Water Watcher

B-cycle is a next-generation bike-sharing program. It is a zero-hassle, zero-emissions way to get around town. It’s a bike-sharing program that meets the transportation, health, and environmental needs of our communities. One that adapts to any size city, corporation, or campus. It’s free and spontaneous, but also practical. Imagine a network of bike stations located within a few blocks of one another throughout your community. As a member, you can unlock any of the specially designed bikes at any station and ride it to any other bike station. Fast, simple, and inexpensive. B-cycle is also the only bike-sharing program that measures the actual distance traveled on each ride and keeps track of the calories you’ve burned and the carbon emissions you’ve prevented. All this information is available on your personal B-cycle web page. Sustainable design that frees you from your car and is optimized for the needs of urban living, B-cycle is a new transportation future and it’s available now.

Can Metaverse today replace reality? As the global COVID-19 pandemic distanced humans from each other, an expedition for new ways of communication began to rise. The concept of ‘Metaverse’ became widespread as a solution. However, VR interaction methods developed so far are biased toward audiovisual aspects. There should be more elements to reproduce for actual communication. Considering the early concept of VR suggested in Stanley Weinbaum’s 1935 SF novel <Pygmalion Glasses>, which included vision, hearing, touch, heat, and smell, humanity is still half as successful.

Chabla is a revolutionary mobile interpretation service for sign language users, their network and sign language interpreters. With Chabla sign language users have access to interpretation from their smart device at any time anywhere without a delay, in multiple languages.

Human trafficking affects 20-30 million victims worldwide. Over 70% of these are women who are forced to work in factories, farms, homes, and brothels around the world. In the United States, hundreds of thousands of minors are considered to be at-risk for commercial sexual exploitation. Victims are rarely “rescued” from trafficking. Most survivors extricate themselves, and are immediately dependent on a variety of support services for housing, medical attention, and emotional care.

Since 2002, the Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI) has engaged North Carolina’s citizens, bringing people together to turn ideas into action. Experts at facilitating face-to-face communication, they wanted to extend their impact using digital tools. They envisioned an exhibit designed to educate North Carolinians about four of the state’s core concerns­–Education, Environments, Economy, and Health–and inspire and enable them to collaborate on these issues. Working with IEI and our partners, we created the Emerging Issues Commons at North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library.

Philips teamed up with a pediatric hospital to create a first-of-kind adaptive environment for behavioral health patients in the Emergency Department. Adolescents waiting for mental health services in the ED can experience ‘psychiatric boarding’ – held for days or even weeks in a secure but empty room which can worsen the crisis.

To continue innovating our banking mobile application experience, we designed "Blue," a virtual assistant that enables financial transactions to be made by voice and text. Thanks to this experience, we can provide closer assistance and self-service to 10.7 M people.The users of BBVA are very diverse, both in terms of age, income, and experience with technology. Blue allows them to interact through a chat window in the application with voice and text, enabling new forms of usage to decide which is best for them.We had a great challenge because it was necessary to consider the linguistic variety of our country and design the training of the AI and the conversations that would impact the vast majority of the users, regardless of their social, educational, or geographical conditions.

n the beginning of 2010, Microsoft Research came to our interaction class at Art Center College of Design and proposed a design challenge–“service meets social”. Being from California, our educational system has been deeply effected–to name a few of the giant issue: budget cuts, young and new teachers getting pink slips, students being packed into classrooms, and outdated standards. Our group easily, though sadly, found a field that desperately needs real solutions. Watching our family, friends, and community being negatively affected by the troubling educational system, we were motivated and inspired to find innovative ideas to solve our state’s educational problems. We approached our project with these questions: How do we update and integrate relevant technology into the classroom? How do we allow teachers to feel comfortable to share their ideas? Most importantly, how do we allow students to get the most out of their education? STEPS, our project, is an online resource and community for educators. With lesson plan databases, member profiles, and a series of expandable integrated applications and devices. STEPS brings networking to K-12 education and allows innovative ideas to be shared beyond the classroom.

Sniffing out the Differences is a series of olfactory and multi-sensory interactive installations dealing with extremely critical cultural issues such as identity formation and xenophobia. It consists of 5 installations – Jallianwala Bagh, Identity stories, Mir Abdul Attarwala, Xeno 500, and Diversity in us and was exhibited at the State Art Gallery, Hyderabad, and Pratt Institute, New York. Each installation was designed specifically to engage the audience, both within India and abroad, through a showing of the common, yet unknown and allowed them to introspect and fill in the missing gaps.

Jury Chair May-Li Khoe nominated the Feminist Coalition to honor their mission to champion equality for women in Nigerian society with a core focus on education, financial freedom and representation in public office, and to recognize how the Coalition was able to create a financially-transparent food, water, medical, security, and legal aid services system in a record-breaking amount of time under extreme conditions of duress.