Extra curricular B2.2
ID Colloquium 15-5-2009
Competencies developed:
A & C
Reflection:
As mentioned in the competency coach feedback, I have been asked to present our concept from the Rhythm of Life 2.0 project on the ID colloquium of 15 May. I presented our concept a few times before during some open days for deans. However the presentation for the colloquium required more preparation.
Overall seen, this presentation gave me more confidence to present and gave my professional conduct a big boost. I’m not afraid to present towards a few coaches and fellow-students, but presenting to a room full of professors, engineers and coaches is not what I do every day.
Comparable with the other colloquium presentations, I saw that it is important to keep it very superficial including a lot of illustrations and visuals. The audience is simply not interested in text and data; they just want to see results in an easy way. I decided to use visual representations to show statistical outcome of our research, which is better to understand for the audience than using numbers only. I also became aware that it is useful to include short movies of the final concept, which makes it even easier to tell my story towards the audience. In the end it gave me as a student a big boost when a few professors complemented me with my presentation. You can see our presentation here.
After the assessment I will be working on writing a scientific paper of this concept together with dr. W. (Wei) Chen. Hopefully this paper will be published in the future.
Dement-watch
Competencies developed:
5, A
Reflection:
I the past got the chance to present our ‘Reminder Bracelet‘-concept outside the University. Some outsiders got interested in this concept and contacted me in order to collaborate. Until now we met a few times and we are currently in the ‘concept development’ and juridical phase.
Until now I learned it is vital to make use of real users and knowledge-groups (klankbordgroep). They can provide useful feedback about practical issues I’m not aware of. By making presentations for them, it is important to focus on their benefits and to use graphics and drawings to support my idea. However I should also take in mind that I should gather practical feedback. Therefore it is important to sum up a list of critical questions in advance.
I also learned that it is better to focus on a simple concrete solution, rather than implementing too much features in the design. Especially to convince business partners it is important to focus on the main issue of the concept. When I present a vague concept it is very like that they lost their confidence in the concept due to a jungle of unnecessary features. Furthermore I became aware it is important to include common benefits (for the society for instance) when presenting a concept to business partners. I got the intention companies don’t care about the product itself, but they care about the profit and the money. Therefore I have to do extended research about what common costs this concept might save (e.g. when designing a product which prevents elderly from falling, how much costs will be saved for the doctors and insurance companies). Of course I need reliable resources for this.
During the summer-holiday I’m going to work at Wingz embedded systems, located on the High Tech Campus Eindhoven. They offered me a job to work this concept out into a real product, using their services.
Industrial Design Company Phunge
Together with my roommates (all studying Industrial Design at different grades) we are currently busy to start our own (industrial) design company. Saving you the prior story we called Phunge. Until now I don’t have any concrete learning points, but it made me more enthusiastic as becoming an Industrial Designer. For us this is a unique possibility to apply the knowledge we gathered so far into practice. Due to our different expertise’s we can fulfill each other in order to design in a professional way.