AUGUST 25 2020

The Columbia Community came together this summer to address challenges posed by climate change, COVID-19 and transit safety. The goal of these challenges was to produce a viable design concept to win continued support toward the development of an interdisciplinary technology-driven solution.

Hear From Our Students

COVID-19 and Safer Medical Care Challenge

COVID-19 has drastically impacted how healthcare workers can safely interact with patients and effectively operate healthcare facilities. This has led to a clear need for this design endeavor – making medical care safer. 50 plus Columbia students split among 11 teams took this challenge head on. A mix of undergraduate and graduate students, coming from across various different disciplines and backgrounds, worked hard to identify specific problems to tackle within the COVID-19 healthcare world.

Students were able to effectively reach out to users, ideate based on their needs, and develop prototypes, all over Zoom. Teams worked with doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, and even manufacturers to investigate needs and get feedback on their solutions. Through the challenge, a variety of medical care products/processes were covered. The teams developed solutions to address issues such as ensuring safety for patients going to the dentist, assessing respirator fit/seal, sterilizing PPE for reuse, and helping pregnant mothers through the pregnancy and delivery process during pandemic times.

The students were diligent, resourceful, and in the end presented some amazing solutions that could impact the lives of both patients and healthcare workers. Between CAD designs and physical prototypes, the teams made great strides in actually producing technology that could help make medical care safer in the COVID-19 world. Many of them plan to continue working on their solutions; it will be exciting to see their efforts translate into impactful medical technologies. 

Chirag Sachar, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University

COVID-19 and Reducing Inequity Challenge 

The Reducing Inequity challenge was a four-week endeavor that 7 teams embarked on in hopes of finding innovative, actionable solutions to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Teams were spread across 8 time zones and collaborated through Zoom in order to tackle issues from NYC, Central Ohio, South America, and India! Areas that students explored for the challenge included ways to reduce education inequity, food insecurity, and menstrual inequity. Through their hard work, teams came up with solutions that ranged from physical prototypes of menstrual pads to protocol designs to increase volunteers for local food banks.

Throughout the four weeks, teams fully applied themselves to the problems they were solving and embraced the design process. By putting the user first, teams were able to understand the problem at hand on a complex level and create solutions that we were very impressed by.

Trang T Nguyen, B.S. Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Columbia University

COVID-19 and Social Interactions Challenge 

The goal of this challenge is to design a product or service to enable more natural social interactions in a world shaped by COVID-19. Over 50 students, split into 13 teams, are collaborating remotely to work on solutions that are purely digital, physical, or the combination of the two. These solutions include virtual dining, student mentorship community on Discord, self-cleaning subway systems, online study group forming, and many more. 

All teams are encouraged to follow the design process which includes defining a problem, gathering information from key stakeholders, brainstorming ideas, developing prototypes and getting feedback, then using feedback to improve the solution. The teams have been utilizing weekly presentation sessions to get feedback on their projects while learning new concepts and approaches through lectures from faculty advisors on Human-Centered Design, ideation, prototyping, and more.  Many teams have also taken advantage of office hours offered by faculty advisors and TA’s to further refine and get guidance on their projects. 

It has been exciting to see the progress that the teams are making and to see that many teams were able to pivot their ideas to something that is more useful and impactful to their end-users. I look forward to seeing some of these ideas actually be implemented for the coming academic year, knowing that these ideas could actually help many students and others during these unprecedented times. 

Masaki Takamatsu, M.S. Management Science and Engineering, Columbia University

July 2, 2020

Climate Change Mitigation Challenge

In our challenge we are trying to mitigate greenhouse gases through the use of energy storage devices.  Sixty students are collaborating to find unique applications for batteries and alternative storage devices to store clean energy for use at any time.  They’re exploring applications from hospitals and ports, to food trucks and freight trucks.  Each of them are looking to use market forces to drive energy innovation that will reduce our carbon footprint.

The participating students are remotely collaborating to discuss the feasibility of the energy and power technologies.  They’ve utilized zoom and google drive to share documents and solutions with one another across time zones.  They initially found groups by meeting virtually through zoom meetings and finding common interests in tackling this challenge.  When they have put a digital pen to paper to work out the numbers they have found both success and failure, but they’ve continued to refine and redefine their projects.  We’re excited to see their final projects in the coming weeks.

Brent La Muro, M.S. Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University

Vaccine Design Challenge

In our design challenge, we have 16 teams participating with just under 60 students total. We’ve seen many different ideas addressing the scale-up and access of vaccine manufacturing, relevant to questions and problems posed by organizations like GAVI (The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations), the CDC, and vaccine manufacturers. Proposed solutions to the design challenge range from web apps to address distribution concerns to modified packaging for verifying or maintaining stability of vaccines all the way to novel vaccine delivery methods that could be easier, cheaper, and faster to produce than the current standard.

Hearing these ideas each week has been exciting as they evolve and gain momentum through guidance from our faculty team and outside sources. Beyond our presentation sessions, we have a Slack channel where external, industry experts contribute through anecdotes and advice from their professional experience and current articles about vaccine manufacturing and COVID-19 vaccine developments are shared. Additionally, office hours serve as a supplementary space for students to dive deeper into Q&A with the professor team. We had a human-centered design workshop with Katie Reuther from the Biomedical Engineering department and are looking forward to our next Q&A with Zvi Loewy, a professor at Tuoro College of Pharmacy, on vaccines and epidemics.

It’s been simultaneously exciting and daunting to be involved in such a relevant challenge with such a wide variety of proposals, each addressing a different facet of vaccine manufacturing and distribution that have remained unchanged and unchallenged for a long time. New questions and thoughtful answers – this challenge is educating us all.

Sydney Jones, Chemical Engineering ’21, Columbia University

Transit Safety Post-COVID-19

The Transit Summer Design Challenge was launched on June 17^th. With 100 participants, nearly 20 teams are formed. Last week, the transportation expert, Mysore Nagaraja, gave a great lecture introducing the useful source in transit research. And Ivy Schultz, director of the Columbia Engineering Entrepreneurship, presented how a good design comes out.

Each team will develop an app to ease the current transit problems rising since the Covid-19. Due to the broadness of the Transit research, different teams will select different topic, from subway operation to bus re-scheduling, and give a comprehensive study on the transportation under the Covid-19.

Zhenyu Shou, Ph.D. candidate, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University

Zhaobin Mo, Ph.D. student, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University