In the midst of horrific shootings happening coast to coast in the US, I stumbled upon a group of people — including a university professor, a project manager, and a software developer — huddled around a laptop, designing a new kind of gun.

Called the Glockchain, the gun would use blockchain technology to track when police guns fire. Every time it's drawn or fired, it would be recorded on the blockchain — an ultra-secure and transparent distributed database, best known as the ledger for Bitcoin, that tracks transactions. Once something is recorded on the blockchain, it can't be altered.

A gun that's tied to the blockchain, then, could force the police into accountability. "Unlike a traditional smart gun, you can see who's holding the gun. Then you can pair that with video for a time record," says Jing Ling, an IT project manager at Liberty Mutual and member of the Glockchain team.

The Glockchain is one of numerous prototypes created for a new venture called Ideo coLAB, which brings together partner companies (in this case NASDAQ, Citi Ventures, Fidelity and Liberty Mutual), designers from innovation and design firm Ideo, and fellows from a variety of backgrounds to find applications for emerging technologies like the blockchain over the course of the summer.

During the multi-day design sprints (just two to four days to create a product), teams go all the way from idea to prototype. In the hour I spent watching the teams work, the Glockchain group went from modeling the gun on a computer to laser-cutting an anatomical diagram of the gun in slices.

Other ideas generated during the Ideo design sprints include a smart container that tracks and traces shipping containers and a device that scans trees to make it easy to track carbon offsets.

While I visited teams working on prototypes related to the blockchain, other coLAB events throughout the summer looked at technologies like digital identity and the internet of things. Most of the prototypes will never make it to market, but Ideo's partner companies will at the very least take the lessons learned and apply them to future projects. It's also possible that elements from multiple prototypes will be pulled together into a single pilot.

The idea for coLAB originally came out of Ideo's realization that design often doesn't play a central role in emerging technology. We come up with new technologies without a clear need in mind, and as a result, innovations fall by the wayside.

Joe Gerber, a managing director of coLAB, points to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which posits that new technologies hit a "trough of disillusionment" after a "peak of inflated expectations."

"You have these cool tools that don't meet needs. We want to match capabilities to real problems," he says.

In 2015, Ideo piloted the coLAB concept in Boston. Earlier this year, Ideo used the model for a project with MIT Media Lab and Target, where teams brainstormed ideas related to the future of food. A prototype from that event, which puts ingredient labels on the front of food items, was piloted in Target stores.

Many of the partner companies involved in the blockchain event are already working on blockchain technology. "They see value in accelerating learning by building together in groups," says Gerber. And while it's hard to imagine a Liberty Mutual-branded Glockchain gun, who knows, there might be some piece of the gun prototype that makes it into a future product.