2 new projects for HackBerry Lab
Another year of ‘failing forward’
An unofficial motto of Berry College’s HackBerry Lab concerns failure.
“We like to say we fail forward,” said Zane Cochran, founder of the lab and instructor at the college.
So as a new school year approaches and the lab embarks on its second shot at the intermediate design studio course, past mistakes will guide one of its new projects — sustainable housing. And certainly over the 16 weeks of the course there will be more, but in any act of creativity, failure is growth.
The focus of the course is to have students work with community partners in using technology and design to solve real-world problems, Cochran said. This differs from the general concentration of HackBerry Lab and the creative technologies program, which puts students in a collaborative environment to create anything they wish — an electric-powered skateboard, for example, he said.
Last year, the lab partnered with the Rome-Floyd ECO Center, Cevian Design Lab, Makervillage and Berry College Admission Office.
“My students had no idea they would be making rooftop flood sensors,” Cochran said of the project for Cevian Design Lab, which presented students with the problem of water pooling on flat roofs.
This year, two of the five student groups will take up a project which has been kicked around for some time and has been of much student interest — tiny homes. And setting out on this creative path, students will explore what exactly it is to hack. Instead of defining hack as the use of computers to steal digital information, the hack in HackBerry is using existing materials for something other than their designated purpose, Cochran said.
The materials in this case are concrete tubes, which will be worked into singleperson dwellings. The inspiration for the project came to Cochran when he visited Osaka, Japan, for a conference and came upon capsule hotels. The 4-by-4-by-8-foot spaces are designed for Japanese businessmen as essentially just a place to sleep.
For their project, the design for the end use of the converted concrete tubes will be as temporary homeless shelters or modular homes in areas struck by natural disasters, Cochran said. The imagined use in disaster zones is to create living space inserts designed to the specifications of a concrete tube which could be placed inside, he continued.
The challenge posed to students in the course is to take a given material, identify and exploit its good properties while resolving issues it has — concrete has good thermal properties, keeping it fairly cool inside, but it retains moisture, Cochran said.
Finding partners for the project is still in the works. But when school starts Aug. 20, students will start a process of finding all that’s required for their project. This involves conducting interviews with specialists in the related field to determine all that is needed, Cochran said. Then students must purchase materials needed, operating on a limited budget, he explained.
A key to the course is harnessing the creative energy of students for it to be used as the thrust of their innovation, Cochran said. It’s the real skills they gather in the process of developing a project — to find out what and what does not work — which gives practical application to the ideas they have.
“For many of them it’s a leap of faith,” Cochran said.
The two takeaways from the course are for students to “obtain a tangible set of skills” and to “step outside of their own mind” to understand the problems of others, Cochran said.
The low-cost living project will embrace one of the many lessons learned from last year. As Cochran says, “small equals quick innovation,” so a practice this year is to start on a small scale, where mistakes are not as damaging to the end goal, and the intent for students to be bold is supported. This is seen in the sampling of different types of concrete which Cochran and his three lab assistants — Mariah Kelly, Emily Smith and Graham Widmann — have been experimenting with.
The other three student groups will be tasked with remedying the foot problems of diabetic patients. Working with local podiatrist Stephan LaPointe, who has his doctorate in biomedical engineering, students will be presented with the issue of those with diabetes continuing to walk on their sore-covered feet without knowing because they can’t feel them, Cochran said.
The goal is for students to spread awareness about the matter and use technology for human augmentation, alerting patients to the condition of their feet.
At the end of the 16 weeks there is always more to do. But the final product is not the central priority. The biggest lessons are learned between beginning and end, one failure at a time.