And the Winner is…

We’ve had an amazing time during the course of launching and coordinating #ProtoComp2015 in partnership with Unisys. Week 3’s Crash Courses and prototyping work sessions are set to begin tomorrow evening, and we wanted to take a moment to announce our Judging Panel that will assess the teams final product on May 13th.

Christina Watters – Christina is a Consulting Engineer in the Forward/ClearPath Forward Engineering organization at Unisys Corporation in Malvern, PA. Christina is responsible for business and engineering process architecture including the selection of open source tools that facilitate software development, build, release, and test, supporting Agile environments. She was instrumental in engineering the framework for open source technology compliance and is currently driving the software distribution model.

Christina has been with Unisys for over 37 years. During this time she has managed geographically diverse software and hardware professionals and provided leadership in process design for ASIC’s, printed circuit boards and hardware and software projects. Christina has a BS in Legal Studies from Kaplan University, holds three process patents and is a certified SCRUM Master and Agile Product Owner.

Jim Thompson – Jim is the Chief Engineer and Vice President of Engineering and Supply Chain at Unisys. In this role, Jim is responsible for the design, development and manufacture of technology products that align with the Unisys’ strategy and marketplace needs.

Jim’s career with Unisys spans 27 years in various customer facing and engineering roles. He is also responsible for creating the vision and architecture for Unisys’ modern mission critical products such as ClearPath, Stealth and Forward! Prior to joining Unisys, Jim held various technical positions in financial institutions and commercial firms, as well as being an independent consultant.

Jim holds technology patents in the areas of operating systems, storage and banking. In 2015, in recognition of driving innovation at Unisys, Jim was awarded the prestigious Corporate Innovation Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Philadelphia Section.

Michael Salsburg – Michael is the Chief Architect for Unisys cloud solutions. He’s been fascinated by computing and automation since he was 14 and has been in business for well over forty years.

Michael’s career at Unisys has taken a lot of twists and turns. He admits to being somewhat of a recidivist. He worked for Unisys from 1982 to 1990, and then left Unisys to create his own company called Performance and Modeling. As a consultant, he worked with Unisys and other companies to model computer performance and predict its impact on application service level objectives.

Before leaving, Michael was the architect for all Unisys performance products. His company was bought by a rising star in Silicon Valley, for whom he served as CTO and corporate officer.

In 2002, Michael returned to Unisys and have continued pursuing the idea that computing should be focused on optimal delivery of services to the business. Infrastructure based on cloud concepts provides the foundation to achieve this goal. He’s written over 60 papers on these concepts and presented them throughout the world.

Chris Dima – Chris launched Walnut St. Labs in December 2013 with the help of a community of innovators in the area. He leads strategic development at Walnut St. Labs, including the overall model, the incubator and partnerships.

Walnut St. Labs is an innovation lab in downtown West Chester, PA. It’s provides co-working space, a robust events calendar, including two weekly events, and an early stage incubator. Walnut St. Labs is focused on developing its new model that will more efficiently productize and commercialize early-stage innovation — assisting innovators getting new ideas to market.

Chris drives strategy and business development for MongoSluice, cutting-edge big data tool. MongoSluice dynamically creates schema from unstructured data in NoSQL and then streams strongly-typed data to any RDBMS datastore.

Peter LoBue – Peter‘s educational background was driven by his passion to learn about how computers work. Research in Human Computer Interaction and Design Thinking has since attracted my attention to caring more about how people work and how technology influences their behavior.

As an Experience Designer, Peter has had the pleasure of solving human problems, making use of my technology skills and collaborating with all types of personalities and roles. His most recent employment provided him with experience in a wide range of projects, from the more technical sides of design (usability, interaction design) to more strategic (service design, web strategy) facets.

Peter led #ProtoComp2015’s Week One Crash Course on rapid prototyping and showed the contestants how to create an effective user interface design, including how to test assumptions with potential users and incorporate findings into the design process. Rapid prototyping is the activity of tweaking your prototype over time to get the desired feedback, while also visually documenting your findings. He discussed the process in detail and presented some killer examples.

Chadwick Wingrave Presents Creativity to Product Crash Course

Throughout the process of the Unisys/Walnut St. Labs’ Prototyping Competition (#ProtoComp2015), the Walnut St. Labs team regularly congregates to plan the coordination of its upcoming installments. Each week, we find ourselves continually saying, “Surely this week we’ll have a smaller turnout and things will finally start to dial down”, and each Wednesday we are confronted with just how high the level of extinction rate truly is for this event. People are so excited to come back each week, learn new things and show us made they’re made of. It’s been super exciting!

We’re ending out Week Two of with almost every representative of each team present for tonight’s bootcamp and advisement sessions. Despite the fact that we’ve tailored a variety of content to aid in the process of building a User Interface, much of the wireframes’ architecture is left to be imagined by the group. It’s inspiring to see each team form uniquely interesting approaches and finding different means to execute their directives.

At such a pivotal stage in the competition, teams are responsible for transitioning between throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks to turning their best ideas into a tangible and organized deliverables. Brainstorming is one thing, but really sculpting one’s ideas into an effective end product is an entirely different animal.

Breaking out of our existing thinking, to create an innovative and effective product, is as much inspiration as it is process. Chad Wingrave hit on what it means to be creative and what is takes to turn those creative juices into a product, or productize it. He discussed the methods to rapidly explore design ideas, and end with approaches for quick and dirty evaluations that shape further design.

#ProtoComp2015 is breaking new ground. We’re creating a platform for interested parties to learn new skills and be given the chance to build something new, in a collaborative and supportive environment. We want to see our community grow and adapt with us and we’re incredibly grateful to see how incredibly enriching the entire experience has been for all involved parties.

Traditional methodologies have suggested that organizations lacking in immediate or specialized internal skills to necessary to execute new projects should focus on more cost effective solutions, like outsourcing. Within recent years, the wide spread organizational pivot to outsourcing has all but taken over. Countless creative projects have since been redirected towards crowdsourcing solutions and the momentum by our account seem to be picking up.

Crowdsourcing changed the game and provided a new way to keep creative efforts cheap and local. Instead giving away all our creative potential to other countries, lets put our heads together and create something awesome! Jim Thompson illustrates, “I truly believe this is what the future of R&D looks like. Forget outsourcing, nothing quite like collaborative organic development to challenge the status quo and get out of the box. Think of it as Crowdsourcing 2.0!”

Week One: The Competition Begins

The Launch Party last week was a total blast, but the real ‘meat and potatoes’ of this project, the creative core, has only just begun. We were floored to see the extent of community interest at #ProtoComp2015 launch, and were futhermore encouraged to see that almost everyone who partied with us last week, not only signed up, but showed up for Week One to compete.

The teams got the Unisys’ backstory from Jim Thompson, the VP of Software Engineering and Supply Chain. He was able to shed some light on the Unisys’ 118 year-long challenge with building design elements, that began with the typewriter.

Local UI and UX Designer, Peter LoBue, explained that to create an effective user interface design, you must test assumptions with potential users and incorporate your findings into the design process. Peter showed the power Rapid Prototyping by explaining the process of tweaking prototypes over time to get the desired feedback, while also visually showing how to document your findings.

Peter introduced a UI design tool to the #ProtoComp2015 team that is taking the design world by storm. InVision is making  the designer iteration process so that virtually anyone can take a solid design idea and create a professional-grade design element, or wireframe. InVision’s work to created such an accessible utility seem like the perfect candidate for a competition such as our with an identical mission.

Kyle Nahrgang of Unisys shared how Agile + Scrum methodologies streamline team-based software engineering decisions and action plans by encouraging thorough organization and constant feedback. With Agile + Scrum, a team will have a clear understanding of the work that has been done, is being done and will be done. This crash course focused on the basics of what Scrum is and how it’s helpful.

Very few places in the United States are opening their doors to facilitate conversational level technology education, and offering an inclusive opportunity to build something from scratch in a creative group environment.  The work we’re doing is setting the pace for what for-profit organizations and educational institutions will do in the future, and we don’t take this lightly. We’re grateful to all the people that collaborated with us on Week One and we can’t wait to see what comes out of Week Two. Thank you for recognizing that the best way to buck ‘Status Quo’ obsolescence is to actively work towards the solution. Walnut St. Labs is raising the collective consciousness of technology one event at a time. Join us.