Smooth Commuting: XD Students Win Mad*Pow Health Challenge

We named our team and began to gather ideas. As a group, our interests varied and we cast a wide net. We explored everything from sofacize – and yes, that’s a thing — to the future of mobility, food equity, health care, environmentally-friendly living, toxins in our furniture, and new opportunities for mobile rooms (autonomous vehicles) to bring services around cities.

After a couple of weeks gathering, sharing, and discussing our ideas, we reflected again on the requirements of the design brief and agreed to focus on the plight of the extreme commuter. This fitted well as a topic that could both be addressed in the short term, and as something with big potential in the future.

As an extreme commuter — someone with a ninety or more minute commute each way — I am rather opinionated and passionate about the experience. In spite of this, I learned a lot doing this challenge. For example, how detrimental the cumulative effects of extreme commuting can be on peoples’ health, or that Boston’s population swells daily from roughly 700,000 to 1.2 million during working hours. Boston’s economy relies on commuters, but commuting has been getting increasingly more congested and difficult. Stef and Houjiang have their fair share of commuter horror stories to draw from too.

The brief required short, medium, and long-term solutions. This was somewhat challenging. In some ways I think we’d have loved to spend all our energy thinking up new visions of the future. The requirement grounded the project and forced us to think about what was possible with the technology and systems that exist today. Given the number of pain points, it didn’t take a whole lot to think of small changes that would make a big difference. Prepaid parking, for example, would take the stress out of wondering whether there would be any parking places left when driving to the commuter station.

As time was running short towards the end, we each tackled different elements of the solution. Stef worked on the proposal which we had been filling out in fits and starts, and the stakeholder maps. Houjiang created a temporal overview of the different states of our suggested systems updates, and I focused on creating a video to demonstrate our future user’s experience of a smooth commute.

Image below: Houjiang’s system’s view of our proposal.

Overall, I think our skills and knowledge complement each other and we worked very well together. It wasn’t all perfume and roses and we didn’t always agree but we all compromised on different things. Stef was doing an internship in DC so we had to work remotely, and we were all juggling other projects, jobs, and holiday schedules. Remote is not my favorite way of working, but we managed to meet once or twice a week every week to discuss progress and decide what to do next. None of us were afraid to voice our concerns or play devil’s advocate and as a result we had some fairly healthy debates.

Our lowest point was about a week before we submitted our project. Doubts were had as to why we were adding all this extra work on top of our already loaded schedules. It was at such moments that Stef’s optimism and encouragement shone. We all had our doubts at different moments but we balanced each other out. It was like riding a bike for the first time with no stabilizers. Happily, we flew.

On Wednesday, 16th of October, I heard a knock outside my office door. I was greeted by the delighted faces of Stef and Houjiang telling me that we’d won the systems category. What a lovely surprise.

We will be presenting our project at the Mad*Pow HXD Conference in April 2020. Our thanks to everyone who made this possible for us. Our classes, our professors, CAMD, and Northeastern.

Business Insider article on the competition