There are no secrets in a co-working space fashioned out of a glass container, and hackers think that might be a good thing. This past weekend, five MIT students with varied interdisciplinary backgrounds lived, worked, ate and slept in a transparent pod with the goal of reimagining the ambulances of the future.
“Research says the best teams are interdisciplinary where people think differently,” Signe Lin Kuei Vehusheia of ETH Entrepreneur Club said.
Hosted by the MIT Innovation Initiative and ETH Entrepreneur Club, the MIT InCube event is happening concurrently in Swiss cities of Zurich, Bern, Lausanne and St. Gallen.
The MIT pod is sponsored by medical technologies firm Stryker. On Thursday night, the team entered the pod and were presented with their challenge of reinventing emergency vehicles.
“We are kind of dealing with a unique space in that there are multiple people using this product, there’s the actual patients using the product, there’s the EMTs and the paramedics, but also the actual owner of the vehicles who all have different goals and ideas,” chemistry student Samuel Solomon said.
Team members spent the weekend interviewing doctors, paramedics, and patients to best understand the competing interests and constraints of the project. From there, they will devise a solution or a potential start-up pitch.
“It’s sort of like a social experiment,” Solomon said. “Everyone can see what we’re doing.”
