2021

Innovation Project 2021

In Homeoffice - for Homeoffice (Kiran Kuruvithadam, Nicola Steffen)

Many of us are forced to work remotely from home because of the current COVID19-related restrictions. Our Mechanical Engineering bachelor students tackle the typical problems and issues of the classic homeoffice lifestyle with innovative hardware-based solutions. To this end, students work in teams and run through the entire product development process.

The Innovation Project 21 is the second instance of an Innovation Project taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year’s learnings allowed pd|z to organize once more a hands-on seminar that allows the students to apply product development methods and develop manufacturing skills, whilst still respecting hygienic and social distancing rules.

The challenge 2021

As every year, the pd|z team came together to formulate a story-driven assignment. While in the last years these relied on imaginary scenarios, the current pandemic situation served the best context for an open engineering task to tackle, namely designing and manufacturing a product that can address the inconvenience and boredom of the homeoffice lifestyle.

Given the open nature of the task at hand, not only the development of the system but also the need- and conceptfinding themselves become important challenges. Teamwork plays an important part and the distribution of the roles amongst team members is vital in a setting where physical meetings and interactions are severely limited. Additionally, all manufacturing happens remotely, in that students can upload their designs and collect the finished parts afterwards in order to minimize physical contact.
The precautions taken are necessary to guarantee the safe continuation of the project and have the benefit of preparing our future engineers to a remote team working environment.

Agile Development and pd|z Principles

The Innovation Project follows the idea of agile development. Integrating elements from Scrum and Kanban into their work, the teams work in biweekly sprint cycles at the end of which they present their interim-results.

Senior mechanical engineering students are specifically trained and act as coaches for the Innovation Project teams. With the help of the pd|z principles for product development, the coaches guide the students through the sprints and iterations of the agile product development process. Behind these principles lie several carefully selected practices for the progress of the teams in their creative development processes, elaborated through research by the pd|z.

The Challenge and Awards

To prove the viability of their product, teams will show the performance of their system in a short video. A voting system then decides the finalists, which then will compete in the Final on the 31st of May from 17:00 to 18:00 in a final public livestream against each other.

Based on the performance in the final and the feasibility rating of a jury, the winning systems will be chosen to be produced and sold as a limited edition in the ETH store. In order to be ready to convince the jury and potential future customers, the teams will develop a small promotional campaign in the style of a crowdfunding project.