Florian, from the Ulmer Nest team, clarified that, strictly speaking, they didn’t create the project at all—someone else did. “We initially created sort of a ‘think tank’/’creative lab’ project as a team here in Ulm with the (maybe a little bit bold) idea that everyone can drop off their respective problem, whatever it may be, for us to solve it—basically we wanted to challenge ourselves a little bit, being a so far decently successful interdisciplinary team of six designers and technologists,” he explained.

“Before that, we chose some experts whose task was to decide which of the submitted problems we actually would have to work on, for 48 hours each. And then, the city of Ulm basically submitted their ‘problem’ which was something along the lines of, ‘We’ve got homeless people who can’t go to shelters, and we don’t want them to freeze to death—can you do something about this?’ And our experts selected this as a task for us to work on.”