Although traditional workshops for industrial design students were held online last year due to the pandemic situation, Honeywell praises its collaboration with the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, BUT. For students, a series of workshops and consultations are an opportunity to gain insight into the product-design framework of a large company. Industry experts, in return, welcome the fresh ideas that future designers bring. With four of them, Honeywell has now filed a global patent application.
“When I showed the idea to our engineers at Honeywell, they were shocked. It's the kind of idea we would never come up with because we are mentally tied to what current solutions look like. When students come up with such a radical innovation, it is an opportunity for us.. I wouldn't spend so much energy if it did not make sense to me. And the students are good at surprising me,” says Honeywell designer Tanguy Prevot.
The revolutionary idea of one of the student teams, which was born in workshops for FME industrial design students, was considered so excellent, that the company has taken an unusual step: together with the students, they want to patent the idea.
“We don´t know yet if the patent will be granted, it will take some time. But Honeywell officially submitted the application. It is a big commitment from the company that we will cover the cost for the patent application and maintenance on a global scale. By doing that we want to demonstrate how the industry could closely work with academia in the early conceptual phase,” adds Tomáš Szaszi from the company's Brno branch, who acts as Honeywell Strategy Leader for EMEA. He cannot give any further details so as not to jeopardize the patent proceedings, but it is obvious that this is a promising innovation in which the students of the faculty have a large share.
User in the spotlight
The workshop series with Honeywell did not take place at the faculty for the first time. It is a continuous effort where both parties (FME Industrial Design and Honeywell) mature this framework for more than 4 years. “Because of covid-19, everything was online last year. That made things of course very different in terms of presenting and getting feedback and reactions from the students. I guess the students took advantage of being digital natives, they know these systems by heart and they are comfortable with them. Covid forced us to learn to use useful tools, and we intend to continue where it makes sense, but we prefer to meet students in person if we can” says Prevot.
In the autumn students started with a multi-day workshop on Design thinking & Domain onboarding, then continued with a Product Design workshop in February. Students have the opportunity to work on a design concept in continuous interactions while getting mentoring and receiving feedback from Tanguy Prevot. The challenge for young designers is especially the task to picture the end-user of their product: protective equipment. Last year students focused on the compatibility of all the protective equipment that is worn on the head: hard hat, eyewear, face shield, respirator, and so on.
"If they were to design common goods such as a mobile phone, it would be easy because they have a user experience. It's harder with our products, we don't make daily products,” says Prevot.. "The key is to imagine our end user. He's a guy standing on an oil rig off the coast of Saudi Arabia doing some work. The challenge is to empathize with his needs, and our offering managers helped the students with that,“ adds Szaszi.
Imagining the future
Future designers learn to assess customer needs while studying at FME. However, the connection of theory with the company's practice is great enrichment, according to David Škaroupka from the Institute of Machine and Industrial Design, who organizes workshops with the company. „We are teaching them how to judge their work, see it from a distance, and how to evaluate their idea. They can build on that, but contact with practice is always enriching,” says Škaroupka.
The three best students from last year's workshop deserved an eight-week internship at Honeywell this year, where they further developed their ideas into a prototype. “If I need to design a specific item, I would say I will probably be better than students. But I'm not better than them in imagining the future. Working with students who make proposals that don't seem to make sense at first sight – that is the creative part. My job is to have them find sense and use in their ideas,” closes Prevot.