A Design Innovation Workshop by Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research (WeSchool) and MIT Media Lab, showcased the outcomes of a week-long workshop where 380 innovators from across India collaborated and shared ideas to design and implement over 100 prototypes with MIT Media Lab experts and local mentors.

The workshop is a platform for innovators from different parts of the country that included dancers, painters, engineers and entrepreneurs to exchange ideas and experiences to co-create simple, novel and practical solutions.

Starting from a field visit to identify crucial pain points of the society to brainstorming solutions for it, the workshop focused on different tracks like banking, sustainability, grass root engineering, performance capture, interaction futures and creative learning.

Some of the prototypes designed during the workshop include a hair comb with inbuilt camera to detect the health of one’s scalp and hair, an automated stove with a timer to reduce kerosene wastage, and a ‘boom ball’ that helps hearing impaired people enjoy music.

Few out of the over 100 prototypes developed during the ‘Design Innovation Workshop’ 2014 are as follows:

Hair comb: A hair comb with an inbuilt camera to detect the health of one’s scalp and hair. The hair comb when used will capture images and give a detailed report on the health of your hair.

The automated stove: An automated stove which can be used at the grassroots level where the wastage of kerosene can be avoided by setting a timer. This is an effective low-cost model developed at the Grassroot engineering track.

Mobile van: The prototype is to have a mobile van which will have different resources to make the students in municipal schools ready for industry by improving their communication and ways of expression by the means of fine art and other such prototypes.

Human Skill replicator: The project aims to record the actions and processes followed by some distinguished craftsman to develop some traditional craft, so that our culture is preserved. The programme will replicate the actions and processes for preparing the craft and thus preserve the skill virtually.

ICICI future of banking:

Taking into account the current pain points regarding security and reduced convenience by using debit cards and passwords, an advanced biometric system was showcased that dispenses money after authenticating fingerprints and facial features instantly.

The system radically changes the conventional model of an ATM which requires a physical card and password for authentication.

Boom Ball: Helps hearing impaired people enjoy music! Music beats are converted to vibrations, lyrics are displayed on the screen and the colour transitions depict the mood of the song

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