Philipp Hemkemeyer

Overview

📌 Further links

👨🏼‍💻 Personal Contribution

In a big group of 8 people I was responsible for keeping track of the group’s overall progress in the project. One important task for me was that we follow the Design Thinking process as taught by the d.school of Stanford. Being close to the process we could even create three (digital - due to the pandemic) prototypes in Autodesk 360 to choose the best one for our final presentation.

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📼 Submission video

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Detailed information

🖌️ Design Process

Our challenge was to create the logistics of the collected biomass in the forest to bring it to the carburizing furnace. As specified by the program and challenge team we followed the Stanford d.school Design Thinking process.

Design Thinking (source Stanford d.school)

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🔍 Empathize/Research

To empathize with the challenge we divided our research session into four different sections. Starting with the environment we figured out the Nepalese forest structure based on the information material provided by the challenge team and general information from the internet.

Collection about aspects of the environment in Nepal

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Secondly, we did some research on the humans who live in Nepal and how they live there. We learned about the average age of the workers as well as what their main job are.

Ideas and facts about the humans that live and work in Nepalese forests

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The third step in the research part of our work was to find out more about the material the people are working with. Mostly it was biomass (like sticks, twigs, branches, leaves, undergrowth, ...) that is not easy to handle for them.

Information collection about the materials that are collected in the forest

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In the last part of our research we collected all constraints such as prices for the planned transportation materials or the weather in Nepal.

Constraints (prices, time, max payload of workers, weather, …)

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🎯 Define

After the research had been done and we had been able to empathize with the topic, we could define our concrete problem which can be seen in the statement below:

Definition of our problem we want to solve

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💡 Ideate

Then we started to brainstorm a lot of ideas. The four main ones we voted on to develop further were the following: (1) The sphere, which can be opened to put biomass inside and the roll it downhill without any additional human force. (2) Then we had the stretcher which is similar to the one used for the ambulance but for biomass transportation. (3) A cable car which should use the incline of the hill to carry the biomass. (4) And lastly, the load carrier which is a backpack-like transportation system that can stand on the ground without any additional support.

Ideation board with voting points on different ideas (in the middle the defined problem statement)

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🔨 Prototype

In the prototyping phase we brainstormed all four main ideas.

Brainstorming and idea collection of the sphere (1)

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Brainstorming and sketches of the stretcher (2)

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Sketches and ideas of the cable car system (3)

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The final prototype - the load carrier (4)

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🧪 Testing

We decided on our top three concepts and designed them in Autodesk Fusion 360 to test them as digital prototypes. Our final solution which we submitted to the committee was the load carrier.

As the project was held during full-lockdown in late 2020/early 2021 everything was done online. Hence we could not use the 3d printer of our university nor the milling machine to develop a real working 1:1 scale prototype.