Protecting the smart grid from cyber crime using nanotechnology
A 3rd place hackathon project write up
Team
Onur, Atomic/Molecular Physicist
Daxal, Engineer
Mahtab, Engineer
Simon, UX Designer
Brief
In a team come up with ideas on how to improve your city through tech.
Focus on designing and prototyping ideas to make a city more efficient
and enjoyable.
Our Idea
Onur put forward the idea for our group, to work on a concept project for securing the smart city from cyber crime. The proposed idea was very complex, using AI and nanotechnology to create an intelligent system that was modelled on the way the human body uses white blood cells to deal with an infection.
Nanobots could be implimented into IOT devices and communicate across the grid, we discussed the use of blockchain but decided that our concept idea woudl work over any protocol.
Currently security options are becoming outdated, like firewall and virus protection which is generally software based and run from hardware like a server or computer.
Being in a group with a molecular physicist and two engineers it became clear to me that my role as UX designer would be to make sure that we can communicate our ideas effectively so the users (the hackathon audience and judges) understood everything.
Problem Statement
After a couple of hours of group discssion on the scope of our idea, I put together a problem statment to make sure everyone in the team was on the same page and we had a clear focus to start ideating…
Situation: A hacker wants to attack a smart city, in this scenario focussing their attack on the energy sector
Problem: Current systems are open to the cloud and vulnerable to attack
Solution: Implement a nano technology system that can actively monitor
Outcome: The city and its citizens are safe from cyber security threats
Challenges & how we overcame them…
Scaling the complexity of the project
During this project we realised the topic of “security” is very broad. Even though our idea was “intelligent security” we still needed more focus, so as a group we decided to focus on security for the energy grid. We came to this conclusion be putting ourselves in the place of the attacker and thinking what were the things that can be attacked to cause the most devistation to a city.
Bringing the idea to life
As our idea was to have something similar to a living human organism that protects its self from infection, the ability to show this was quite challenging. The intelligent security would automatically provide protection, but we decided that there could be a system to monitor the grid status, especially for if there was ever the need for human intervention.
So, to visualise this I used my design skills to create a demo of what the monitoring system may look like. I used Sketch to design it and then made it into a clickable demo using InVision.
Communicating our idea
The final challenge was being able to present our complex concept to the audience and judges within the given timeframe… we only had 3 minutes to present!
Presentation
I took on the role of presentation designer for the team. Everyone fed me ideas and I had to make them presentable and digestible.
The basic structure for the presenation was:
1. Frame the issues around currently security and how vulnerable the system will be in the future if changes aren’t made.
2. A theatrical segue into our idea (shown below)
3. Background info/techincalities of our idea
4. Clear & concise explination of the idea and its benefits
The winners
First place team presenated an idea for low light technology that kept light pollution to a minumum within a smart city. Second place designed an app to aid with parking within a smart city.
Our team took third place (out of 14 teams) in this hackathon competition, with judges explaining that we couldn’t have finished higher as our idea was almost too futuristic.
Thanks for taking the time to read my article, I am a junior UX designer currently looking for a full-time job in London, please take a look at my portfolio and let me know if you know any opportunities?
