is the product we’re creating going to focus more on bringing location data analytics to the organizer or enhancing the festival experience of the participant?

We realized that the research done by the engineers about location tracking technology as well as the hypothesis validations about our customer segments brought forward by Vignesh only allowed us to optimize existing solutions. Although we had found a cool buzzword to use in our blog, “location intelligence”, there was nothing intelligent about our solution at this point in time.

By pursuing the conversation, we understood that we had focused maybe too much on delivering value to the organizer and not enough to the participant who is also the end-user. We had to come to the conclusion that our solution did not fully enhance a festival if the only one benefitting from it was the organizer. We needed to redefine what it meant to actually enhance a festival experience!

This lack of focus on the end-user of the product, meant that their needs in terms of ergonomics, sensorial and overall user experience did not  allow our designers to visualize how the interaction and product design could evolve successfully given the chosen direction.

This is why we have decided that it is now time to experiment and figure out how we can place the festival participant at the center of our product design.

In terms of technological feasibility, we now have a good understanding of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities but what about other technologies which could allow our product to deliver real value to all the stakeholders involved without compromising the needs of a particular group?

The main question now is:

Is there a way to use some of the more obscure technologies such as vibrations to provide navigation information within a festival site? Is there a way to enhance the way we listen to music at live shows?

This coming week, these are the questions that Romain & the engineers will try to answer while Joanne researches which materials are best suited to achieve our goals.

Meanwhile, Vignesh will do his best to reconcile everything that’s going on and develop a clear methodology for our solution interviews.

Stay tuned for more!

Team Ikare

Last time we posted a progress post, we had defined a “world” we wanted to work in and had a blank page in front of us. The engineers were working hard on listing the possible technologies that could be interesting to develop for CHIC, I had started to look into our potential customer segments and developing our value proposition canvas while Romain and Joanne were mapping out personas, journey maps and helping us out our tasks.

A lot has changed since then. So the question is… what’s happened in the past two months?

–        Explore ideas

At the end of ideation weekend, we had defined that we wanted to explore the world of mobility and location-based services and experiences. In order to define a relevant “Value Map”, we needed to focus more on the customer segments present in this ecosystem and really understand their habits.

Thus, we brainstormed and came up with these following ideas from which to develop a product:

• A mobility assistance device for individuals with disabilities using echolocation technology
• Simplest GPS device aimed at pedestrians who don’t like taking out their smartphones every 2 minutes in a busy city
• A device allowing you to “Find your Friends” in large spaces

–        Trial & Error

From there, it was time to set some hypothesis and try to validate them and thus define our direction. Our aim was to see which idea of ours gathered the most traction and interest.

At this point, we didn’t know much of what we were doing but we all knew that we wanted to dedicate our efforts into an exciting device we all could relate to. However, it was also at this point that plenty of issues started to arise as some tended to focus more on the technical feasibility or other details such as price while other focused more on understanding the potential customer.

By making our friends and family go through these trials, we learned a lot about the way people think when confronted with a new way of doing things. Thanks to this, we were able to have very eye-opening conversations about what we were doing, how we wanted to do it as well as the format of the entire CHIC experience.

Indeed, we understood that the overall product development efficiency and effectiveness is going to depend on various processes being well executed. Our actions or tasks which are included in these processes are influenced by the ethical and moral elements that have been selected by each one of us, whether this selection was conscious or not. With the help of our supervisors, we were able to overcome this difficulty. This realization really pushed us to have very honest conversations as a team and start progressing.

–        Sharing with others and defining the main idea

For this phase of the problem exploration, we applied our learnings from the ideation workshop and we all decided to reach out to people in our entourage and start gathering feedback on the three solutions above.

It was imperative for us to do it quickly and efficiently but especially make sure the knowledge was shared between us all. This rapid way of testing our hypothesis allowed us to see which functionalities or features were “very relevant” and which ones were “nice to have”.

By sharing our feedback honestly and getting together to gather all the information on a weekly basis, the idea of a device that allows you to “locate your friends” at events emerged.

Indeed, most individuals we had talked to had experienced issues with mobility or locating themselves, friends and facilities at events. We learnt that there are indisputably worse places to lose your friends than in a large crowd of like-minded people, but for most event participants, sticking with their crew of friends is a very important factor when experiencing arts & music. Additionally, depending on the event, with minimal cell phone service and plenty of ground to cover getting lost is an unfortunate norm of an event experience, but it doesn’t have to be.

This is the main reason why we decided to focus on mobility and providing location-based experience at events for the first Milestone in November.

–        MS1: Problem exploration

This brings us to MS1. It was quite a challenge to transform all the information we had into content that’s useful for our MS1 team presentation. It was also an intense period for all of us in terms of workload at the university or our respective jobs.

The most challenging aspect of this milestone was to present key learnings from interviews in a structured way when most of our interviews were conducted in an informal setting. The second most challenging aspect was to communicate our ambitions as simply as possible. Indeed, things had been changing at such a fast-pace, we weren’t exactly sure what it was that we were doing!

This is why while preparing for the presentation, making sure we were using a common language became even more important. Hence, the week before the presentation, we met several times and put together all the content we had created or collected in a way that satisfied everyone in the team.

–        Feedback from MS1

The main feedback we got from our supervisors, Marc Laperouza & Raphael was to sort through all the information and really find our focus. It seemed that when we pitched our product idea, our overall performance was a little too academic with too much going on. With their feedback, they pushed us to sort through all the information and find out how we can differentiate ourselves from existing solutions.

However, they also encouraged us to keep working hard and practice our pitch presentation several times before a big presentation!

All in all, to make it simple here are the 5 key take-aways from our MS1 presentation:

1. Find your unique selling point
2. Focus on 3 main personas
3. Make sure you have the technical capabilities to see your plans through
4. Make your design as eco-friendly as possible
5. Give your customers the ability to customize the product to a certain extent

–        Report writing & Team Progress

Based on the feedback & resources available on the CHIC platform, we went back to the whiteboard with everything we had learned until now.

By brainstorming some more, we slightly pivoted our focus from a device that can “Find your Friends” at events to creating a device that can provide “location intelligence about audience & participants” for music-festival organizers. However and most importantly, we wanted the end-user of the product to be the event or festival participant.

This is when we asked ourselves… Do we start all over again with a fresh idea? Or… Do we find a way to reconcile our valuable learnings before and after our pivot to create a meaningful product that enhances an individual’s festival experience?

We actually voted on this and decided to go with the second choice. That’s how Team Ikare decided to officially start creating technology for festivals.

With a very short timeframe meet our deadlines, we got to work trying to understand the events management & festival industry, the rate at which the industry is adopting new technologies and more. From there, we mapped out our future potential customers and focused on understanding what were their jobs, pains & gains when it came to organizing an event for thousands of participants. Additionally, we asked ourselves, how do participants value certain elements or factors during an event or festival?

To reach our objectives, we realized that we needed to work more efficiently and conduct even more interviews. And this time around, it needed to be done in a well-structured way from the start.

At this point of the adventure, which was right before Christmas, it was a real challenge to continue meeting regularly but we managed to keep everyone in the loop whether it was through Skype, Slack or even short recap sessions around a quick coffee.

Once we handed-in our MS1 report, we decided to take a short break in order to be able to focus on our respective exams and end-of-semester projects. This break allowed us to take a step back and try to understand the “bigger picture” at an individual level, but it also allowed us to understand each other better going forward.

–        What’s next?

Now that we are all back and focused on MS2 with an interesting idea/product to develop, we are going to start by reviewing the way we create our blog posts so that we can share our adventure with you more regularly and in a more meaningful way.

The next thing on our checklist is to reach out to festival organizers & participants and start with the solution interviews. We still have some hypothesis to validate as well as update our test methodology but what we already know has allowed both the engineers and the designers to explore solutions and start prototyping.

That’s it for now! To recap, we’re now getting ready for MS2 in mid-February and conducting our solution interviews.

Stay tuned for more updates shortly!

Yours truly,

Team Ikare

Having graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts et Design of Amiens with a degree in DNA Design Graphique, I have now joined a Masters in Media Design at the Haute Ecole d’Arts et Design of Geneva.

In practice, I’m passionate about exploring the new relations between the physical and cognitive aspects between humans and products. I also follow new artistic and musical movements that originate from the age of Internet.

My role in team Ikare is to create the user experience, however, I’m also interested in involving myself with some of the more technical aspects surrounding our product. Indeed, I believe it’s my duty to include the concepts of Ethical & Sustainable Design in the product development process.

The idea of uniting engineering, design and business has convinced me to take part of this new edition of the CHIC program.

See you around!

Hi everyone, I’m Mehmed Blazevic and I’m from Bosnia, but I was born here, in Geneva. I’ve always liked technology and especially computer science. When I finished mandatory school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future. I discovered electronics science by chance at school. I was amazed watching those « things » moving, lighting or doing something it can interact with human. It was very interesting and I knew at that time that I will like working in technology. I’ve always been interested by science, so for me it’s always been clear that I’ll work on a scientific speciality. Now, in my last year at HEPIA, I want to work on interesting projects and CHIC is one of them. This project is very interesting and working with a great team is motivating to me. I like the point of view of a business-guy and especially from the artists guys. As an (future) engineer, I’ve always wanted to solve a problem by doing something like code or electronics schematic the most efficient way. It’s a form of art, because it has to be the most beautiful/effective way to produce something. For me the designers have the same problem. They want a beautiful product, simple to use and the most ergonomic for the consumer. I think that we have a lot to share with each other. Our team is a great team, and we’re improving each other.

My life started the 9’th May 1996 in Geneva when my parents gave me the name Gabriel Da Silva Marques. With a name like that of course my origin is not from Switzerland, I’m Portuguese on the paper but, inside, I feel like a true Swiss guy because all my life is here.
So, as a Swiss guy I study in this beautiful country. I’m already in possession of a computer scientist CFC with a Matu pro that I got in CFPTI 4 Years ago (time flies). When I got this diploma the only thing I was thinking of was to study more, learn the maximum I could. That’s why I started the bridge to enter EPFL but my level in mathematics wasn’t good enough so I sadly didn’t finish the year well. This misadventure explain why I’m at Hepia now in the last year of a bachelor in information technology engineering.
Today, I’m a proud member of Ikare team. My role, like Mehmed and Pierre, is to engineer our product. Make it possible and real by looking for technologies and combine them to build our final device.
I think CHIC is a great opportunity for me to improve myself. For first, my English will become much better (I hope), then, it is always a good experience to work with people that aren’t from our domain. This open our mind and make us understand all the point of views during a project creation. The main point of this project is that we are allowed to make mistakes now that we won’t do later in a future start-up. Of course, meeting new people is the best part of this project 😊.
There is not only CHIC that improves me, I think that my presence there is a plus for everyone, I’m motivated and enthusiast with this project, that, I think, can push every one of the team to give our best.

Do you like cats ? There’s so many people on this earth who like them. And I still don’t understand why, and what’s even worse is the fact that I’m not alone in that situation. Although I’m not especially a cat lover I have the same undescriptible feeling for technologie. I’m more a tech guy, passionated for news things, gadgets, technologies and others things like that.
As you maybe know my name is Pierre Buffo, born in switzerland, raised in switzerland, I discovered in myself a passion for computers and everything around very young. I’m now 22 years old and in last year from a bachelor at HEPIA Geneva in IT, participating in the CHIC 2018 I’m very grateful to the persons organising this event who will allow me to produce something from a to z.
But being in IT was, in some sort, my destiny, having a father and a grandpa working in the same domain it was natural for me having that same passion. I was born along the internet era, and I feel very lucky about that. Internet and networks brought a lot of new things to our world, and a lot of new horizons for persons like me, connected devices are everywhere, IA becomes more and more powerful, etc…
Aside that I’m a Japanese culture lover, a train enthusiast, an amateur photograph, a data recovery specialist and a motorbike rider, I like building things with my hand and always push my team to go even further.
Being a part of this chic edition will allow me to bring life to a device who will help many people in their life (or at least I hope so). As an engineer my role is to create an electronic circuits and coding things. Building something real is my motivation for this project, and because of that I will put all my effort into making our idea a concrete reality.
In the meantime I’m hoping to discover new things, especially from the other parts of our team (designer and business), you know, when I think to this whole chic concept I find pretty amazing giving to students the ability to create something real within a controlled environment. I know perfectly that what we’re trying to create won’t be perfect, but in some ways, that is perfectly normal, you can’t create somethings perfect from the first time without any background. The whole thing is to learn from your mistakes. And this project is about to create us, I hope, lots of nightmares, ’cause otherwise it would mean that having a full team of qualified teachers is a waste of time (and money) and that we did already know everything.

Learning is fun !

Born the 1rst of june 1995, I grew up in switzerland. I am a mountain and lake lover. I love cats, dive in deep water, nature and animals. For now, I am in the second year of my bachelor in Design of products, jewellery and accessories at the HEAD – Geneva ( High School of Art and Design). This formation is something that can bring me everywhere ! I can use so much material, create as many things, objects, as my brain want to create and the only limit is my imagination. Having the possibility of inventing things with my hand or with the help of computer or machines is something I have always wanted. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always built my own doll houses or dress for them and lot of stuff like this. Apart from school, the photography and drowing are some of many activities I like to do form time to time.

During my school journey, I get through terrible ordeals like decease and disappointments but I’m here, going forward and giving the best of me to show I am capable.

From the start of CHIC adventure, I knew i twill be interesting. Our team is great, people in it are intelligent and funny, we all know when we can make jokes and when we have to be serious. I decided to take part of CHIC adventure because it is like a test for me. A test to see how far I can go with my imagination and create something with other people, a test to learn how to work in team wich has other disciplines than design. It is the first big project that is conreat and does not only go from the idea to a drawing or a scale model. In team, we have to help each other to make this happening and work. Of course we may have some disagreement but I know we will get over them and have a successful project.

Being in CHIC team is also a good thing beacause I met great people and I can learn of what they are doing and give them what I know in return. It is a pleasure to be part of that and I am excited to see what i twill be in the end !

We are team Ikare!

Joanne & Romain from the Haute Ecole d’Arts et Design, Pierre, Mehmed & Gabriel from the Haute Ecole du Paysage, d’Ingénierie et d’Architecture and Vignesh from the Haute Ecole de Gestion.

As far as new beginnings go, being part of the 5th edition of the China Hardware Innovation Camp is probably going to be one of the most fun, ambitious and challenging aspects of our education. The CHIC initiative curated by EPFL gives all participating teams the opportunity to start from a blank page and create an IoT product that we will develop over the next 9 months.

Our team, based in Geneva, met for the first time last weekend where we met our supervisors and the program directors. We barely knew each other but had to learn how to work together quickly in order to get the most out of the fast-paced workshops and find our team’s purpose. The learning curve was steep but we learned a lot from each other and got to see what it’s like to think like a designer, how to build prototypes like an engineer and to pitch like an entrepreneur. The different exercises allowed us to narrow our focus on two main “universes” in which our product would be created:

– Mobility and location-based services

– Emergency Response

Limiting our ideas to ones within these two topics allowed us to have deeper conversations about the value we are trying to create, the problems we would like to solve and the technological feasibility of each idea. It allowed us to get a glimpse into how each member thinks and the reasons why he or she joined this program.

Finally, after some encouraging last words from the supervisors, we were really starting to feel like a team! Then, we finally went home to let all of this sink in.

Two days later, on Tuesday, we met up for our first official meeting. We debated and got lost in details more times than we’d like to admit but we also worked towards establishing a common language between us and managing our expectations. Let’s be honest, finding common ground requires a few compromises but we have managed to define a clear idea towards which each of us could start doing some research. The other outcome of our meeting was realizing that we needed to manage our time efficiently until our next milestone. As we’re all working on multiple different projects, this means that learning how to organize our efforts is going to be critical to our team’s success! Also, we learned about our own personal weaknesses. Weaknesses that we will hopefully turn into strengths by the time we get back from the last stage of this program in China!

So what’s going on right now?

The engineers are working hard on listing the possible technologies that could be interesting to develop, Romain and Joanne are mapping the user experience and creating a few mock-ups while I’m trying to profile potential customer personas. We’ll be meeting again this weekend to see the progress we have made and help each other get better at our jobs.

It’s barely been a week but it’s undeniable that the learning experience has been amazingly rich. For this, we’d especially like to thank our supervisors who were crucial in catalyzing the team and developing our ideas.

And that’s about it for this week… We’re super excited to have started this adventure and hope you’ll enjoy following us on this journey!  We also want to take this opportunity to wish good luck to all the other CHIC teams! The Geneva team is looking forward to meeting you!

We’ll be back soon with more updates so stay tuned!