10Clouds welcomes a group of work experience students from IAMCore in Amsterdam

Last week, we were very pleased to host a group of students from IAMCore, a Study Association for the Communication and Multimedia Design study at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. They came to find out about the types of projects that we handle at 10Clouds and to get a taste of software development and design in Poland. There were 22 students in total and they were split into two groups working on a couple of very exciting projects – details below.

Group 1’s mission

Currently, there are about 3,000 EV charging stations in the city. In order for this plan to be a success, Amsterdam needs to build 16,000 to 23,000 EV charging stations by 2025 (TheGuardian, 2019). How can we, designers and technologists, design a solution for 2030 that also takes technology into consideration to allow Amsterdam citizens to easily book a charging station and charge their EV?

Results:

It was great discussing transport solutions with the IAMCore students in this group and getting their thoughts on the future of transport in Amsterdam, Warsaw and other cities. They really got on board with the above task and came up with some great ideas, including:

• One group suggested a solution that takes advantage of AI that will learn about your schedule and routine to suggest charging times and points
• Another had a specific approach to make transparent when you can charge, introducing community aspects that tap into the psychological side of users
• A further group adopted a simple approach which focused on charging station availability with the option to reserve slots
• And lastly, one approach ensured all types of users are taken into consideration depending on their needs. They also thought ahead, wanting to create a parking garage to charge your car, eliminating the problem of needing to find an available station.

Group 2’s mission

A banking client has asked us to design a new app for them and they’ve told us that they have two major requirements: for the system to be totally secure, but also for it to be easy to use.

Design a user authentication and account recovery that guarantee the security of user accounts against typical attacks, without impeding their ability to use the service. Focus on both the technological and UX aspects of the solution.

Results:

It was great hearing all of the innovative solutions offered by the IAMCore students in this group, who really engaged with the task. The ideas that were presented included:

The IAMCore students went above and beyond in preparing some very ambitious and forward-thinking solutions to the task set before them.

• One group created an authentication flow based on heavily leaning into mobile phones as physical authentication devices, and fell back to offline authentication via post when it came to handling registration and deregistration of said devices. It was radical of them to set the mobile phone possession as a hard requirement of the use of their service, but it allowed them to sidestep a lot of security issues inherent to using phone numbers for this. They also presented a very clever UI alternative to the traditional PIN entry – a widget similar in functionality to a physical safe dial.
• The second group increased the scope of the task of their own volition, choosing to solve the authentication problem in a centralized, government-backed fashion, as opposed to only doing it for a single web service. Their idea was to rely solely on biometric data stored in an immutable blockchain-like database, maintained by a centralized governing body, which all web services could then use as an authentication provided, much like Google and Facebook are currently used with OAuth2. It was a futuristic vision facing a potentially long and politically difficult path towards a working implementation, but nonetheless very well thought out and provocative.

A great day was had by all and we at 10Clouds felt we learnt a lot from the students ourselves. It’s always amazing to have a broad range of minds focussed on a common project!

Want to find out more about working with us? Looking to start a project? Drop us a line on hello@10clouds.com and we’ll email you right back!