Day 16: MIT Make in India

Day 16: MIT Make in India

Today I enjoyed the luxury of waking up at 9:30 in the morning, and it was beautiful. Then I showered and even wore shorts for a bit. Scandalous, but my legs needed the air. 

The Shower Washers were determined to get somewhere today (with Duncan off at a wedding in Chennai), so we started the ideation period with what each group observed at the hospital. While we went and talked to the ECG technician, another group had gone and spoken with the doctor in the operation theatre. The problems they found were that the rooms had to be kept very cold at 22 degrees Celsius and patients would shiver from the cold, which made it very hard to do whatever the doctors needed to do on them. Their idea was a heat pad that would keep the mattress warm as opposed to the hospital’s current very expensive hot air mattress. Finally, after much debate, we split into two groups: one doing the heat pad and other tackling women’s issues. 

I was in the heat pad group, but our group discussion did not go well at all. There were a lot of disagreements and no one seemed on the same page. It was probably an extremely frustrating and bad experience for the three of us. 

We all left. Then ate some lunch. After that, I came to the house, and found that others were feeling similar frustration. Kristin, amazing Kristin, finally decided that she was going to get everyone together and on the same page (since Raj was in Mumbai). She called everyone into the room and talked a lot about how we needed to either work or not and how leaving a project half done gives no satisfaction. Kristin was tapping into her experience from 2.009.

The whole group sat in the room and began to pitch problems and some random ideas about things. We filled up, together, the entire whiteboard. 

Then Kristin sent the soap people to get their stuff together outside while the Shower Washers went off all the ideas listed to narrow them down and talk about our goals for this workshop and how viable the project ideas were. This worked very well, and we almost have our groups and projects! The top ideas are the hair collecting comb, fun trash can for kids, feminine waste disposal (which had fantastic conversation...), and hospital heat pad. We will research, ideate, and start designs with teams tomorrow. 

I also downloaded the old Windows pinball game for my Mac and it was probably the best decision I have made in a long time. Such productivity. 

I made Kristin a flower for her amazing work to turn around and boost our motivation. Then I taught Jaspreet how to make one. Sadly our large fingers were not helping us...

We also watched the hilarious Pretentious movie review videos on YouTube (Anu had shown me this a few months ago) as Swapnil brought it up. Most Exercise Ever. Too many laughs. Let's leave it at that.