💚💚💚 Dear colleagues, friends, and partners — a little over halfway through our prototyping journey, we’re back with fresh insights, new iterations, and stories of progress from the Prototype Fund cohort:

🧭 Halfway Reflections

Iteration in Action: Building, Testing, Evolving

After our User Testing Day at the Swiss Future Symposium in September, our teams returned with pages of feedback, fresh insights, and the humbling reminder that real innovation happens when ideas leave the lab and meet people.

Now, each project is continuing to iterate — refining prototypes, adjusting assumptions, and transforming sketches into working tools for the public good.

Prototypes in Motion

💡 impACT entreprise

From concept to clarity.
After early testing, impACT’s team is refocusing their product around what truly drives change — people, not processes.
The challenge ahead is to frame AI-driven climate actions that feel relevant, achievable, and collective. The app is evolving from a “sustainability challenge” into an engagement platform for organizations that want to make climate-friendly behavior measurable and motivating.

🧩 QLever Federation

From infrastructure to accessibility.
QLever’s open-source knowledge engine wowed testers — but it also revealed the next design hurdle: accessibility.
Even when people don’t understand RDF or SPARQL, they still want to explore data.
The team is now simplifying onboarding, designing clearer explanations, and improving usability for researchers and non-experts alike — turning QLever into a gateway for sustainable data exploration, not just a backend powerhouse.

🌿 WildCamera

From prototype to platform.
WildCamera entered testing with an early open hardware concept — and left with a stronger network and a clearer roadmap.
What started as a proof-of-concept camera trap is becoming a modular system that connects real-time biodiversity data to policy-level conservation.
By integrating feedback from ecologists and technologists, the team is shaping hardware that’s not just open and sustainable, but ready for the field — technology rooted in habitat.

⚙️ Zero-Power Indicator (ZPI)

From demonstrator to application.
ZPI’s prototype sparked curiosity and deep technical conversations — from color-changing materials to batteryless tags.
The devices can spark big debates about sufficiency.

Next step: transforming the lab demonstrator into a functional zero-power indicator for real devices — starting with low-energy systems like hearing aids, where every microjoule matters.

📍 Next Stop: DINAcon 2025

We’ll bring our prototypes — and our progress — to DINAcon, the Swiss conference for digital sustainability. Instead of running a dedicated pre-Demo day, we are partnering up with DINAcon this year.

Join us there for live demos, feedback sessions, and conversations on open innovation and technologies that matter.

📅 DINAcon 2025 – 18 November 2025, Bern
 🎤 Prototype Fund booth & live testing zone

https://dinacon.ch/en/ 

💬 Innovation isn’t just about building faster — it’s about building with purpose, and learning in public.

Stay tuned for the next round of updates → prototypefund.opendata.ch

The Prototype Fund is a program by Opendata.ch and supported by the Mercator Foundation Switzerland and the Christoph Merian Foundation.