Greetings from the team Wired!

Being now at the very beginning of the new 2021 year we would love to reflect on the work that was done at the end of 2020.

In mid-November, after working hard on our Opportunity and Tech Cards, we plunged head first into a 4-week online Festival of Exploration, where together with our coaches and with team Earthlings from Melbourne, we actively generated new ideas and exchanged inspiration. Every week we were greeted with completely new serious and sometimes funny tasks that helped us to get creative and look at existing problems from completely different angles while getting to know each other a little bit better.

For example, during Week 1 (Week of Ideation session SDG & Tech cards), we chose the problem “Excessive Energy Consumption” and used the Goldilocks Principle to come up with a “How Might We” statement. This statement represented the real-world problem that we then were focusing on. Brainstorming led to a truckload of post-it notes that we then placed on a graph which measured the satisfying need factor versus radicalness of those ideas.

 

Week 1. Working with our “How Might We” statement (Brainstorming)

Week 1. Result of Brainstorming represented as a graph “Satisfied need” versus “Radical”

 

Week 2’s Harman Fan Ideation was the team’s personal favorite for two reasons:

  • Harman Fan was all about thinking of an alternative future and how soon or not it can arrive. We got a chance to look as far as 2050 to imagine the world we all will live in one day.
  • That was the first time we had very close interaction with the Earthlings team from Melbourne as our coaches made sure to mix all international team-members very well! It resulted in a great brainstorming session ?

Week 2. Harman Fan: Ideas by Maryia, Bhishag (team Earthlings) and Gracie

Week 2 also presented us a great speech by Markus Nordberg on “Why are we here?”, which made us dive right into the multiple unknown ideas waiting to be discovered under multiverse thinking.

During the same week, both teams had a chance to learn more about 2050 Scenarios – four plausible futures: Humans Inc., Extinction Express, Greentocracy and Post Anthropocene (Source: http://bit.ly/2050scenarios ). The discussion of one of those scenarios led our team to the Idea Napkin of Magnet Powered Continental Train which could help to reduce the air pollution and become a better alternative to planes to travel across the world! Don’t judge us too hard, we are just dreaming BIG!

We also, of course, did not forget to defuse a serious atmosphere of concentration with fun and interesting assignments from our coaches.

Fun task: Each person got a white screen to start his/her painting. Then the timer rang, and we moved clockwise to continue someone else’s piece of art. Five circles of changing led us to this beautiful collection of masterpieces. We know we are talented! ?

“Bring us something that makes air move!”

One of the prompts for the Second Week included the creation of the Headlines from the Future. In this task we got inspired by a world 20 years from now and came up with CBI A3 weekly newspaper issued from 20 March 2040. The Headline speaks for itself (haha)

Week 3 helped us gain even more experience in cross cultural perspectives, varied working styles, speedy idea generation and unique thinking towards our projects. Our coaches presented us with the idea of the World Café.

First, we had to create a “How Might We” statement and then we were given a random Extreme User who needs our help with this HMW problem. There were 3 rounds and in each of them the coaches gave us specific little tasks that made the challenge even harder and mixed us again and again between different teams to make sure we get to work in the most various combinations of brains!

Example below shows one of the problems we worked with: “Availability of affordable healthy food”. And Claus the hermit, who lives in a remote area really hoped we could create something to make his life a little bit easier. So, we did ?

Working under time pressure is not that easy but we managed to help poor Claus to get his healthy food!

 And our weekly drawings, of course!

Week 4 was all about working on the previous exercises to create even more ideas and to produce further prototypes. We learned a new way of giving feedback by terming it with 3 main clauses of “I wish”, “I like” and “I wonder” and found out how feedback given or commented in this way is not just constructive but also easy on the ears! (haha)

As we were heading to the end of the festival, we truly realized how much we appreciated being a part of such a great squad of CBI A3. We are very grateful for the team Earthlings and our wonderful coaches that made us enjoy every moment of that festival! We bonded over snacks, our silly drawings, various items around our homes, and love for innovation and discovery.

A lot of time was spent exploring areas of growth within our local cities and around the globe. We learned more about different applications for CERN tech, explored the existing problems even deeper and got to pitch some of our ideas to CERN professionals!

Some of our Idea Napkins remained just ideas. One of the biggest challenges we faced was that many of the ones we produced turned out to be in existence or in development! However, despite all, we continued to generate more and more new suggestions!

Some of our Idea Napkins and their Prototypes

Not everything was easy. This festival forced us to learn a lot in a short period of time and to think in ways we never had before. Not to mention, doing this amount of work during finals meant we didn’t have much extra time to spare. However, we did our best to get as much as we could out of the festival and team Wired couldn’t be more thrilled with the experience. We are so thankful to the teaching team for helping us to go through this experience. Every time we got stuck, there was someone to drop a mystery prompt and help continue our thoughts.

Unfortunately, we must announce that one of our team members, Addy, has decided to step down from the CBI A3 project. While we are sad to see her go, we are so grateful that she was able to work with us through Phase 1 and make her mark on the team. We wish her all the best. However, the show must go on so we will be continuing to represent team Wired as Gracie, Maryia and Karen.

We are excited to see what spring semester and Phase 2 is going to bring us in this new year!

 

Quote of the Festival:

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Albert Einstein

Next steps:

 

Moving forward, we want to meet frequently to have brainstorming sessions towards new and innovative ideas. Now that we have more time to dedicate to the project, we will spend it researching CERN technologies and discussing the real human needs in different areas. Our team received a lot of great feedback from our CERN coaches that we keep analyzing and applying, both in changing previous works, and keeping their methods in mind as we develop. In the next Phase (Phase 2) we will have to pick just one final idea we would work on, and we are constantly thinking of which one would be the lucky one to be chosen by us ?

Hope that you enjoyed our short reminiscing of the Festival of Exploration. We will see you very soon!

 

Best,

Team Wired