HiiCCE: An air conditioning barrel cools backyards and apartment blocks
In the Cross Innovation Class, interdisciplinary student teams developed solutions for the Resilient City.
The challenge
The team from the Hamburg-based company Hiicce (Hamburg Institute for Innovation, Climate Protection and Circular Economy) focussed on extreme weather in the city. The initial question for the students was: What do extreme weather events mean for Hamburg's municipal cleaning services and how can they respond to them?
Output
The team of students from the Product Design, IT Engineering, Urban Planning and Business Informatics departments developed a technically functional prototype in just one semester and won this year's audience award. Extreme weather in Hamburg means not only heavy rain showers but also heat waves. And that is a problem, because the rise in temperature in cities can also become a social problem. Concrete buildings store heat and intensify the heat in cities. As a result, it does not cool down properly at night and air conditioning is not available everywhere. One way to cool down heat-prone apartment blocks is to green the concrete shells of rubbish containers.
The result is "Die KlimaTonne", a planted reinforced concrete box that stores water during heavy rainfall and cools the waste inside the bin.
Team: Johanna Simon (HCU), Amely Hesse (HCU), Malte Anton Koch (HCU), Thies Frederik Rapen (FH-Wedel), Jannes Wegner (FH-Wedel), Sascha Witzel (AMD)
"The cross-innovation approach is the big plus of the class, as it creates new impulses and different ways of thinking."
Format & method
In the Cross Innovation Class, students from three to six different universities work in interdisciplinary teams on the practical challenges of the project partners.
- The process follows the logic of design thinking: in iterative feedback loops with the partners, the teams approach a solution step by step.
- The entire process is managed by the Cross Innovation Hub team and accompanied by trained facilitators.
- Prototypes can be created and tested in the workshops of the partner universities.
Cross Innovation Class #4 took place in the summer semester 2022 on the topic of Resilient Cities.
Our partner: HiiCCE
HiiCCE is a pioneer, driving force and thought leader in the field of circular economy. As a merger of Stadtreinigung Hamburg, the former JOMA-Umwelt-Beratungsgesellschaft and the Sustainable Resource and Waste Management working group at TU Hamburg, HiiCCE combines expertise from the fields of waste management, science and environmental consulting under one roof.
