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BASE

From Smart Facilities to Smart Regions

Project information

ProjectBASE – From Smart Facilities to Smart Regions
Implementation time01.03.2022 – 31.01.2025
ToteuttajatHAMK Design Factory
FundingATTRACT, Horizon 2020

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004462
Total budget240 000€

The BASE program aims to create desirable solutions for smart technologies and smart environments. The users’ needs and possibilities of the technologies are built to fit real-life situations and provide sustainable benefit.

The program projects exploit the results from prior iterations, both from the technological and user understanding point of view. Partners of the program are Aalto Design Factory, Hochschule Mannheim, and HAMK University of Applied Sciences. All partners are part of the Design Factory Global network, share their user centered innovation approaches, incorporate interdisciplinary team collaboration, and provide  rich “making” facilities to support the prototyping process for solutions.

The innovation methods used in the course encourage the autonomous decision-making of the students and enhance the collaboration between different stakeholders when creating new proof-of-concept models. Students use design methods to empathize with real users and take these findings as inspiration to come up with meaningful and desirable product ideas based on the provided ATTRACT technologies and their regional context. The design decisions of their product concepts are rationalized by their findings on the context and environment and backed by user testing through several iterative cycles.

The combined result of the course is a mapping between smart technologies and smart, sustainable environments. It exemplifies by the provided solutions, how smart technologies as provided in ATTRACT can be used to improve the lives of people without harming our planet.

Implementation

Course #1

International Product Development Project (iPdP) Is the joint collaborative and interdisciplinary course of HAMK Design Factory and Inno.Space – Design Factory Mannheim. The joint program is built for master students from various areas and a course where bachelor-level students can opt to join. The course aims to create high feasibility prototypes with new technologies for customer cases brought from sponsor companies and NGOs. Learning methods are flipped learning, design thinking, and phenomena-based learning. Students also have mentors from each of the universities taking part in the course.

Course #2

International Product Development Project (iPdP) Is the joint collaborative and interdisciplinary course of HAMK Design Factory and Inno.Space – Design Factory Mannheim. The joint program is built for master students from various areas and a course where bachelor-level students can opt to join. The course aims to create high feasibility prototypes with new technologies for customer cases brought from sponsor companies and NGOs. Learning methods are flipped learning, design thinking, and phenomena-based learning. Students also have mentors from each of the universities taking part in the course. Additionally, Aalto Design Factory students are joining the iPDP course #2.

Course #3

Product Development Project (PdP) is the most comprehensive product design course organised at Aalto Design Factory and one of the most significant project-based courses at Aalto University. It is aimed at master students in technology (ENG, ELEC & SCI), business (BIZ), design (ARTS) and is suitable for other master studies too. This course is about sharing the passion for doing and doing it together. It is focused on cooperation between highly motivated interdisciplinary teams of students, industry, and the university that work together to solve real problems.