best of week 5

here's a selection of stuff we did in week 5.  first up was a dinner at fogarty vineyard.  it's set on top of a hill and has marvelous views of the surrounding countryside.

the best thing about week 5 was this.  it was an optional visit to the d. school (design? school) at stanford.  the school runs programs that students from various disciplines sign up for and work together in cross-functional teams.  it is strictly voluntary and students work on the programs on their own time.  for instance, in the picture below, we were briefed by prof patell on the "entrepreneurial design for extreme affordability" program.  basically, the program identifies problems in developing countries and get the student volunteers to come up with affordable (as in, really cheap) solutions to those problems.

first we watched a video about one of the programs they had done in myanmar where a woman found it hard to keep her farm going after her husband had abandoned the family.  she desperately wanted to keep the farm in order to support her daughter who loved school and was doing well.  but she found it hard work to keep it going on her own - there were problems with water supply.  in the end, she saved the farm because the program developed a cheap plastic water pump that you work with your feet (something like the stairmaster in the gym) that cost almost nothing and allowed her to have a constant supply of water which she needed to irrigate her crops.  and she also rigged the pump with a stand that allowed her daughter to work the pump while reading her textbooks at the same time!  it was a truly inspiring story.

design thinking is a new way of problem solving that places emphasis on producing mockups or prototypes in order to quickly test concepts.  the mantra of design thinking is "fail early, fail fast".  not that the point of it all is to fail but rather, it helps to produce better solutions because of the idea that when you test a prototype, you do it as close as possible to the real environment where the product or solution has to work.  that way, you find out problems early and can then quickly go back to improve it. 

this recognises a very important aspect of human behavior in such work.  the more work that has gone into a product or solution, the more entrenched would be the beliefs of the person who came up with it and he is likely to resist suggestions for change because it would be costly (he may have to do radical re-design, or undo a lot of work that has gone into it).

some of the spaces in the school which are created to help the students have a better environment in which to come up with their ideas.  below are some of the more interesting products that the school has developed.

this is a solar flashlight that is made in singapore!  

these two girls are holding a prototype of what they hope would be a cheap respirator for babies.  the respirator at this point in time consisted mainly of an aquarium pump, and a plastic bucket that was cut in half and then put back together!

a paper "spacer" used for inhalers - these are used by kids with asthma.  the advantage of this paper spacer is that it is easily transported flat, and then folded into this shape when needed and because it is made of paper, very cheap.

this is professor jim patell and the green tubes in the packaging is the pump mentioned earlier.  the blue thing next to it is a baby incubator.  the incubator has some pieces of wax-like substance that slip into pockets in the back (it is made of plastic and looks like a life jacket) - the idea is that you dump the packets of the wax-like substance into hot water) and then once it is heated up, slip the packets into the incubator and it keeps the baby warm for a few hours.

this was easily one of the highlights of my time in stanford and it wasn't even a compulsory part of the program!  in some ways, it made me wonder how i would have spent my time differently in school with the hindsight that i could have done and achieved more, not just for myself, but for those less fortunate.  the short time that i spent here was truly inspirational, and not just because of the achievements of the program, as seen in the amazing stuff that they produced, but more from the fact that these students volunteered their own time to work on these projects (and they won't earn any credit for it towards their undergraduate or post-graduate programs) and simply want to make a difference.