During five days in late September, fifty master students from Aalto (Helsinki), KTH Stockholm), TU Berlin, Budapest and 3TU were in Eindhoven for the second week of the summer school on Health and Wellbeing. The first week took place a few weeks earlier in Vierumäki (near Lahti) in Finland and was focused on questions how ICT could foster a more healthy lifestyle. During that week the students worked in small project groups on new products and business models. During the second week they were elaborating their concepts from a user perspective point of view, and turning the ideas into real business propositions.
The aim of the summer school is to exercise entrepreneurial skills within the context of a larger thematic area (such as health and wellbeing) and to engage the students with industrial partners. In this case Philips was the host and students spent a day at the premises of the User Experience Lab of Philips at the HighTech Campus in Eindhoven.
The programme consisted of two activities: “focus group” discussions, where senior Philips staff discussed the concepts of the designs (mostly web applications) on basis of claims, specified by the students. The exercise here is not to defend the design put to hear the suggestions and comments from the independent experts.
The second exercise was to test the design on usability aspects, to see whether the interface is intuitive and complete. Young trainees from Philips were acting as users performing “use scenarios” on a paper interface that was “operated” by one of the students. Both the interaction with the Philips staff as well as the visits and demo’s from the Philips Lab were very well appreciated.
Later that week senior staff from Philips were also present by the final “pitching” of the groups for a business panel. The winning project was a design for a “jogether” website where joggers could meet for running together and taking up new challenges.
This summer school was a first pilot towards a regular summer school programme for the upcoming EIT masters. The first day, the students were welcomed by Willem Jonker, the CEO of the EIT ICT Labs, and the last day the students were said goodbye at the KIC co-location (also at the HighTech Campus) where node-director Patrick Strating instructed the students to use the co-location in the coming years as their “homes” and entry points to the KIC network. The whole summer school organized by Krista Lagus and Erik Jansen, and was highly rated by the students.
See more on www.cis.hut.fi/wicamp/
