This track will focus on solutions for hospital-systems. We are looking for applicants who have a cross-disciplinary passion for medicine and medical technology, as well as design, engineering, or social justice. We aim to teach students techniques in rapid prototyping, design thinking, and data science in an effort to improve overall patient care. We hope to incorporate a field-trip to a nearby hospital to identify potential challenges in the current health system and come up with creative solutions for them. We especially encourage those with experience in medicine (pre-med, medical students, those who have shadowed doctors) to apply. 

This track will foster design thinking, stakeholder identification, long-term medical device development, and how to make large scale impacts in the healthcare system.

We are looking for creative students with a passion for implementing change within their own community. We hope that applicants will identify public health problems within their own community, as we want our track to be designed to fit their needs. Learn how to design solutions to improve accessibility to health care for the broader community, use software tools, modeling, synthetic biology techniques and/or product development. Prototypes from this track would ideally improve community access to diagnostics, preventative care and/or common medicine. Potential projects include: designing a diagnostic device for detection of disease or detection of clean water; designing an app to streamline healthcare appointments; designing a service experience for aging communities; or designing a program to streamline delivery of medications for patients. 

This track would foster design thinking and rapid prototyping for point-of-care, community-based applications. 

The world around us is complex and often difficult to comprehend and represent. Creatively conveying a social issue can be impactful in both bringing awareness about the issue and creating a drive to address it. Technological and art-based media can enable us to tell effective social stories that express one’s perception of a phenomenon/event/space/trend in society and create impact by highlighting important issues.  

In this track, we will engage in a variety of exploratory exercises – need-finding, investigative journalism, reflective ethnography – and create tangible and interactive artifacts that share narratives and perspectives. Participants will be exposed to journalistic documentation practices such as interviewing, photo-documentation and data collection and create artifacts that are playful, responsive and tell stories. Tales can be an art installation, a game, a projection, a data visualization, a tangible product, or anything else you imagine it to be. Each tale will communicate a powerful social narrative. 

India is the second-most populous country in the world with 1.37 billion people, 40% of whom are expected to be in residing in cities by the year 2020. The average population density is 450 individuals per km2 while in certain regions like Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world, it can be as high as 500,000 individuals per km2. While the housing crisis is a direct problem associated with this rapid urbanization, there are also serious problems associated with access to energy. Specifically, indoor air pollution due to the burning of solid fuels for cooking, which leads to nearly half a million deaths annually. These and other associated problems are only expected to worsen as urbanization is expected to double over the next 30 years.​

The goal of this workshop is to explore unique Indian problems with students of diverse backgrounds. Our theme specifically explores housing as well as energy-related problems like the ones described above. We will also be exploring other topics like micro-grids, tracking energy usage using pervasive technologies like cell phones.

Current practices in urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture continue to interfere with natural processes pervasively and chaotically, with bearings on water cycles, climate, and biodiversity. Global climate change and sea-level rise coupled with a growing global population and local changes to environmental conditions have intensified the threat of flooding episodes in communities around the world. We frequently talk about the side effects of these phenomena as if they are inevitable features of the design, but is that really so? India is a particularly pressing geography to examine from the perspective of climate action and adaptation. Both high-density cities located in the deltas of major river systems and in flood-prone territories, Mumbai and Kolkata are among the most vulnerable cities of the subcontinent. Urban planning practices in these cities have led to legacy infrastructure in areas that are exposed to pluvial and fluvial flooding without the capacity to control, store, or redistribute incoming water.

This track will guide you, the students, to explore solutions for the built environment towards the mitigation of hazard fallout. 

Have you ever noticed how people use their public spaces, and problems in those spaces? From outdoor markets to parks, to street intersections, public spaces are the outdoor living rooms of cities. Small scale design interventions in public spaces can have ripple effects throughout the city, such as perceptions of safety, dynamics of human interactions, and ownership and empowerment of citizens. This track is for designers, seeking to improve the built environment through physical installations.​

This track will focus on developing solutions that make our public spaces more dynamic, responsive to a different community and neighborhood needs, and improve critical shortcomings like safety, comfort, and accessibility. We will engage with public spaces to identify an opportunity area where you, the students, see a need for improvement, and then we will design and build a physical model of a solution for the space.