Overview

Despite, or perhaps inspired by, the problems of the Corona crisis, a hackathon took place again at HM Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences in the winter semester 2020/21. It was organised by the Social Entrepreneurship Academy (SEA) and aimed to collect and work out as many ideas as possible on the topic of "Circular Cities" in a short time. A total of 13 student teams worked on their ideas over a period of two days. The DTLab supported the event.

Problem

The problems that the students wanted to solve in this challenge/event were mainly about living in a neighbourhood and a city and how this could be more compatible with protecting the environment. For example, there are many people who would like to get involved close to home, but do not yet know exactly how and where they could best get involved. In addition, the city of Munich has set itself the goal of becoming almost climate-neutral by 2050 and needs the support of its citizens to achieve this. Especially regarding Munich's waste management, there are already a number of ideas that would like to encourage Munich residents to behave in a more environmentally friendly way and which also played a role in this hackathon.

Approach

During the hackathon, the students received support from the DTLab and AWS. They gave them an introduction to the "Working Backwards" approach, which involves creating fictional artefacts before a product or idea is released, to work it out in detail right from the start. We present some of the results here. The corresponding artefacts can be found on Github.

Proposed solutions/ideas

The first idea presented by the students is called "fixit". “fixit" is an app that provides citizens with repair boxes on demand and offers users a platform to exchange information on the topic of "upcycling". Furthermore, users can chat with experts in "fixit" to carry out repairs at home under supervision and trade in upcycled products. The app aims to address one of the major problems of today's consumer society, the surplus of goods that leads to huge amounts of waste due to the premature discarding of broken products.

The second idea is called "Circled.". "Circled." also wants to break the circle of consumption and simple disposal and gives citizens the opportunity to renew or repair old products together, with the help of interesting workshops. The core themes of the workshops include sustainability, learning and fun. The former comes from using products more responsibly and reducing waste through recycling. Learning means that the participants of the workshops can acquire new skills and broaden their horizons through the work. In addition to learning and working together, the workshops are also about having fun in the community, designing personalised products as well as being able to express themselves creatively, always with the possibility of asking experienced "upcyclers" for advice.

The third team's "Munich Circular City Map" aims to support citizens with services and products of their choice while reducing their trips within the city. This could improve both the quality of life in Munich's neighbourhoods and their air quality. The idea of the map is to display initiatives and businesses that contribute to a circular city on a map and to give citizens a platform to propose projects and work on them together. Instead of authority-driven projects that often give citizens little space to interact, citizens could thus contribute their own ideas and look for like-minded people to realise projects as a community for the community.

The fourth idea involved an innovative, green solution to server storage within the city, called M/Computing. The demand for fast computing power is increasing year on year and has been particularly boosted by the boom in home office workplaces over the past year. To meet it, new places need to be created where servers can be stored. The students' idea was to use existing buildings for storage and, if necessary, to create new space by digitalising products stored there. In addition, their idea includes the use of exclusively green energy from the Munich public utility company and the return of energy in the form of radiated heat by the servers. This could create a sustainable circle that would create a high benefit for the citizens of Munich with low consumption.

Next steps

The City of Munich was very interested in the students' ideas and, after a plausibility check, would like to look at some of the ideas and elaborations in more detail in the future.

Documents

The documents for the four ideas mentioned above can be found on Github.