Coffee Enthusiasts Take Note: GE’s FirstBuild™ Challenge Spurs Coffee Roasting Innovation for Home Use
December 01 2015 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
GE’s FirstBuild co-creation community has answered the challenge
of coffee lovers everywhere with a way to roast fresh coffee beans
at home. Along with Autodesk™, a leader in 3D design and
engineering software, and Sweet Maria’s, a premier coffee bean and
roaster retailer, FirstBuild challenged makers to create an at-home
coffee roasting system and selected three winners from more than 30
entries.
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First place winner in the challenge was
City Roaster, designed by Stephane Arthur Kiss, a mechanical
engineer from Ottawa, Canada, who was inspired by his love of
espresso and his popcorn maker. (Photo: GE)
FirstBuild, which embraces the brainpower of the maker movement
at its Louisville microfactory and virtually around the globe,
challenged makers to devise a simple coffee roasting system that
could be adapted to home ovens. All entries were developed using
Autodesk Fusion 360, a product development tool that brings
together design, collaboration and fabrication in a single
platform.
FirstBuild’s community responded and chose the following winning
designs:
- First Place to City Roaster by Stephane
Arthur Kiss, 29, a mechanical engineer from Ottawa, Canada, who was
inspired by his love of espresso and his popcorn maker.
- Second Place to Cool Beans Coffee Bean
Roaster by Hunter Stephenson and Steven Morse, 21 and 22, both
quality engineers in Louisville, who work at GE Appliances. Their
inspiration was coffee lovers who roast beans on a cookie sheet.
Their winning design makes use of a novel "suit-case" concept that
allows for even roasting, chaff removal and quick cooling, all at
an affordable price for the consumer.
- Third place to Float + VacuBean by
Chia-Chen Lee, 32, an industrial designer living in Rochester, NY,
who optimized her design to tumble the beans based on her home
coffee roasting drum experience.
Additionally the challenge named the best student design: Air
Coffee - Coffee Beans Roaster by Pedro Soria Martínez, 21, of
Spain.
“The coffee roasting challenge illustrates the power of the
maker community,” said FirstBuild Director Venkat Venkatakrishnan.
“It also shows how FirstBuild has created a physical and online
community of makers who innovate, motivate and build on each
other’s ideas to create the kinds of products that consumers
want.”
“Autodesk Fusion 360 was created for exactly the type of design
disruption that this challenge celebrates,” said Mike Geyer,
Autodesk director of Evangelism & Emerging Technology. “It’s a
tool that’s well-suited to the new ways of making
products—empowering every stage of the design process from concept
to fabrication.”
Much like the craft beer and wine movement, home coffee roasting
is gaining among coffee enthusiasts. With this challenge,
FirstBuild wants to make freshly roasted coffee accessible to the
coffee lover at home. With just a convection oven and these
innovative designs, home roasted coffee can be a reality.
The key challenges for entrants were maximizing airflow around
beans in a convection oven, removing the chaff from beans after the
roast, and fabricating the device using equipment available in
FirstBuild's state-of-the-art microfactory.
FirstBuild hopes to commercialize the coffee roaster in the
coming months. The winning entries were awarded more than $15,000
in prizes including a 3D printer, desktop CNC mills, Fusion 360
software and coffee beans from Sweet Maria’s.
About FirstBuild
GE’s FirstBuild is a global co-creation community that harnesses
the brainpower of the maker movement to change the way major home
appliances are conceived, designed and manufactured. A physical
state-of-the-art microfactory on the University of Louisville
campus and online forum, FirstBuild speeds products from mind to
market and enables customization through small batch production,
without the costs and risks of traditional mass manufacturing. For
more information about how to get involved,
visit FirstBuild.com.
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For FirstBuildKim Freeman, 502-452-7819kim@firstbuild.com
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