Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Students in the Design Process class at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture once again racked up many of the top awards in an annual ideas contest sponsored by the Mays Business School.
The Ideas Challenge, sponsored each spring semester by Mays’ Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship, sees students currently or previously enrolled in the class take many of the top spots year after year. The Design Process class is taught by Rodney Hill and Jorge Vanegas, professors of architecture. Vanegas is also dean of the college.
In the contest, Aggies campuswide are asked to submit their ideas of the next big product or service.
Lauralee Young, who joined with two other students in the contest’s first-place entry, “A Fresh E-service for Social Networking,” took the Design Process class in 2006.
Young’s entry, “A Fresh E-service for Social Networking,” provides a new twist on the use of popular sites like Facebook.
“WuzPage.com is a social networking website service that connects people through shared/common attendance to events, like the 2007 Alamo Bowl, 1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert, Jane Doe’s Ring Dunk Party, etc,” wrote Young and her collaborators, Neal Lee and Daniel Hensheid. “WuzPage.com provides a medium for online users to ‘mini-blog’ to friends or the world about significant experiences of their life, and to join others who were there.”
Three of the seven third-place ideas — “Enerflow Gloves,” “Electronic Calving Sensor Inc.,” and “RFID-enabled Smart Shopping Cart for Retail Stores,” — were submitted by student teams from the spring 2009 class.
“Enerflow Gloves,” was submitted by John Tyler Green, Randalyn Johnson, Leslie Jordan, Austin Klores, Klark Kurz, and Michael Missicotte.
The group’s idea, they wrote, is for anyone who has ever been frustrated by the lack of gloves warm enough to make cold-weather activity truly safe and enjoyable.
“They work by capturing kinetic energy created by the random movements of your hands, and then transmitting this energy back to your hands through resistance coils,” they wrote. “ They are innovative because they don’t require bulky external power supplies, which could run out of power in the middle of activity.”
“Electronic Calving Sensor Inc.” netted a third-place finish for Rachel Bowdoin, Travyss Chitolie, Seong Kang, Kyle Logsdon, Kristin Ratterree and Kat Stiegel, and goes above and beyond existing technology that can monitor the amount of feed cattle have eaten, their body temperature and location.
“None of the currently available sensors have the ability to detect when a cow goes into labor,” they wrote. “Our calving sensor combines existing sensor technology with a simple circuit system which will alert managers of the dilation of the cow’s cervix, ultimately improving the birthing process by allowing the owner to provide any necessary aid.”
Gordon Burgett, Ashley Taylor, Richelle Kila and Colin Bryson scored a third place finish with their entry “RFID-enabled Smart Shopping Cart for Retail Stores.”
Their idea is a system that automatically scans and maintains a list of the radio-frequency identification product tags, which retailers are using with increasing frequency to track inventory, that are in a customer’s shopping cart.
“When prompted, it wirelessly transmits this list to a computer system via Bluetooth,” they wrote. The shopping cart can use the list of items to simplify the checkout process, track buyer habits, and with an onboard display provide direct-to-cart targeted advertising and directions to items on the shopper’s list.
Of the 38 business ideas that judges advanced to the contest’s final round, 23 were from the Design Process class.
