The Battles are on!

Only two days to go and the Museum Battle and Media Battle are being kicked off, this time in Enschede. An odd 150 – 160 students from Utrecht’s and Enschede’s Universities of Applied Sciences will pressure cook a concept for their real-time assignors. The briefings will be given in Enschede and our Utrecht students will then work three days in Utrecht to finally pitch in Enschede again on Friday. As I am partially back in the classroom myself as a university student, I wont be able to join ‘my’ guys and girls in Enschede. But I will most certainly help them out during the three days in the creative boot camp at Hal16 in Utrecht.
Although in Dutch, I recommend the Media Battle’s website. The battle has been going on twice a year for a while now and I must say, the results are pretty spectacular. Early September I participated in the previous battle with five groups of students attending the minor Mobile Business Design. The Media Battle was a starter for a half year of intensive mobile business designing of what started as a creative idea during the battle. And I must say, the assignments were really tough.
There was Hoog Caterijne, asking a solution to guide people through the busiest shopping street/complex in Holland during a long-term refurbishment. There was a group of entrepreneurs looking for ways of attracting new commercial settlers in their shopping street, not far fro m the historical center of Utrecht. There was the Harbor Museum of Rotterdam – one of the world’s largest harbors – asking for a solution to guide visitors through their open air and free of charge museum. And there was the City of Utrecht’s Archive asking for a mobile application to help people wandering through Utrecht, taking them back three hundred years ago when the Treaty of Utrecht was negotiated and finally signed; a great diversity of stunningly complex questions that need answers from our students.
SO, as of Monday, my 8 teams in the course eBusiness & Marketing and many other students will crack their brains over new assignments that need to be pressure-cooked. I really am enjoying my livelihood.

Tagged with: saxxion, hu, utrecht, museum battle, media battle,

Utrecht Crowd Surfing

A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.

Tagged with: utrecht, crowd surfing, central station, youtube,