Vodafone 5G Challenge for Smart Cities & Smart Campus

Polifactory together with Vodafone, ANT Lab – research laboratory working on communication network from DEIB department of Politecnico di Milano – and Exprivia, they  organized the initiative Vodafone 5G Challenge for Smart City & Smart Campus. The project is about the pre-commercial experimentation of the 5G technology supported by the Ministry of Economic Development and assigned to Vodafone inside the metropolitan area of Milan. The initiative is dedicated to the students of Design and Engineering courses of Politecnico di Milano who accepted the challenge to put themselves to the test to propose and develop innovative solutions for the future cities. Solutions that use the most innovative aspects of the 5G technology, ranging between Smart Bins, Smart Parking, Smart Gate, Smart Lighting, Smart Directions, Environmental Monitoring. The project has been divided in three phases: Solution Design Hackathon, Project Development e Demo Day.

Solution Design Hackathon two days (5th – 6th April 2019, at Polifactory) where over than 50 selected young designers (initially over than 90 applications) has been invited to compete to design innovative product or service solutions based on 5G technology. Eleven projects developed and presented during a pitch along to a demonstration based on a quick-and-dirty prototype in front of a panel of experts. Three of them has been selected to pass to the next step of Project Development.

Project Development: the three selected teams has had 12 weeks to pursue the development of their projects, creating an evolved prototype of their initial solution based on 5G technology. To doing so, they has been supported by Polifactory, ANT Lab and Vodafone in the fields of design, digital fabrication, communication networks and 5G technology.

Demo Day: at the end of the Project Development phase, the teams has presented their own project and advanced prototype during the Demo Day (July 2019), a final presentation event concluded with the selection and award ceremony of the winning team that consists in a paid internship at Vodafone Italy.