Global Digital Innovation Project (GDIP) is a course offered by Sandbox both during autumn and spring. This year, as part of the GDIP project, UT and Sandbox student Volodymyr is in a team with students from inno.space Design Factory. We asked them a few questions about their experience so far.
What is the challenge you are working on?
Our goal is to support companies in exchanging secondary raw materials and waste materials with a platform for resource trading moderated by the city of Mannheim.
What is the impact you are hoping to achieve with your work?
The shortage of raw materials and environmental problems caused by high CO2 emissions are to be prevented by the Circular Economy according to the political strategy of the EU. In order to achieve this, companies need to work together, share their resources and benefit from each other. Therefore, we would like to support companies in collaborating on the Circular Economy and its principles of reducing, reusing, recovering, remanufacturing and recycling raw materials.
What have you learned so far during the process? What was surprising for you? Or perhaps, what was the challenging part?
In the process we deepened our understanding of many Design Thinking Methods. It surprised us that these methods really helped us to get creative and come up with many cool ideas. The most challenging part was the user research because scheduling interviews with companies is really time consuming.
We’ve also learned that the design thinking method is a great – but not always easy way – to come up with an idea and really focus on getting the best out of it.
Surprising to us as well was that we could develop really complex solutions in such a short amount of time with a great structure. The challenging part was actually our challenge - but we guess the name says it as well 😂 It is not always going as planned if you‘re working together with companies instead of people around you. You have to be really flexible and professional and sometimes as students that is still a bit difficult.
Is the Sandbox programme worth it?
The experience in general is really worth sharing! If you‘re interested in meeting all kinds of people and you want to work with a great team and also on top of that are open to big and exciting challenges - then inno.space and Sandbox are your places to go.