#BUCPUA Students Win Toyota/Net Impact’s Next-Generation Mobility Challenge

BUCPUA’s Professor Regan (FR), Professor Sungu (L) with BUCPUA students and winning team members Luis Quintanilla (FL) and Alejandro Delgado (BR), and their prototype of “Cindy” the cane that will assist the elderly through public transportation systems.

On Saturday, February 4, students from Boston University, UMass Boston, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, Brown University, and Rhode Island School of Design gathered to attend Toyota’s Mobility Foundation and Net Impact’s Next Generation Mobility Challenge in the Colloquium Room of the Photonics Building. The event was planned by BU’s Net Impact Undergraduate Chapter and was a great opportunity for students in the #BUCPUA program to work in multi-disciplinary teams to design and launch solutions that promote equity and accessibility for people of low-income, the elderly, and the disabled. The design process was broken up into four steps—discover through observations, frame opportunities, imagine ideas, and prototype experiments.

For many students, this workshop was their first time going through the design process. BU City Planning and Urban Affairs Professor Terry Regan, who teaches UA 619: Urban Transportation Policy and Planning, described the workshop as a “stimulating way to start my day off,” while Professor Sungu-Eryilmaz said that, “It was a dynamic day where multidisciplinary teams learned to combine empathy, creativity, and prototyping.”

BUCPUA students Luis Quintanilla, a Master of City Planning candidate, and Alejandro Delgado, a Master of Urban Affairs candidate, were part of the winning team, which includes Evana Nabi, a senior student in Economics at Wellesley College; Hiro Kainuma, MBA student from Babson College; and Ghazal Randhawa, a freshman in Computer Science Engineering at Boston University were part of the team that will advance as a semi-finalist.

Their prototype was a cane named “Cindy” that “would assist the elderly to easily navigate through public transportation systems in their cities while concurrently connecting them to more people with similar interests and destinations. The latter would help users to socialize and feel safer during their journeys,” as Quintanilla commented. The team plans to work on the product’s affordability and its pricing strategy through a sponsorship scheme.

Luis Quintanilla shared that:

“While designing our product, the team gave a lot of thought to the particular needs of our end-user’s persona: an 85-year-old lady who is gradually losing eyesight and has no family to look after her, but still willing to do her errands and meet new people to feel accompanied. We focused on making our product extremely user-friendly, relying on current GPS, voice recognition, and DSRC technologies that Toyota and other manufacturers are investing in and researching at present. During the prototyping stage, the team conceived this smart device in the form of a cane, in order to be handy for senior citizens. However, we are thinking of designing additional variants to our product, such as belts, watches or necklaces, so more people find it convenient. We want to make this product affordable for everyone. Thus, we are thinking of developing a sponsorship scheme that would aid into the project’s financial components.”

“This is our second year of doing this. We hoped people would come and brainstorm solutions for transportation problems, which are part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Mobility needs to be tackled at a global scale,” Natalia Vasquez, Net Impact Program Manager expressed. Projects were judged based on the clarity of the challenge and target user, positive social impact, feasibility, and creativity.

Dr. Sorenson, director of the Toyota Mobility Foundation was pleased with the turnout and said that it “shows the power of a lot of creative minds on problems facing society, problems of how people will move about in a safe, environmentally, expeditious, convenient manner. In 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas as opposed to 50 percent now. We need to think about automobiles, public transportation, and come up with good creative ideas.”

Some students proposed products, while others pitched services or experiences. Ideas ranged from door-to-door bus services, tablets that enable the elderly to view directions for public transport, to phone-monitored self-driving cars that can drop the kids off at school. At the end of the day, participants made new friends, gained new insights on framing questions of mobility and proposing inclusive solutions. “It was really cool that we are spending a day to find solutions on global transport problems and to see how different people all over the world are affected by it,” Aditi Jhaveri, a junior studying in Economics and Gender Studies at Wellesley commented.

Three finalists will be selected from 15 U.S. on-campus workshops, be flown to Next Generation Mobility Challenge’s boot camp to work on their solution, and prepare a final pitch that could result in a $10,000 paid internship to incubate the winning project over the summer with the Toyota Mobility Foundation.

– Savannah Wu, CAS’19