Conceptual Design Competition 2022

On Saturday 14 May MECHA had its first ever Conceptual Design Competition! In teams of four, students were given the day to brainstorm and develop a solution to an open-ended engineering question, culminating in a final presentation and one page summary to be reviewed by a panel of judges. The aim of this event was to explore the many possibilities of solutions reached to real world problems.

The focus for our question was on sustainability and how important this is to consider in all engineering designs. Our question for 2022 was:

Context: The Auckland Harbour Bridge is an iconic landmark in the Auckland skyline. Approximately 170,000 vehicles cross the bridge everyday, including 1000 buses, which carry 39 % of all people crossing during the morning peak. To combat the heavy congestion commuters face every day, the Skypath project was proposed, which would have allowed Aucklanders to cross the harbour via foot or bike, thus significantly reducing the number of cars on the bridge. A total of 51 million dollars was spent on this project before it was scrapped due to the inviability of the proposal.

Using this 51 million dollars, what solutions or technologies could have been implemented in place to successfully reduce the most number of vehicles on the Auckland Harbour Bridge?

Many thanks to Andrew from Beca and Bex from Jacobs for dedicating their time to help us judge the amazing submissions we got! And congrats to the winning team, Waterways!

If you’re up for a challenge or just need a CV booster, be sure to join us for the next one!