This week, we finally got to phone our partner team in Melbourne. They gave us a lot of good information, and we’re excited to work with them and to meet them at CERN in two weeks! We split the technologies we’re researching in half, so that each team gets a good variety of technologies to investigate.

Skype meeting with our amazing buddy team from Melbourne

On Thursday we had an interview workshop at Inno.space, which helped us tremendously to work out the questions we want to ask our interview partners. Since we’re not focussing on a certain direction at the moment, our questions are very open, and the workshop definitely helped us to figure out how to interact with the interviewer, so that we get the best possible results. We also made a list of people we want to talk to and hope to talk to a lot of those in the next two weeks. We also had our first interview today. We talked to an urban planning student, who gave us a lot of great insights and topics to further think about. One of the key insights we got from him is that water and water infrastructure is a very important part of urban planning. There are a lot of laws in Germany that focus on that topic, for example if a new residential area is build, there needs to be a compensation area for the destroyed nature and water areas. Another thing is that sometimes there’s a need to add specific chemical compounds to water to make sure the infrastructure doesn’t fail. He specifically mentioned chalk, which we thought was always bad to have in tap water, but sometimes if there’s no chalk, a small amount needs to be added to prevent rusting of the pipes. The interview was also good because now we have some more insights that we can bring to our other interview partners.

First interview with an urban planner

Next week, we’ll focus on the interviews and try to talk to as many people as possible. We hope to get a good cross section of different professions, to see what the concerns of each group are. We will also research the technologies more and create some technology cards.

Quote of the week