16 ï TALKING TO TOCALABS

Talking to Tocalabs

Real-world skills remains at the heart of our approach and our connections to industry are a critical part of the programmes. This year, our live projects with ongoing collaborators, Tocalabs, featured the conceptualisation and industrial design of TocaHive, the hardware housing the onsite Toca platform

Tocalabs is a scale-up software automation company headquartered in Reading, UK. Our work focuses on building a no-code, highly productive scalable Enterprise Automation Platform called Toca. Toca is enabling businesses in their digital transformation, improving operational efficiency and allowing them far greater agility than ever before. It includes the ability to automate across all systems within a business through the use of Bots, furthermore for those businesses to then be able to easily create user apps for their customers and employees.

Tocalabs Director, Mat Rule, says, “we've been enjoying working with Middlesex University and RedLoop for a couple of years, previously on a physical robotic platform called ‘Cara’, that was focused on controlling physical touchscreen devices. Tocalabs and its employees are very much driven by the desire to solve business problems with deep technology and true innovation. Our focus is always on achieving a successful delivery for our customers and so our solutions must be the best in function and design, that is one of our unique selling points.

“Our platform is typically hosted in the cloud however, last year, we came across a problem where some of our customers required our solution to be both hosted in the cloud and also partly on-premise. The on-premise

Follow Tocalabs on Instagram @tocalabs and Twitter @tocabot. And learn more by visiting their website https://www.tocabot.io/

part of the solution would house a number of virtual desktop machines that would be able to carry out automation within the business. This led us to wanting to explorer a way to do this where we could place a system on a desk or on an office floor that would blend into a modern office environment, and be aesthetically suited for both the more fashionable shared working environments right over to the more conservative office spaces. This system would also have to be functional to house the specified electronics and computer hardware and take in to consideration heat, space as well as displaying its status to a user. The name 'Hive' was coined and hence TocaHive was born.

“The MDX students have been fantastic in a number of ways, firstly as all the designs understood the technical constraints and practicalities of the project and I would say all could have gone to production and secondly, none of the student's projects were lacking in aesthetic design, keeping the aesthetics balanced carefully with the function. I think it is too easy for inexperienced designers to fall heavily on one side or the other, either too aesthetic or far too functional.

“We are planning to take TocaHive forward into our product suite, working with MDX to produce a working prototype. We have a number of customers already who are keen to trial the product.”