The German part of the international organization Engineers without Borders arranges challenges for students to come up with ideas and prototypes for local problems in developing countries. In the 2020/2021 challenge we as a team developed new ways of transporting biomass in the country of Nepal. We followed the Design Thinking process to gather and analyze ideas in order to present them to the committee.
- Annika Skwarr
- Till Grutschus
- Timm Wilken
- Christoph Schramm
- Hannes Vollbrecht
- Torge Heerwagen
- Lukas Dech
- Autodesk Fusion 360
- Premiere Pro
- Prezi
- Nordakademie English Article
- Engineers without Borders challenge
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the last part of our research we collected all constraints such as prices for the planned transportation materials or the weather in Nepal.
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:
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.
In the prototyping phase we brainstormed all four main ideas.
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.
