BASE is a program that aims to create desirable solutions for smart technologies and smart environments by exploiting the results from prior iterations, both from the technological and user understanding point of view.
This program is aimed at students from Aalto Design Factory, Häme University of Applied Sciences, and Hochschule Mannheim, who use design methods to empathize with real users and take these findings as inspiration to come up with meaningful and desirable product ideas based on the provided ATTRACT technologies and their regional context.
The university partners, which are part of the Design Factory Global network, share their user-centred innovation approaches, incorporate interdisciplinary team collaboration, and provide rich “making” facilities to support the prototyping process for solutions.
Get to know more about the BASE program through this interview with a teacher and a student that participated in the first round of this program:
Manuel Walter
Inno.space Prototyping and Innovation Coach.
Which university and courses are part of your consortium and what brings you all together?
We are all part of the Design Factory global network, and our partners have the same spirit, so they teach the same things like design thinking or human-centred design. Now we start to build some planet-centred design thinking methods. And we have in common that we all run this course together, and students from Finland, for example, and students from Germany are working closely together in mixed teams.
How do you think society will benefit from this project?
I think it’s a really good way we are teaching these courses that students that are really unbiased come together with these innovative and absolutely new business start-ups like we had in the last semester with the ECSENS company from The Netherlands who developed a method to detect antibodies in bioliquids. And our students came to fantastic ideas about how we can bring this technology into our daily life.
How do you envision participating in this project will contribute to your personal and professional development?
I really much like the idea of helping innovators and start-ups to grow and to spread their idea. Maybe I’ll become an entrepreneur as well one time, but first of all, I like to help these start-ups to get good students or students to learn how to build a start-up, how to create a start-up, how to run or how to develop big ideas.
Milla Räty
Mechanical Engineering student at Häme University of Applied Sciences
How do you find working with the R&D&I projects?
Our team didn’t really innovate as much as we could have, but when we started to look upon these projects our minds were blown away by all the possibilities that we could have done. So, we really enjoyed getting to know these different projects.
How do you think society will benefit from this project?
We did answer the question of how to reduce food waste. So, we came up with this idea of food lockers, and if this idea could be further developed and teams up with these ATTRACT solutions, it really would make a difference.
How do you envision participating in this project will contribute to your personal and professional development?
I like collaborative working internationally, and I have spoken on behalf of getting more women involved in the STEM field. So being part of this international product development project, really gave me a new perspective on what to do in the future. So, it opened up so many possibilities.
For more information:
Visit the BASE program site.
