The SFU Student Social Innovation Fund, a collaboration between RADIUS and Embark, provides project funding of up to $1000. Below, we get an update from Kuelii Smart Fan, a project team funded earlier this year.
After a long journey of hard work and long nights, we’re finally ready to say hello in our first blog post!
First of all, allow me to introduce myself and the team at Kuelii Smart Design. I’m Jay, a design student at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology department of Simon Fraser University and a founder of Kuelii Smart Design. With past experience in project management, media production, and UI/UX design, I’m the CEO and experience designer on the team.
Ok that’s enough about me, let’s talk about the team.
Our team is made up of talented students from Simon Fraser University (SFU) and University of British Columbia (UBC) with a variety of backgrounds, nationalities, and experiences. On our technical development team, we have Dolapo who handles software, Johnson who works our electrical systems, and Cindy who designs our hardware models. To the business end, we have Kevin for business development and Adeline on graphic and interface design.
The Kuelii team during our mentorship trip visiting Lee (bottom row) at Galvanize in Seattle. (Left to right: Dolapo, Kevin, Adeline, Jay and Sittidej)
The idea was born.
During the heat wave of summer 2015 I observed, living in a single detached home and visiting my friends at their condos, that buildings in Vancouver are built to contain and retain heat during the winter. Houses suck at shedding heat from the hot sun. For those of us without the money to buy and own an air conditioner, we open windows and use tower fans to ease the summer suffering. Of course, in true infomercial fashion, I thought to myself, “there’s got to be a better way.”
In the fall semester, I was given the opportunity to take a shot at solving the problem. I took IAT 267 under the expert instruction of instructor Helmine Serban and TA Maryam Mobini. In the class when we formed our core team and created a proof of concept that demonstrated the ideas behind our product. We were able to, by freezing our butts in the middle of winter, demonstrate our product’s effectiveness in solving the problem. In mid-December, we sat down with the project team and decided to take the Kuelii project beyond the classroom, with the hopes to make life better with smart technologies and enable environmentally friendly solutions.
Of course, not all our classmates stayed beyond the class. We’re extremely grateful of the contributions of Jasmeen Virk and especially Sittidej Somprakit who was with us until April.
Okay, you’ve said so much so…. what is this thing!?
Hold your horses. This is only the first part! Over the next few blog posts we’ll tell you all about it!
Coming soon — Part 2: the beginning of a journey.
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