Welcome back to our Blog everyone 🙂
It’s been another couple of weeks and therefore its time again to give you all an update on what we have been up to. The last couple of weeks have been quite stressful for us, as there were many things happening all at once. Where do we even begin? Let’s start with the rather boring part first: Right after our last blogpost, exam season started for us here at Mannheim. This meant a lot of our time and energy had to go into other subjects. The good news is, that as of writing this new post, exam season is officially over and we are ready to continue working on our CBI project with full commitment!
Despite all the exam stuff, we luckily still managed to do some interesting things, so let’s go over them!
Regarding the CBI project we had a fascinating workshop with Ursula Kloé, who is an expert in agile workshop concepts, systems thinking, design thinking and business modeling. The workshop was all about megatrends and future scenarios. We learned what these megatrends are and how we can identify them in order to try and predict what the future will/could look like. If you are intrested:
We then discussed different possible outcomes for the world in 2050 as a result of these megatrends and did a STEEPLE analysis of them. STEEPLE stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal and Ethnical. These are the different categories we focussed on, when researching our future scenario. We have chosen a post-anthropocene future scenario, whereby we have also focussed on the neo-ecology megatrend. Here is the vision statement we created:
In 2050, imagine a future where we will live in equality with nature and humanity for a healthy planet, because there is no second planet.
The following chart shows the results of our STEEPLE analysis. We also tried to paint our vision to visualize and communicate it better. You can see a modern city that has underground transport systems, clean factories and short distances to all important facilities. The buildings are integrated into nature and have additional energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. There is also vertical farming to save space. In the other drawing we can see that energy generation takes place across the entire country. There are offshore wind turbines and wave power stations in the sea. On land, hydrogen is produced and stored in tanks where a lot of energy is needed. In addition, old coal power plants are operated with pulverised iron, a way of continuing to use the existing infrastructure to generate green energy. There are pumped storage facilities in the mountains that can store energy. Solar power is also generated and there are nuclear fusion power plants.
Quote of the week:
“Synergy – the bonus that is achieved when things work together harmoniously.” – Mark Twain
Highlight:
Thanks to Ursula, we also had the opportunity to join the 24ecompetition together with team S.A.G.E. The 24ecompetition is a 24-hour endurance race for electric cars at the Hockenheimring (a racing track near Mannheim). Who ever manages to do the most laps in 24 hours wins. At first glance this task seems easy enough, until you realise that its not about speed, but rather efficiency. The biggest limiting factor for achiving more rounds is charging time. Every team got paired with another team in order to share a car charger, which is limited to a charging power of 20kW. In practice this meant, that we spent about 1/3 of our time charging, rather than driving (this is a typical amount of time). In the end we managed to get 3rd place in our battery category. Speaking of which, our car (an Ora Funky Cat) was in the smallest battery category. We are really happy to have reached this place, as we all had no prior experience in endurace racing electric cars. It was a lot of fun! Here are two pictures, one of our team with the car after 24 hours of racing and another of us doing the washing machine 😀
Next Steps:
The next step will be to create a video prototype. We have also planned several interviews with different people and are looking forward to realising them.
See you soon 🙂
SUSTA.INNO
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