Tag: Partnerships

As an Innovation Lead at the AT&T Foundry, I work on applying emerging technologies to make the world a better place. In 2017, I led a technology for good project to create immersive entertainment experiences for children in hospitals as a form of distraction therapy, through collaboration with Quantum Interface (technology startup) and the Melodic Caring Project (nonprofit).

AT&T is transforming into both an Entertainment and Telecommunications company. Projects such as this highlight the need for a strong 5G use case where there is a need for high throughput and bandwidth to support a quality experience for users. By applying emerging technologies to real-life problems, we are able to solve business needs, uncover new markets, and help change lives.

In 2016, I initiated and spearheaded our exploration of the Augmented and Virtual Reality market to propose strategic business plays for AT&T and Ericsson. As I engaged with our ecosystem, I discovered two amazing companies, each experts in their own field — one a technology company specializing in virtual reality and custom interfaces (Quantum Interface) and the other a nonprofit that streams concerts to children in hospitals (Melodic Caring Project).

It occurred to me that if I connected Quantum Interface’s next generation, interactive interface for 3D experiences together with a 360 virtual reality video of Melodic Caring Project’s live streaming of personalized concerts to hospitalized kids, we could create something truly memorable. So, we did just that.

After introducing everyone, the project took off immediately! Quantum Interface brought in SubVRsive to make the Virtual Reality capture a reality, and Melodic Caring Project brought in singer-songwriter Amos Lee and team as the content creators at the core of this experience. Together, the team used the magic of 360 live streaming to transport hospitalized children to an Amos Lee concert experience that they could share with their loved ones as they received encouragement from near and far!

Our partners were pivotal in making our live stream a success. Fresh off this achievement, we quickly moved onto the next step — building an interactive, immersive experience.

“Watching the concert as a VR show completely swept Maya away. She was feeling badly from recent chemo and having the glasses and the 360 experience took her away from the yuck that she had been feeling.”

– Maya’s father (Maya is in the photo below)

After the live stream, our team created a post-produced 360 experience with an interactive layer on top of this recorded concert. Children are not only able to be immersed in the concert, but also can interact with the environment and control playback using only small head movements, all completely hands-free! This is huge for patients who may not just be confined to their care facilities, but may also be bedridden or tethered to medical equipment with limited mobility.

We have been fortunate enough to share our interactive experience with countless viewers both inside and outside of hospitals, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

We started by collecting anecdotal evidence that we are helping patients escape from the discomfort of their hospital rooms. Now, we are quantifying the impact our immersive entertainment experience is providing as distraction therapy through clinical trials.

With the use of quantifiable biometric sensors and qualitative surveys, we are able to correlate the two to assess how effective this experience is as distraction therapy and what factors are necessary to build an effective distraction therapy experience.

As we widen our audience reach, we are also expanding the catalog of content accessible within our video player. Using AWS, we are building a repository of content pieces that a user can draw upon. Patients are able to navigate hands-free through a library of options to suit their needs, whether it be a desire for an outdoor adventure to a relaxing meditation by the fire.

Austin – March 7, 2017 – Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Amos Lee played a sold-out concert at the world-renowned Austin City Limits Moody Theater on Saturday, February 25, 2017. This time, Amos’ sold-out show didn’t just reach the crowds of the Moody Theater. With the support of partners including Quantum Interface, SubVRsive and the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry, the Melodic Caring Project, a nonprofit that bridges the gap between music, technology, and patients battling serious illness by live streaming personalized concerts to kids and teens in the hospital, live streamed its first-ever multi-camera, virtual reality 360 video show directly to kids’ hospital/home care rooms.

Since Melodic Caring Project’s founders, Levi and Stephanie Ware, began this journey seven years ago, the nonprofit has broadcast approximately 400 concerts to nearly 5,000 children all over the world and has partnered with some of the world’s biggest artists, including The Black Eyed Peas, Jason Mraz, Andra Day, Alabama Shakes, Rachel Platten, Daughtry and The Head and the Heart. The nonprofit gives the performing artists a list of kids (aka rockSTARS) who will be watching the night of their show. Then, during the shows, the artists call each rockSTAR out by name, offering support and words of encouragement.

The project all started at the AT&T Foundry, a place where corporations, technologists, start-ups and content creators come together to incubate ideas and test concepts. With a mission to take the viewing experience to the next level, a three-way collaboration was created between The Melodic Caring Project (MCP), Quantum Interface and AT&T Foundry/Ericsson. Quantum Interface and MCP crafted a vision to live stream a concert in fully immersive 360 Video and, by drawing in other parties from their networks, were able to make that vision a reality. With the support of Ericsson and thanks in large part to AT&T Foundry’s network of partnerships and the leadership vision that pioneered this collaboration along with Amos Lee’s desire to get involved, that vision came to life in Austin’s famous Moody Theater.

On the night of the show, SubVRsive, which handled the end-to-end production and distribution of the stream, placed cameras in two spots on stage and streamed the entire concert straight to the VR headsets of the evening’s rockSTARS. As the kids watched the concert, they were able to stand on stage with Amos Lee and the band, look out into an audience full of supportive faces, and leave the sights and sounds of the hospital behind to truly feel present at the show. Saturday’s concert in Austin was the first Melodic Caring Project concert that used state-of-the-art VR technology to give kids an opportunity to virtually be on stage with Amos and his band.

“One of the rockSTARS watching the show in Austin was a girl named Maya,” said Evan Blackstone, VP of Melodic Caring. “Maya had previously taken to Amos after watching one of his concerts and afterward, Amos paid her a hospital visit in Seattle. On Saturday, Maya lay on her couch in her hospital room, yet was front row at the show getting the full live experience of hanging out with her buddy Amos. He spoke directly to her and the other rockSTARS throughout the night and, although he was miles away, they were all able to be right there at the show, no longer in the isolation of their hospital rooms.”

“It’s been said that virtual reality is the ultimate empathy machine because it allows users to not just look through a frame, but step into it,” said Austin Mace, CCO of SubVRsive. “Being able to let these kids step through the frame and be on stage with Amos was a really powerful thing and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to leverage 360 live streaming for such a great cause.”

The final stage of this project will be to combine the video with a virtual interactive layer, which Quantum Interface will be contributing. In this way, the amazing 360 video will become an interactive experience, so the children will not only be able to be immersed in the concert, but interact with encouraging messages, the environment, and other virtual content using only gaze, completely hands-free. This is a significant and first in world experience that will bring the 360 experience to life even more.

“Music is a celebration of life. Musicians have such a unique, magical ability that deeply moves people. We live in a time and place that needs this energy more than ever. Especially the kids that Melodic Caring Project works closely with. Levi, Stephanie [Ware] and crew are world class. We look forward to supporting their process and helping them tell that story”.

– Amos Lee

Check out AT&T’s featured article on the project. AT&T’s LinkedIn post. AT&T’s Tweet. AT&T’s Innovator Series post.

Check us out on the Ericsson Tech For Good Blog.

Read SubVRsive’s perspective on our project.

Read our partner Melodic Caring Project’s perspective on our project.

We are also receiving international coverage.

Check out one of our demos at the following locations: AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, AT&T Foundry in Houston, Ericsson Experience Center in Santa Clara, Ericsson Experience Center in Plano, Ericsson Experience Center in Sweden, AT&T Forum in D.C., Quantum Interface in Austin, and Melodic Caring Project in Seattle.

While at the AT&T Foundry, I led an Augmented Reality project to create a pre-visualization tool for filmmakers, specifically camera crews and directors in collaboration with Quantum Interface, Economist Media Lab, and teammates at Ericsson Research. Together, our team conducted user research, designed, and implemented a complete voice and natural gesture controlled Hololens solution to a prevalent need for film crews within three days at the Fox Studios Hackathon in June 2016.

In June 2016, we were invited by the Fox Innovation Lab to build an augmented reality concept to improve the entertainment production process using the Microsoft HoloLens. In response, we created Spike, a tool that helps filmmakers streamline their pre- and post-production processes by tagging sets with virtual camera marker “spikes” and visualizing adjustments to camera settings. This same concept can be applied to other virtual objects in other contexts as described in the presentation video below.

As the first Foundry AR/VR project, this success demonstrated the value of this technology solving real use cases beyond the gaming industry. It has since sparked interest in looking deeper into Augmented and Virtual Reality with further explorations into other industries and spurred discussions across the company.

Quantum Interface’s video of our proof of concept showcasing their innovative interface technology.

I joined the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry in Fall 2015, and my experience has been extremely diverse and fulfilling. My work spans a number of disciplines and industries as we work to create innovative solutions to challenging problems.

The AT&T Foundries are a network of six innovation centers across the world–Palo Alto, Atlanta, Houston, Plano (2), and Israel, each sponsored by a different company or internal organization. In Palo Alto, we are sponsored by Ericsson and jointly innovate with team members from both AT&T and Ericsson. As a member of the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry, I serve as a bridge between the two companies.

The Foundries were originally created several years ago as an open, collaborative environment to inspire and promote the rapid invention and innovation of strategic ideas from concept to commercialization. Foundry team members drive their own projects and champion them to stakeholders, much like entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Projects emerge from personal passions, business unit needs, external partnership opportunities, and our employee crowdsourcing platform.

As one of the top internal brands to AT&T, we are highly regarded internally as the reliable source of all types of innovation, with a special focus on efficiency and disruptive innovations.

I was hired to lead design at the Foundry, and since then I’ve led numerous design projects, trained up team members, and worked on initiatives to bring design thinking to all of AT&T. I am frequently consulted on how to apply design to products, teams, processes, and business models. My work ranges from exploratory research to ideation to prototyping and implementation.

Projects

For instance, since 2016, I have collaborated with my teammate on the design portion of building a highly trafficked, enterprise product to provide a complete, seamless, self-service experience to incubate and validate any virtual network function against AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Architecture as part of the release of ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy). Check out some press on this project and how we are in the process of open sourcing it in 2017:

Has AT&T ICE’ed VNF Onboarding?
AT&T ICEs Vendors of Virtual Network Functions

In 2015, I immersed myself with our key enterprise customers to understand their needs and expectations around our new Network on Demand product. My research uncovered key product strategies and features that our team was able to champion both companies.

In 2016, I led design for yet another engaging, enterprise design project, though for an internal tool this time. Our efficiency innovation reduced the time for network capacity engineers to plan out how to decommission legacy network machines from several weeks to hours.

Leadership

Over the years as the head of design at the Foundry, I have trained my teammates in design thinking through collaborative projects, coaching, mentorship, and workshops. In turn, my colleagues are now applying design thinking to their work and even leading training sessions of their own.

One such instance occurred in 2016 when my colleague and I conducted interactive design thinking workshops for middle school and high school women interested in technology. Read more about our contribution here: AT&T hosts Girls in Future Technologies (GIFT) Day

My design team has found success identifying and solving difficult problems they could never have imagined in short periods of time through my guidance. One team member dove into understanding the needs of Uverse and DirecTV installation and maintenance technicians for several weeks. His research uncovered so many high impact opportunities that when we presented our work to the Senior Vice President responsible for these teams, the SVP allocated millions of dollars in resources to addressing these findings immediately.

While at the Foundry, I have had the pleasure to engage with hundreds of startups working in emerging technologies. In early 2016, I became especially curious to learn more about augmented and virtual reality and identified it as a high potential path to new revenue streams.

With my market research, I educated, championed, and began the dialogue within AT&T to apply these emerging technologies to our business strategy. As concrete demonstrations of strategic AR/VR plays, I sought out and developed strong partnerships with leaders in the industry to create cutting-edge projects.

In one such project, my partners and I created an augmented reality, spatial tagging tool for camera teams and film production crews using the Hololens in collaboration with FOX Studios.

In another, my partners and I developed hands-free, interactive, virtual reality entertainment experiences for hospitalized children and tested immersive entertainment as a form of distraction therapy.

Along with our numerous technology and design projects, marketing, partnerships, and thought leadership are similarly top of mind. I have contributed on visual design, information architecture, content strategy, startup partners, and developing marketing and brand collateral for several key initiatives, some of which are elaborated below.

Specifically, six times a year, we host the Futurecast Series, where we invite an honored guest to participate in a deconstructed panel where the curated audience is invited to participate in the conversation between the guest and moderator. Before the discussion, we also invite relevant startups to demo their latest and greatest to attendees. All our past and future events can be found on our website.

In 2016, we also began the Futurist Reports. In this series, we dig into technologies and trends while highlighting key insights that are reshaping entire industries and our world-at-large. Each report includes an industry-wide view from a diverse array of leading experts and features select startups at the forefront of technology. We delve into broader business implications of these technologies and explore indicators such as collaborations, investments, market demands, and technology advancements. Check out our latest reports on the Future of Drones and the Future of Entertainment.

In early 2014, I joined a small smart home startup called Leeo as a Product Manager leading our expansion into Enterprise Internet of Things (IOT). As the rest of our team worked on building and launching our first product, the Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight, a consumer, plug-and-play remote Smoke and Carbon Monoxide alarm monitor, I worked as a team with our co-founders to translate our company vision into our product suite, business, IP, and partnership strategy. In addition, I product managed our launch website, where I led the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners.

My time at Leeo was a huge personal growth experience. Before Leeo, I had primarily worked as an Engineer and Designer. However, at Leeo, I played significant roles in Business Development, Partnerships, New Product Exploration, Product Marketing, and Strategy. I joined looking to work on high-level problems and expand my skills and experience. I am fortunate to say that got exactly that, beyond what I had even imagined.

As the sole employee out of our small team of twenty responsible for expanding from consumer to enterprise, I set the path for how to approach our growth. I began with a market survey of enterprise IOT and discussing our company vision with the Founders. Once I had a solid foundation of our goals, the market landscape in several enterprise IOT industries, and our existing partnership base, I selected a few high potential industries and dove into qualitative user research.

I interviewed 100+ individuals in the course of a few months to learn about various industries, different roles, and what their needs were in the IOT space. With our executive team’s wide-ranging contacts in Real Estate, we especially dove into all forms of that industry from Hospitality to Multifamily Residential Housing. This research spurred countless conversations with our leadership to determine company strategy for the coming months and years, resulting in numerous patents (see below).

What started as exploratory user research transformed into so much more as well. We began to form strong partnerships with individuals and companies who wanted not only to help us with our research but also to collaborate on projects with and even invest in us. For instance, after our meeting with one utility company about product collaborations, they invested and joined our board. Thus began my first experience leading Business Development and Partner Relationship Management, reporting directly to the Founding team.

As the value of my work shined, I was soon able to grow my team. I hired and managed a colleague, and together we accomplished deeper market landscape analysis and research. Our work served instrumental in securing investors down the line when asked for our due diligence.

As the only team member who had ever shipped a consumer electronic product before, I was also often tapped to give advice on hardware product design. It was an honor to leverage my strong hardware engineering experience to be a resource to the team as they navigated contract manufacturers in Asia and industrial designers in San Francisco.

Three months before we publically launched our first product, we were in need of a Web Product Manager who could reliably deliver in a short period of time. I took this opportunity to step up to product manage our launch website.

I led our teams through the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners to ensure that we had a fully functional, responsive, product launch marketing page, e-commerce store, blog, support forum, and community forum to showcase our company and product in time for our mid October launch date.

This was yet another new growth opportunity for me. So far at Leeo, I had already had a significant impact in my roles in Business Development, Partnerships, and New Product Exploration. Now, I was offered another chance to play a leading role, this time in Software Product Management and Marketing, and I owned it. Our entire launch was seamless and it was rewarding to see how my work directly led to sales.

WO 2016040378 A3: Environmental monitoring devices and methods
US 20160071196 A1: Systems and methods for transferring data and revenue
US 20160072891 A1: Sensor-data sub-contracting during environmental monitoring
WO 2016007680 A1: Fault diagnosis based on connection monitoring
US 20160071219 A1: Dynamic insurance based on environmental monitoring
US 20160070614 A1: Identifying fault conditions in combinations of components
US 20160071184 A1: Service-improvements based on input-output analysis
US 20160071183 A1: Environmental monitoring device with event-driven service
US 20160071148 A1: Alert-driven dynamic sensor-data sub-contracting
US 20160070276 A1: Ecosystem with dynamically aggregated combinations of components
US 20160070920 A1: Constrained environmental monitoring based on data privileges

WO 2016032465 A1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9092060 B1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9304590 B2: Intuitive thermal user interface

WO 2016018269 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic
US 20160034010 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic

US 8967855 B1: Electronic device for determining external temperature
WO 2016028295 A1: Electronic device for determining external temperature

WO 2016032457 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20160061640 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20170038233 A1: Fluid-flow monitor

US 9213327 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9372477 B2: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20150268205 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9170625 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
WO 2016010529 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9116137 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20160018799 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions

In the Fall of 2011, I had the opportunity to re-design and develop a new website for an Indian medical electronics startup. Along with a friend of mine, we conducted initial user and market research, designed the user experience and interface, created all graphic and visual design assets, and developed the website using HTML, CSS, and JQuery for a remote client half-way across the world in India. We both had full-time positions as Mechanical Engineers at the time and used our evenings and weekends to work on this project.

Every minute, two people in the world die from Anemia–a completely curable disease! One may think that perhaps the cure is not well distributed, but that is not the case. In fact, the weak link in the chain boils down to lack of accurate diagnosis. With a false positive diagnosis and treatment, dangerous complications occur. With a false negative diagnosis, no life-saving treatment is offered.

Biosense’s TouchHb product addresses this key moment in the chain by providing a reliable, portable, non-invasive diagnostic to healthcare workers. TouchHb targets mobile healthcare workers in rural India with its low cost and minimal profile.

Our client asked us to re-design the existing Biosense website so that it was easier to use and more engaging.

After determining that the website’s target audience would be the health care workers in the field and potential investors as opposed to the rural patients, my partner and I began with researching how to best design a site that could convince our target audience that TouchHb was a valuable product in which to invest.

We studied the history of anemia, key statistics, and existing solutions. We learned that though information was plentiful, it was not common knowledge and scattered.

We interviewed potential website viewers. With investors, we found that our biggest obstacle with was demonstrating the importance and need of TouchHb for people of the emerging world. Investors often did not realize the extent of the problem and how a solution was right at their fingertips. As we interviewed healthcare workers, we learned that many were entrenched in the mindset that reliable anemia diagnostics were only available at larger hospitals and had to invasively draw blood. We needed to make it clear that that was not the only option available to them. A portable and non-invasive solution could now be purchased by individuals at a fraction of the cost.

We researched how to best share our knowledge and achieve these goals, and came to the conclusion that our website needed to tell a story. From there, we began designing and prototyping what an immersive storytelling experience might be.

As we dove into the storytelling and user experience, we worked to simplify our story down to absolute essentials. A full-page, immersive slideshow analogy began to form as our chosen tool of expression. We strove to make our design friendly, engaging, informative, and a clear call to action. We wireframed various iterations out on the whiteboard as we cycled through this process.

Since my partner and I were both the designers and engineers on this website, we were careful to design a website that achieved all our goals independently from engineering challenges. After we were confident in the framework of our design, we determined what the best way to code our solution. Naturally, we faced some key engineering tradeoffs. For instance, we wanted to use a CMS, but realized that our schedule and resources would not allow us to complete the design we wanted with a CMS.

When we handed off the completed website design to our client, we provided them with all the final code, visual assets, and a
guide to the code.

On the visual design side, we followed a similar process of iterative design with colors, graphics, photography, and individual page layout. Throughout the process, we checked in with our client to make sure that they were satisfied with our progress and we tested our designs through interviews, usability tests, surveys, and A/B testing.

We settled on using a theme of warm colors that had earthly tones along with a red to subtly reference the blood associated with anemia.

Let’s dive into our process for the front landing page. Our process for all the other pages was extremely similar.

For the front page, we created initial wireframes of full-screen slideshows as well as framed sliders. We explored where we wanted information to be presented, and how we wanted to indicate how a user was to interact with and move through our story.

As we regularly checked in with our client, we created prototypes to share our progress. We started with simple static prototypes and gradually progressed into functional prototypes.

Once we were confident with the framework of our website, we began prototyping our visual assets. We had several photoshoots where we played with colors, framing, and composition. In our first photoshoot, we rented a nice lens and photographed ourselves in preparation for when we hired a model and on the off chance we did not need one. After looking through our shots, we needed a model.

In our second photoshoot, we hired a model and coached her through the session. We played around with various backgrounds, attire, facial expressions, positioning, subjects, lighting, and composition. At the end of our session, we had a massive library to chose from for our story.

After choosing our top images, we created rough static mockups of key pages side by side for feedback. We used side by side comparisons to determine our final combination of photographs.

If you would like to learn more about Biosense’s ToucHb, watch their TEDx talk: A 20 second blood test without bleeding from 2013.

I joined Barnes and Noble’s Nook Media team in Fall 2011. Though the company headquarters are in New York, Nook headquarters were in Palo Alto. Nook functioned much like a startup within the larger company, where we had the advantages of agility and resources.

During my two and a half years at BN, I worked on the design of about ten tablets and accessories. Some were products I joined during the later stages of the development process and most were early concepts that we took through various stages of the development cycle.

Nook HD+ (shipped)
Nook HD (shipped)

As a Nook Product Designer, I was offered the opportunity to dive even deeper into Hardware Product Design through the mentorship of my team. Over the years, I worked on almost every subsystem in a tablet, including custom batteries, cosmetic housing and structural parts, displays and touch screens, audio systems, antennae, buttons, connectors, PCB and flexes, media and camera systems, and high-level system architecture.

In teams of three, we not only designed the overall system architecture and the detailed mechanical part design, but we also collaborated with internal Engineering, Marketing, and Operation teams and external ODMs, consultants, partners, vendors, and suppliers.

During my final months at BN, our team did a massive re-evaluation of our roadmap. We worked side by side with multiple design consultancies to brainstorm and strategize what direction we ought to take our products. Over the course of a few months, we used our user previous research data to settle on some unique experiences that would be enabled by innovative product form factors and materials. It was very exciting to push the bounds of what we think of as a typical reader and to not only make one unique experience but to also design a whole family of products that interplayed with each other.

While at BN, we invented a number of unique assembly techniques for consumer electronic device product design.

US 20140201997 A1: Method for split wire routing in a cavity for a device
US 20140204547 A1: Apparatus for split wire routing in a bracket for a device
US 20140201996 A1: Techniques for split wire routing for a bracket in a device

US 20140026411 A1: Techniques for efficient wire routing in a device
US 20140027166 A1: Techniques for efficient wire routing in electronic devices
US 20140029218 A1: Apparatus for efficient wire routing in a device

From March 2010 to June 2010 as part of Stanford d.school‘s prestigious Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class, I worked with a diverse team of four, including Engineers and MBAs, to help rural Indonesian farmers earn fast cash from the weeds in their farms and simultaneously minimize deforestation.

With The Easy Steam Machine, rural Indonesian farmers can increase their income. The Machine provides them an efficient way to produce steam for their home essential oil distillation units. By reducing the time to produce steam from hours to just a few minutes, The Machine enables farmers to process at least 25% more biomass per day! Time is saved by (1) increasing surface area, (2) heat insulation, and (3) including a continuous water flow through system. As a $230 plug-and-play replacement for the traditional batch drum, the Easy Steam Machine ensures durable, hassle-free steam distillation.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Traditional Batch Drum Distiller

The Easy Steam Machine

We worked with IBEKA, our NGO partner in Indonesia, to identify the core need of these farmers. For one week, two of my teammates visited, observed, and interviewed these farmers in their fields. We noticed that these farmers were battling with lemongrass as a weed in their farms, and as a result, expanding into fresh rainforests as they struggled to keep their farms going so they could support their families.

Interestingly, most farmers had systems in place to convert their lemongrass into crude lemongrass oil, which they could easily sell for fast cash. However, these distillation systems were left unused, because it took them three hours of valuable time to boil the water necessary to begin the distillation process.

Subsistence farmers in Indonesia need a way to process all of their lemongrass and patchouli into higher value essential oil. Currently, farmers leave up to twenty-five and seventy-five percent of their plant material unprocessed because their essential oil distillation device is too cumbersome and time-intensive. Given the short harvest period and the low throughput of their device, farmers must leave potential income in the field, unprocessed.

In order to increase the quantity of oil output, we focused on increasing both the throughput and the yield, i.e. doing a faster job and doing a better job. The Easy Steam Machine is a replacement, plug-and-play device that fits directly into the traditional system — which makes it less expensive than purchasing an entirely new device. It also lowers the barriers to adoption because farmers will feel familiar with the design and user interface.

Inefficiencies with Traditional Distillation

The Easy Steam Machine

There are four problems with the existing system that lower throughput and yield: stifled fire, biomass heat loss, poor water-to-fire interface, and high water maintenance. We address each of these with our system by designing a more efficient fire, biomass insulation, higher surface area, and water flow-through.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Check out a prototype in action:

We handed this project over to our partner IBEKA to execute and distribute this among their served communities.

Read our implementation plan here.

Read our final presentation here.

Read more about the d.school class Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability here.