Product design sop
If history has taught us anything, it is that we humans are never complacent and our passions and interests are ever changing. While the medieval ages marked the Golden Age for Art, the last few centuries have seen a technological boom. Interestingly, the fairly recent technological advancements have only brought greater dissemination of ideas in Art. As I look back today, I owe my passion in combining technology with art and product design, funnily, to "SWAT Kats", a TV show that first introduced me to an interplay of futuristic technology in an animated artful way. The little engineer in me was inspired and I began to experiment with old broken toys and craft items, I embarked on giving life to my imaginations - ranging from a small car that could also float on water and a train engine replica to a Shaolin Temple model. This simple hobby of breaking things open and building new toys slowly turned into an obsession as I chose Mechanical Engineering for my undergraduate education to further fuel this passion. Qualifying a national examination with a 99.6 percentile, I joined Indian Institute of Technology Madras, one of the highly coveted institutes in India, a place that provided me a plethora of opportunities to grow and hone my skills.
The journey of my undergraduate studies started with an exhilarating set of courses which allured my attention. Courses such as "Concepts in Engineering Design", "Machine Drawing Practice", "Workshop I & II" exposed me to various design concepts, software skills and fabrication techniques respectively. Much of what goes into product design was still uncharted waters for me as the learning so far was purely theoretical, so this provided me with huge scope for improving. As Confucius quotes "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand", I believe in pragmatic learning and hence to complement my theoretical knowledge, I decided to get my hands dirty by working on few projects of my own. Some of these include a chair made completely out of old newspapers which could withstand weight up to 65kgs, a farming mechanism using scrap metals attached to a Moped which could simultaneously plough, plant seeds and water while moving on the field. Projects such as these bolstered my predilection towards creating products and fostered me to further delve into product designing.
In my sophomore year, I gradually worked my way through the domains of microcontroller coding, electronics, Image processing and Computer vision, 3D modeling and mechanical design. I competed in Goldman Sachs Able Solutions competition to witness my efforts take the shape of an assistive device that went on to secure third position out of 70 participating teams all over India. This idea of developing an assistive belt emerged after a thorough survey with the visually impaired students at Saint Louis Institute for the Deaf and Blind, Chennai. This device aids the visually challenged in avoiding obstacles without the hassle of carrying walking stick. Through proximity sensors and haptic vibratory feedback, the device gives them a sense of their surroundings.
Apart from working on projects and participating in competitions, I dedicated my time in being a part of team Envisage for 3 years. Envisage is an annual techno-entertainment show which boasts a display of technological products that entertain audience and is an idiosyncratic show in India, completely run by students of IIT Madras. My journey through team Envisage started off with developing a Virtual piano to mentoring projects like "Kinect DJ", "A 3D hologram" and "Virtual instruments", and to finally becoming head of the team in my final year. The key takeaway of being a part of such a unique show is understanding the needs of target audience and acting accordingly to satisfy them, which I believe is an essential quality of product developers.
I've learnt lately that Product Design is not merely generating ideas and prototyping them, rather, it is a systematic process of finding the delicate balance between art, science, technology and most importantly, necessity. Hence to further steepen my learning curve and simultaneously use my knowledge in the professional world, right after graduation I joined a startup as Product Development Engineer and was initially held responsible for developing LED lights based on client requirements. Later my responsibilities were shifted to a more challenging project namely Floating Solar, wherein I was assigned to design and develop the entire support system for placing the solar panels on water.
I was very excited to work on this project as its scope was unprecedented in India and it was the most challenging project that I have ever worked on. Handling such a huge project right after graduation was at first a nightmare, but with my utter passion and peer support, I could take it forward no matter the setbacks I've faced in the process. The key to designing an Industry centric product is to maintain high quality standards with low production costs and this is where it gets more challenging, I had to go through multiple design iterations to ensure it satisfies all the constraints without compromising on functionality, aesthetics and ease of manufacturability. Once the designs are analyzed to be functional and cost effective after carrying out stress analysis, we move on to prototyping phase where I developed a miniature model of the system to test with scaled down version of constraints. A detailed cost analysis was carried out in the end to determine the optimal configuration of the panels and best inclination angle for the solar panels to maximize productivity and profits. Overall, working in this startup gave me full exposure to product development right from understanding the need to physically manufacturing the product and it has also strengthened my instincts of getting a formal education in product design through graduate studies, as my major learnings till date are only experiential. Especially the way it is being offered as a conglomerate of Science, Art and Marketing in the MIIPS program of Integrated Innovation Institute at CMU is what I'm really looking forward to pursue.
I developed an insatiable appetite for designing through years of exposure to it and I still am a voracious knowledge seeker hoping to quench my thirst through graduate studies and further use my knowledge in starting my own firm and developing products which focus on making lives of many people a lot better. Being a part of CMU's Master's program gives me a chance to interact and innovate along with the most ingenious brains of the world. I am sure that CMU's Masters in Integrated Innovation for Products and Services is a right choice of graduate studies for me to fulfill my ever growing thirst for ingenuity in shaping my ideas to create a better world.
