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Rainproof

Team

Almar Mulder lykermulder@gmail.com
Jeffrey Gyamfi jeffogya@gmail.com
Dymphie Burger dymphieburger@gmail.com

Commissioner: Amsterdam Rainproof

Description

The risk of local floodings due to heavy rains is increasing in the Netherlands. How can we encourage and engage citizens to take action? Together with Amsterdam Rainproof, an Amsterdam based collective for sustainable water management, we will design solutions and gain awareness for this issue.

DIY: rain beer!

Who does not like beer, please raise your hand!

Nobody, right, everybody likes beer. In the first sprint, our coach Joris, was brewing his own beer with his Hema brewing kit and had an idea. He had to use a lot of water, and thought that you could also use rainwater in the beer brewing process. This is a way to save drinking water, but also to use rainwater and make your house more rainproof.

There are many people who drink rainwater, whether it is safe to drink will depend on the environment and whether you cleaned it. If you for example have a lot of particulate matter or other types of air pollution in your environment, you will need a more serious approach for cleaning the water. Besides that, rain water does not contains salt and will have similar effects on your health as demineralised water. It is drinkable, but not if it is the only source of water for you, so “geniet, maar drink met mate”  (enjoy, but do not drink too much).

In order to make our beer safe for consumption, we boiled the water, which removed all the organic pollutants. To make it safer, destillation or filtering would be a better idea, because there might still be heavy metals, anorganic pollutants and acids in there. Not so healthy. We will analyse the beer in the lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied science whether the beer is totally safe for consumption.

For those who are interested, Joris uses a Hema beer brewing kit, you can find instructions on brewing beer here.

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The last part of sprint 2

So, what is the rainproof team doing a sprint later? This morning were the peer pitches, where every team gives a short presentation about the results of their sprint and what they want to do in the next sprint. Our goal was to deliver two concepts with a low fidelity prototype and a small report that explains the two concepts.

In our translate session we discussed our concepts with Amsterdam Rainproof and after that, we explained why we chose to focus on two concepts. The New Lake concept and the Raingers! game concept. We chose these two, because they would be effective to raise awareness and engage people, whilst also being doable.

New Lake

If you already forgot what New Lake was about, the idea is to create a platform that connects citizens (private homeowners) to industry professionals and provides information about rainproofing your house. They can also upload ideas, give feedback and invest in projects. Professionals can join projects. When a project has been executed, the “idea” could be sold on the platform.

photo

photo (1) A user storyboard for New Lake

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Laser cutting a prototype

Every wednesday, all the MediaLAB interns have workshops, and today we had a laser cutting and adobe illustrator workshop. Every team should make a file in adobe illustrator that could be used by the laser cutter. We decided to make a prototype for our board game and to draw the board. Combined with information from waternet, we gave a ranking to each borough how rainproof it was on average.  The more “rainproof” the borough was, the higher it would be on the board.

The illustration

The illustration

Then we went to the makers lab and got an explanation how the laser cutter worked and decided to cut the boroughs out of cardboard multiple times. After that, we paste them back on each other again, the more “rainproof” boroughs were cut out more than the less “rainproof” boroughs.

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