The project partner organizations and their respective challenges for the 2018 Senior Design Challenge are:

  • Burton Snowboards (Project brief): Burton tasked students with the challenge of reimagining the hardware goods customer purchasing experience. For this project, the student team has carried out a wide range of qualitative and quantitative user research, honed in on key insights and is ultimately focusing on a solution centered around the company’s e-commerce platform.
  • Efficiency Vermont (Project brief): The students working in this team have been tasked with developing a solution that will encourage small- and medium-sized businesses across Vermont to invest in energy efficient programs. The team has particularly zoned in on restaurants and is developing a program in which they leverage Vermont’s community and people oriented culture to encourage energy efficiency.
  • Upper Valley Haven (Project brief): The Upper Valley Haven initially asked students to address challenges relating to food insecurity in the Haven’s catchment area. However, once the team started their preliminary field research, the team realized that a more acute challenge was improving the Haven’s understanding of its own user base. The team used this finding to pivot and has reframed their challenge to focus on designing a mechanism for the Haven to better understand its user base and their most acute needs.
  • Peter Sheehan Diabetes Care Foundation (Project brief): PSDCF is a diabetes foundation spearheaded by a Dartmouth alum, Patrick Sheehan ’15. Patrick has tasked his student team to design the living space of the future for the elderly, diabetic Chinese population of Chinatown, NYC. In designing their solution, the team must thus consider not only architectural constraints but also how healthcare, technology, and culture intersect in the Big Apple.
  • The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) (Project brief): TDI is interested in using technology to facilitate co-production and more egalitarian, transparent communication between healthcare providers and patients. Within this context, this student team is focusing on designing a digital tool to facilitate healthcare monitoring for teenagers with asthma living in affordable housing who are currently transitioning from middle school to high school.
  • OpenIDEO Nike Grind Challenge (Project brief): This is a student-initiated project topic, that focuses on designing a creative and impactful way to recycle Nike’s waste material. The student team working on this project has decided to take on a user-centered approach to this challenge, and is working on generating solutions that center around core needs of the peri-urban homeless in Northeast America.

Note: all of the above project briefs require a Dartmouth login to view.