Vivian van Gaal is a cultural program maker. She currently works as head of public affairs at MU art space at Strijp-S. In recent years she has worked on many projects in the fields of art, technology and education at STRP Festival, Tante Netty, Woensel Super Toll! and Studium Generale.

Peter Kentie is managing director at Eindhoven365, the company responsible for the city marketing of Eindhoven region. He is fond of complex, multifaceted, multi-stakeholder projects related to marketing and brand building. Peter is one of the co-founders of STRP Festival and in recent years he has worked as marketing and media manager at PSV, was chair of the board at Baltan Laboratories and has been closely involved with the Dutch Design Week. He has a big passion for Estonia and supports the country in reaching a bigger audience.

University Racing Eindhoven (URE), a student team from the TU Eindhoven, aims to educate engineers in a practical manner while they study. To do this, URE participates in the renowned Formula Student Electric competition every year. A team of about 50 students, full-time and part-time, make this happen. By combining the knowledge of multiple disciplines like Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Automotive Engineering and Computer Science, an Electric Formula Student Racecar is build.This year the competition has introduced a driverless part, aiming for even more ingenuity in this competition. URE aims to participate in FS Driverless in the summer of 2018. To do this

Road- and object-detection is of upmost importance. A LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging system) would seem the most logical choice, but also an expensive one. Jesse is looking for advice about a less expensive, but effective alternative to LIDAR with the driverless automotive industry in mind.

More information about URE.

Uni—Sex is a project that started with a visual analysis of unisex fashion campaigns. While studying how the male and female body are displayed in a genderless image, Floriane observed the visual codes and tried to understand their social meaning. Her research has developed as a forecast on how unisex fashion imagery should evolve to adapt to modern conceptions of gender. She is looking for formats and narratives that work best to portray her research in contemporary media. At Bliksem en Donderdag she is hoping to hear about outsider’s expectations and feedbacks and is looking for a brainstorm on which media she can use and in which way.

More information about Uni-Sex. 

Lia is a wearable device and a mobile application that helps people develop a habit of a good posture by training your muscles. It does that by tracking your posture and shoulder position using sensors located on each shoulder. Lia works very simply: when you slouch, or have your shoulders aligned improperly, you get notified about it! Lia is a new way of treating your posture, while boosting confidence and preventing health issues. It gently attaches to skin, giving the most accurate results, while staying discrete underneath clothes.
Our device communicates with the user via our app, reminding him or her to not only correct the posture, but also to even out the shoulders. We recently hear a lot of people saying that the problem with wearables is that after using them for a month, people forget about them or leave somewhere on a shelf and never use them again. How to prevent that?

Read more about Lia.

The Vditory eyeglasses are meant to be used by blind people, who can wear them like normal glasses. The aim of Vditory glasses is to change blind people’s lives and to enable them to interact more with the community. Vditory can read any text in front of the user, in more than one language and even if it was upside down. Vditory can describe everything around the user, recognize people’s gender, age, emotion and their faces as well. Vditory can also recognize currency and colours. At Bliksem en Donderdag Mohammed is looking for recommendations about product design, manufacturing, and prototyping for Vditory.

More information about Vditory.

The increased presence of robots in our world scares lots of people. They tend to think robots will cost millions of jobs. But can robots also create jobs and employment? Can they empower those who are currently having trouble finding a job because of the specific situation they are in?

That is what the Empowered by Robots-challenge is about. It focusses on the following questions: How can we ensure that people who have difficulty to find and retain a job can make use of opportunities, enabled by robots and other technologies to execute new jobs? Could robots possibly provide employees with superpower, unique qualities which increase their working chances? What technologies and people will hire themselves out at the employment agency of the future?

This design competition challenges designers, technicians, students, start-ups, robot enthusiasts, engineers, futurists and everyone with a fondness for robots and humans to reflect on new jobs in an automated labour market. At Bliksem and Donderdag the team is hoping to gather participants for their challenge.

More information about Empowered by Robots.