ResponDrone presents project objectives and first results at the kick-off meeting of the H2020 project INGENIOUS

The ResponDrone Project is gradually taking on shape and already beginning to prove its potential value to other projects dealing with similar, relevant fields of interest.

Two members of the ResponDrone project, coordinator Max Friedrich from the German Aerospace Center-DLR and expert team member Prof. Arthur Khalatyan from the American University of Armenia were invited to attend the kick-off meeting of the new EU Horizon 2020 project INGENIOUS in Porto Heli, Greece on September 18, 2019.

The Ingenious project seeks to “develop, integrate, test, deploy and validate a “Next Generation Integrated Toolkit (NGIT) for Collaborative Response”, with a view to ensuring maximum protection for FR and an improved operational capacity to deal with human and natural disasters.

The ResponDrone presence at the kick-off meeting served to present the project’s overall operational rationale along with the timeline of its planned activities.

Above all it provided the conference participants with distinct insights based on the key findings from the end-user study conducted by ResponDrone and highlighted the need to ensure that end users are integrally linked into the process right from the early design stage.

The most important contribution from ResponDrone to the kick-off meeting dialogue was the emphasis on the need to connect the project deliverables to the practical end user requirements in the field. Careful and precise selection of stakeholders as well as engaging in a multi-level dialogue with all relevant parties was found to be crucial to the study process. As such, the team focused on asking the correct questions in order to derive requisite answers providing crucial information about requirements related to system design and testing of the system in a realistic scenario.

The importance of a constant dialogue between system designers and end users was especially emphasized. This dialogue is crucial for ensuring that the system design meets the actual, practical requirements of the various end users and not simply what the system developers themselves deem valid, as this might actually fail to address what is really needed in the field.

This was underscored by the ResponDrone representatives at the INGENIOUS kick-off meeting and is precisely the objective of the upcoming ResponDrone Design Thinking Workshop to be held in November 2019 in Thessaloniki, Greece. 

Here the focus will be placed on creating ResponDrone system mock-ups that specifically consider the ideas and needs of the end users. As Max and Arthur so succinctly put it, we need to avoid “building the wrong thing right”!