Yves Behar, Daniel Zarem and fuseproject's Entry for the COVENT-19 Challenge

The CoVent-19 Challenge

The CoVent-19 Challenge is the creation of 13 anesthesiologists and advisors from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston-area who have come together to help overcome the ventilator supply crisis during the devastating the COVID-19 pandemic. As experts in mechanical ventilation and frontline workers fighting COVID-19, they seek to develop low-cost, rapidly manufacturable solutions to support heavily burdened modern medical facilities. CoVent's goal is to close the gap between our actual resources and those in need around the world.

The CoVent-19 Challenge is an open innovation 12-week Grand Challenge for engineers, innovators, designers, and makers. The Challenge launched on the GrabCAD Challenges platform on April 1, 2020. The general admission round resulted in over 213 entries from 43 countries. Seven teams were invited to participate in the invite-only finalist round (details below). The Baxter Academy team is one of the 7 finalists. The invited teams are receiving access to additional resources for completing their ventilator designs and support in creating functional prototypes, including test kits, test lungs, and testing protocols. The prototypes will be evaluated using a test bed to determine which design provides the best combination of performance, safety, reliability, manufacturability, affordability, and simplicity. The final ventilator designs are due to CoVent on June 21st and will then be evaluated by a team of expert medical and technical panelists.

Team Name: fuseproject + Accenture + CIONIC

Team: The overall fuseproject + Accenture + CIONIC team is led by Senior Industrial Engineer Daniel Zarem and a team of 8 designers and creatives from the design consultancy fuseproject, based in San Francisco. Other team members include Dan Semo, Judy Leung, Jayati Sinha, Jaehon Jung, MC Abbott, Eric Oesterle, Qin Li and Harriet Zhou.

Members of the extended team include 3 engineers from Accenture's Seattle office, Brad Laird, Eric Spaulding and Jonathan Schreven. Two team members from ICONIC include Jeremiah Robison and Tyler Smith.

The three groups are operating as a virtual team from their lockdown locations in San Francisco and Seattle, conducting all of their work, including user interviews, remotely. Much of their work was conducted asynchronously, using remote design collaboration tools like Miro, Interestingly, the core fueproject team approached this global innovation tournament with a different orientation than the other finalists in that they are designers first and foremost. I think you'll get a clear sense of this mindset if you watch the video and listen to Daniel and the fuseproject's CEO Yves Behar.

Here is a 6.5 minute video that introduces you to the team and the interim design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trMOjdNOIuI&t=5s

The commercial entity, fuseproject is a San Francisco and New York based design and branding firm established by Yves Behar in 1999. He has also simultaneously served as Chief Creative Officer at Jawbone, where his work helped the company become a leader in wearable and audio consumer electronics. Behar is also the Creative Co-Founder of OUYA, an open sourced gaming platform, and is Co-founder of start-up August, a next generation home entry system. Yves' has had other collaborations with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, GE, Puma, PayPal, SodaStream, Samsung, Issey Miyake, Prada and many others.