Smart Russell: First Build Hackathon
It’s a universal problem: Where can I charge my cell phone?
We use our cell phones to manage our day-to-day lives and our lives are on-the-go. So when our cell phone battery runs out, we lose a key tool to navigate the modern world.
As part of #SmartRussell, Louisville Metro’s Office of Civic Innovation & Technology is building a public Wi-Fi network in the Russell neighborhood, and early in our community conversations about the project we heard that exact question: “Where can I charge my cell phone?”
We needed a solution inexpensive enough to widely deploy, but rugged enough to survive heavy usage and the elements. There weren’t any affordable commercial solutions available, so we turned to FirstBuild and the Russell community itself to help us co-create a new solution to this universal problem.
FirstBuild and Gwendolyn Kelly, a local community organizer, led a community design session at the Russell Apartments to understand how neighborhood stakeholders currently keep their devices charged on the go and learn from them how that experience could improve.
Design Requirements from Community Meeting
They shared that public Wi-Fi device charging stations need to have the following characteristics:
● clearly labeled as a charging station reliable
● fast
● inviting
● rugged
● clear instructions on how to report an outage
● highly visible
● something that adds to, not takes away from, the aesthetic of the neighborhood
● accessible to people at all levels of mobility
● accessible throughout community members’ daily journeys
These design requirements and others collected at the community meeting guided the prototyping process for the FirstBuild Hackathon for Engineering Week held on February 19, 2020.
Hackathon!
The hackathon drew over 50 people ranging from career General Electric engineers to FirstBuild Innovators to maker-curious community members for a day of co-creation. The participants split into seven teams to create their vision for what a low-cost device charging station could look like.
After a day of collaborating and making, each team presented their idea.
Here is what they created:
The winning prototype focused on a basic design that would allow for adaptation over time as technologies changed. The simple, yet flexible design could easily work in a public space and be upgraded as cell phone technology changed.
Next Steps
The next step for the project is to bring in local partners that can help make a real-world prototype test a reality and go back to Russell stakeholders to get their feedback on it.
We hope to have something to share with the community later this year and, if all goes well, will have a prototype in the field in the next year.
