Bryce Irving

Curious College Creations

Reflections on Innovation

by Bryce Irving 5 min read

Here, I reflect on my innovation through a series of assignments and projects that challenged me. Whether the challenge was to reuse existing ideas, pivot when needed, or collaborate with others, each experience helped me hone my ingenuity, teamwork, and creative problem-solving skills that are needed to tackle the grand challenges. Further, I revisited these class lessons later on in my education which allowed my ideas about innovation to continue to grow and change. Read on to see how my experiences inside and outside of class have prepared me for a future in engineering that values innovation and entrepreneurship.

Introduction

Before I begin with my experience, what exactly are the Grand Challenges and why should you care? The Grand Challenges are the product of an NAE-sponsored report and encompass 14 critical areas—from medicine to infrastructure to more—that represent opportunities for transformative engineering over the coming generations. As a student in the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, I gain hands-on experience and develop skills relevant to handling these large issues. This post, along with several others, forms my portfolio, unifying my college experiences across five key categories: innovation, service, research, interdisciplinary, and multicultural. Here, I focus on my growth in innovation. The Grand Challenges are grouped into four themes: joy of living, health, security, and sustainability. I completed this innovation component with a focus on sustainability and achieved experience level by completing a relevant honors electives.

Throughout my time at Mines, I discovered that innovation is not just about transformative new ideas—it’s about creating value. In this post, I reflect on my experiences, class projects, and competitions that have shaped my approach to engineering. Whether through designing a wind-up toy or visualizing Earth data, these experiences taught me the importance of ingenuity, teamwork, and utilizing existing tools to solve complex problems. Continue reading below, where I will share these relevant experiences, starting with one of the first classes I took: Grandey, Leadership by Design (LbD).

The Ant Project

My very first project in the LbD class was a simple exercise in innovation: the mover project. The requirements: make something that moves. Tasked with creating anything that could move, I chose an ant because I thought (and still think) animals are cool. I began with two things I have since never had to do in any class: sketches and SolidWorks. Then began the first challenge, which was devising a movement mechanism. I tried thinking about using rubber bands or other things, but eventually I decided instead of reinventing the wheel, I reuse a wind-up mechanism from a toy. Using a pre-existing solution frees up time to spend on more demanding aspects. The second challenge required me to pivot. I wanted to use the laser cutter to build my final product, having used one before. But since it was broken, I instead took a class on how to 3D print. Eventually, my 3D printed ant came together, and reflecting on this experience I learned that using whatever is available, including repurposing existing things, can be a large part of innovation.

The Museum Exhibit

Moving along to the end of the semester, I did a project that also required me to break a large project into something simple for a non-technical audience to understand. This project had us create a museum exhibit, which centered on the global challenge of clean water. Our team initially aimed to cover the entire spectrum of water issues, like the history, current state, proposed solution, and so on, but soon learned that focus was key. We then targeted a more emotional experience by featuring a water quality test inspired by real challenges faced in places like Haiti. I borrowed a water quality meter from the library (again using resources that are available to me) and set up cups with varying “qualities”—water with or without a drop of lemonade or coke to create deceptive readings. The task of visitors to this exhibit was to simply drink the water regardless of the meter reading. I have already stated that to innovate means to create value. This exhibit taught me that sometimes it means removing any complexity to deliver a clear, impactful message to any audience.

Reflection

There were many other assignments and experiences in Leadership by Design class, but the two I have showcased highlight skills that I learned and continued to use in my classes and extracurriculars. Coming from a computer science background, I never imagined I’d be sketching and building physical prototypes, and may never again. Yet, through each project I learned that effective innovation is about simplicity, strategy, and usability, not solely groundbreaking inventions. Enhancing what already exists to better address human needs is needed and important in addressing the Grand Challenges. This journey has instilled in me a more pragmatic and empathetic approach to engineering challenges. Now, let’s follow these lessons learned deeper into my time at college.

The NASA Hackathon Experience

I’ve always been drawn to the excitement of hackathons, even though I knew they were challenging. In one doomed-to-fail experience, I teamed up with a friend to tackle an anomaly detection model for a company’s data. We were completely lost and could not finish the competition, but I kept my eye open for other hackathons where I might do better. Fast forward, I joined the DrivenData Open Earth Data visualization competition; however, this was well before I was familiar with visualization tools I would learn later in college. After some trial and error with technology like Tableau and Pygwalker, which proved to be too complex for the short timeframe allotted, I found inspiration in simple, effective visualizations from online examples of a different hackathon. These examples used basic shapes and simple ratios to represent more complicated data. With this as inspiration, I created a Python script to analyze the change in atmospheric methane data over 20 years. This script gave me a simple figure, which represents changes with concentric circles in varying shades. Although the visualization wasn’t designed for experts, its simplicity would make it approachable to non-technical viewers. In the end, this figure earned us an honorable mention. This experience reaffirmed that reusing existing ideas can create new value and simplicity can be an effective communication tool.

Conclusion

To sum up my innovation journey, it has been challenging and changed how I think. From the class projects in LbD to applying my skills to visualize data, I’ve learned that the heart of innovation lies in creating something, no matter how small it might be. This can be accomplished by creatively repurposing existing ideas, communicating a topic more effectively, or embracing failure and knowing when to pivot. These experiences have helped prepare me to tackle complex grand challenges with a practical yet hopeful outlook. As I continue to grow and refine my skills and knowledge, I am eager to use and expand my innovation skills.