IDEO CoLab…

… is a branch of IDEO for creating new projects using IoT for community good! Because I love that IDEO is all about human centered design, I applied to be a part of CoLab’s Makeathon in San Francisco. I was overjoyed to find out that I had been accepted and made my way to SF to partake in one of the most fun one-day builds I’ve had!

We were assigned into teams based on our information from our applications and so it was incredibly interesting to make new friends while learning about everyone’s backgrounds and skills.

Joe, materials engineer and tech ventures

Kritika, digital product designer

Stephanie, UX designer

…and me: the mechanical engineer and prototyper!

Our prompt was to create something that would use IoT to create more collaborative cities. Something that would help and foster a sense of community while innovating on a unmet need. After brainstorming, we decided on a community EV Car Charging station that would encourage neighbors to help each other through the usage of an automated moving charger.

My role was being involved with the ideation, paper prototyping, and pitching! I did all the presentation for the physical items and Kritika was our designer wizard for our prototype app!

Ideation Session

We had all ranges of ideas from food waste sharing among residential and commercial operations to electrical vehicle (EV) spot sharing in city environments, and even pay on demand energy grid systems with local solar installations. After pitching our initial ideas, the IDEO CoLab team helped us lock in and more deeply define the community car charging idea. We needed a working prototype in less than 6 hours, so we raced to get it as done as possible enough to pitch and present!

Our Idea

EV charging stations are expensive, they are static, and sharing becomes difficult due to the need to move parked cars (nobody is waking up at 2 am to move their car or leaving work in the middle of the day). Could we set up a system for neighbors to collaborate moving vehicles? Maybe we could automate this move? Could we create a sharing platform based on time of day and priority? What about shared EV vehicles themselves?

What if we created a shared, moveable EV charger?

A community owned, moveable EV charger (similar to a Roomba but the size of a Tesla power wall) that can dock to small IoT ‘tower converters’. Spot owners can purchase just the IoT ‘tower converter’ to join the community for their respective parking spaces.

Additionally, a platform that allows the community to book, interact, and communicate charging for everyone’s EV. This system includes an incentive system with ‘carma’ points that will translate to discounts on your electrical costs.

Prototype Function

The app shows the process of finding a time slot to charge under tight time constraints. Even if there is no slot available at the time, the system allows users to reach out to the community to ask for help. If the community individual chooses to help, the helping individual is gifted with value (shown as ‘carma’ points). This whole procedure can occur while all participants are away from their car.

Additional points discussed were:

• Ability for the system to realize full charge overnight and move to another EV automatically

• Optimize charging of multiple parked EVs

• Ability to set priorities, e.g. I am not driving this weekend so my charging priority is low

• Automate responses, e.g. if someone asks for help and my car is over 80% charge then automatically let them take charger

I worked with Joe to put in a simple proximity sensor in our paper build that would communicate with our arduino to trigger example notification popups in our app that Kritika and Stephanie created within only 4 hours!

We finished with 10 minutes to spare and had such an incredible time presenting/pitching our project. Our prototype worked seamlessly (thankfully) and truly felt like a viable product that we created only in a few hours.

There were so many other fun moments from that day: