Students revamp, improve everyday objects in Cornerstone Design

Everyday objects aren’t always well designed. From poor ergonomics to bad aesthetics to wasteful or unsustainable materials, many of the things we use all the time can be improved. 

Mines students in the Spring 2024 Cornerstone Design Competition took on the challenge to make existing objects more useful and less wasteful. The teams presented their solutions at a final in-person pitch event May 2.

The winning team – which took home $1,000 – was Team Anything, which focused on encouraging Colorado residents to use public transportation more often. Their solution was a bus stop indicator, which displays real-time information to riders, enhancing the experience and making the service easier to utilize. Members of Team Anything were Bryce Jewell, Aaron Siegle, Yoshi Taitano, Jordan Lam and Oscar Ambriz.

Second place and a $500 prize went to VACT, which aimed to make at-home medication injections less intimidating and more user-friendly for children and their families. The team created an injection practice doll, making it easier to practice injections while also storing all of the needed materials. Members of VACT were Asher McMahon, Chloe Russell, Tommy Medina and Veronica Sherman.

Third place and a prize of $250 went to Off the Walker, which created a padded device prototype that can be added to walkers to help users improve their posture and overall experience. Members of Off the Walker were Krishna Divakarla, Ava Osborne, Rob Laurie and Ben McKnelly. 

The Subject Matters Experts Pick and $250 went to ¡Sound Waves!, which created a device that would allow flute players to practice their instrument without disturbing others. Team members were Nevan Orozco, Cameron Johnson, Hannah Shaw and Zachariah Gebhart.

Cornerstone Design is a signature Mines undergraduate student experience that provides students with the opportunity to apply STEM tools and skills to address a real-world, open-ended problem with a novel design validated through stakeholder engagement, research, prototype building and testing, and analysis.  Students engage with real people outside the classroom to ensure that they are addressing the needs of those experiencing the problem and receiving guidance from professionals and experts.  

For the first time, Cornerstone Design students this semester were able to use the newly opened Labriola Innovation Hub to work on their projects.

“The Cornerstone Design Competition is our favorite time of the semester as we, students, faculty and staff alike, all get to experience the culmination of our students’ design and problem-solving journeys,” said Yosef Allam, director of Cornerstone Design. “Project teams redesigned existing designs to better serve identified stakeholders while simultaneously maximizing utilization of the new, world-class Labriola Innovation Hub making and building facilities. The Cornerstone Workshop in the Labriola Innovation Hub was a buzz of activity for three consecutive months as students learned new hands-on skills and applied them towards realizing functional prototypes of their new redesigns.”