Smart Chairs in California Magazine
Imagine being able to charge your phone just by sitting on a chair. That's what the team of Volta (Matthew Cheung, Jessica Chiu, Julia Solano and Nick Firmani) designed for their Spring 2015 Interactive Seating Design course hosted by the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and led by the interdisciplinary team of BCNM Director Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice), BCNM Executive Committee Member Björn Hartmann (EECS), and Bob Full (Biology). The product they produced over the course of fifteen short weeks was so well developed, the team was selected to showcase their work at the National Maker Faire in Washington D.C., and earned a Maker of Merit Award for their efforts. California Magazine has a great article on the project and class now available online.
On the interdisciplinary nature of the course from the magazine:
“One of the abilities that we want our students to graduate with is the notion that they connect across domains of knowledge, across domains of expertise,” Niemeyer explains. “That means being able to have a dialogue with people from other disciplines, and being able to collaborate and establish common value structures across disciplines.”