If you are a student interested in design, look no further than the Multidisciplinary Design program, or MDD, which is part of the College of Architecture and Planning. They teach every aspect of design, and every year, juniors and seniors get to develop real products around a theme. The 2016-17 theme was “adaptive future.” “The impact all designers seek happens at the intersection of design resolution and entrepreneurship,” said Cord Bowen, the director of this program. Here’s a look at some of the projects from fall 2016:
Fish Wasatch
Bryson Benton’s project is called Fish Wasatch and is a hyper-local fishing app for the Wasatch Mountain Range. He designed this app with the key points in mind: guide, learn and share. The corresponding features of the app are downloading maps for offline accessibility, teach users how and what to catch, and sharing this with your friends via a built-in social network.
Resistive Exercise Device
Gray Turner’s project is called WRED, which stands for wearable resistive exercise device. It’s designed to combat muscular atrophy and bone mineral density in astronauts. Most astronaut exercise devices are extremely large and bulky, so WRED has the advantage of being smaller and more streamlined. It consists of a resistance harness that has various attachments like a foot strap.
Webstance
Sara Ference began her project by asking herself, “How will artificial intelligence learn what we value?” She sought to provide a solution for this question, so she designed an application called Webstance. It captures all of a user’s data to catalog their online behavior, motivating users to better their online behavior. Her hope is that when artificial intelligence uses the Internet to learn about human values, it will find good things.
Safe & Comfy Fishing Gear
After three seasons of working on a commercial fishing vessel in Kodiak, Alaska, Sam Tresco designed a suit that offers the fishermen unprecedented levels of safety and comfort. He aims for this suit to become the future of commercial fishing rain gear.
More articles like this in ‘Student Innovation @ the U!’
Find this article and a lot more in the 2017 “Student Innovation @ the U” report. The publication is presented by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute to celebrate student innovators, change-makers and entrepreneurs.
