Design is in

Playtime is of the most important, and memorable pastimes of childhood. Play is the first and most crucial education a child indulges in. Play develops physical and mental health, motor, social, cognitive, and language skills, while enhancing creativity and confidence. The MIT Toy Lab was founded in 2004, and is dedicated to the exploration of creative design. 

This course is an introduction to the product design process with a focus on designing for play and entertainment. The students work in small teams of 5 to 6 members to design and prototype new toys. The course is structured so that there is a local sponsor, an elementary school, and experienced mentors. Students go through the entire process right from determining customer needs, to final prototyping and presentation to the community. The interesting aspect of the course is each year there is a theme, which students have to work under, such as toys that promote dental hygiene, to toys that can be inexpensively manufactured in Brazil, and toys that inspire and teach science and engineering. 

Some interesting toys are Stack-It, Harry Potter's magical toothbrush which appears to be floating. Then there is Lux, a toy animal that eats colors from the world and mixes them in its stomach teaching additive color mixing (the light theory). Cell Slap is a card game that teaches which organelles are present in different kinds of cells, definitely a more fun way to learn Biology than from a text book. 

The first few weeks of the course are dedicated to idea generation and brainstorming, during which the team comes up with hundreds of ideas, out of which they finalise on four. The team then produces sketch models of those four concepts, which test the feasibility and value of the concept. 

Toy design is a blend of product design, engineering, pedagogy, aesthetics, and more. It is an area of huge potential, and importance, as toys can be much more than just 'playthings', as some of the toys on the MIT site show. The word 'toy' generally brings to mind Barbies and train sets and little sports cars. But toys can be powerful tools that enhance the educational experience, making much more holistic, engaging, and inculcate values in children too. 

In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright credits his visual-spatial ability to the Froebel blocks he played with as a child. These were a range of educational material advocating the importance of free-play in childhood. Wright says, ""For several years I sat at the little Kindergarten table-top . . . and played . . . with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks . . . All are in my fingers to this day . . . ."

The toys of today make the people of tomorrow. 

By Armeen Kapadia

Energee-Saw in action

A design student at Coventry University in the UK, Daniel Sheridan, designed a simple see-saw which generates enough energy to satisfy a school's electricity needs. His research report Power Through Play explored positive aspects of African communities and tried to combine it with a daily need.

His report concluded that the joy and energy of children was one the most positive aspects and the need of electricity at schools was one of the key needs. Based on these conclusions, he created a see saw called Energee-Saw that generates electricity by using a generator mechanism.

A pilot installation was done in a Ugandan primary school in early 2008. Daniel recently completed his major project with the assistance of Aventure, a charity and volunteer placement enterprise, to develop power-generating play equipment for a community in Uganda. He's now secured funding from a consortium of investors and a local innovation investment initiative that will allow his company to start implementing the product on a broader scale with Ugandan schools, in partnership with the Build A School charity. Daniel's example shows that well-considered work at the student level can have far-reaching effects.

The see-saw design is provided to the community in a kit form that will use local materials to bring down costs. Daniel is engaging local communities to build the see-saw too. The energy generated through the see-saw can power LED based classroom lighting, radios, mobile phones and low-power laptops. It just takes 5-10 minutes of play to light the school for an entire evening.

Ultimately, Daniel wishes to design an entire playground of different pieces of equipment that can generate electricity.

By Sanjay Basavaraju

Linda from malariamustgo.com

Malaria is one of the major killers worldwide, with around 40% of the world’s population affected, and every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria. With a few simple measures, the disease can be prevented. Two students of the Royal College of Art’s Industrial Engineering programme, Katie Taylor and Andrew Stordy, have with come up two affordable products that help prevent malaria.

The two products are one that attracts and one that repels mosquitoes, Linda and the Koroboi Lamp respectively. Linda uses the most simple of everyday things, your smelly socks, that you have been wearing all day, and charcoal to attract and capture mosquitoes. At the base of the lamp charcoal is burnt to create carbon dioxide that then rises up to the top part where the sock is inserted. The combination of these two odors, carbon dioxide and the bacteria that live on human feet attract mosquitoes. The netting is impregnated with an insecticide, which kills the mosquitoes as soon as they land. There were many challenges while designing this product, which you can read about here. Linda can be used outside the house to attract the mosquitoes away from people. If lit before going to sleep, it can give a good night’s rest till the early hours of the morning.

The Koroboi Lamp was developed in Burundi with a local tinsmith. They can be filled with eucalyptus oil, or any other mosquito-repelling oil that acts as a mosquito repellent as it is vaporized. The Malaria Must Go project is a result of grass root level research, which included a trip to Tanzania, and user-centered design, with a focus on people’s attitudes and opinions. Malaria is linked to the cycle of poverty, so it was important that the product be locally made, and give employment to local people. Linda is being manufactured in a factory close to the users, and local artisans make the Koroboi Lamp.

The work has earned Stordy both an IDEA Gold award and a 2008 Dyson fellowship, among others. A strong sense of social responsibility, if inculcated at the student level, can have wide repercussions. Understanding of the local scenario is of prime importance, as good design exists in a context, and not in isolation. As Stordy says on his site, “The solutions we developed were generated by completely immersing ourselves in the problem at hand.”

Linda and the Koroboi Lamp, have a bright future, as they are designs that fulfill a very human need.

By Armeen Kapadia

Usually, the word Bose is synonymous with music. They are known for making expensive but quality home and automobile audio systems. After more than 25 years of research and development on automobile suspension, they are out with a magnificent product. Although it was introduced in 2005, Bose is still waiting for a potential vendor.

What we see in the video (above) is a result worth sharing. According to Bose, every automobile suspension has two goals: passenger comfort and vehicle control. In reality these goals are in conflict because comfort can be provided by isolating road disturbances and control can be achieved by maintaining road contact. Usually comfort is a priority in luxury sedans and control in sports cars. Bose suspension has change that completely. With Bose suspension one can provide comfort and achieve control, at the same time.

The whole idea of Bose making automobile suspension dates back to 1980 when founder Dr Amar Bose conducted a mathematical study to determine the optimum possible performance of an automotive suspension. The design of conventional suspension uses hydraulic approaches. Instead, the Bose suspension opted for electomagnetic approaches. The Bose suspension system includes a linear electromagnetic motor and power amplifier at each wheel, and a set of control algorithms. You can read in detail about the technology here.

Bose, in a white paper published on their site, concludes that "For the first time, the Bose suspension demonstrates the ability to combine in one automobile a much smoother ride than any luxury sedan, and less roll and pitch than any sports car. This performance results from a proprietary combination of suspension hardware and control algorithms."

The next question is when will we get to sit in a car that sports a Bose suspension? We may not because the cost of this technology is too high. A Cadillac worth $100,000 can claim to sport one. It is unlikely that most of us will experience it first hand.

By Sanjay Basavaraju

Rendered image of Jugnu

Jugnu (English: Firefly) is a nano-satellite (3 kg) to be launched by student team at the IIT Kanpur. Of course, several faculty members and experts from ISRO are guiding these students. Apparently, an MoU is already signed between IIT Kanpur and ISRO. Jugnu will be launched in the polar orbit from Sriharikota, by the end of this year.

Aptly named as Jugnu, it is 34 cms long and 10 cm wide. With approximate budget of 2.5 crores, it seems like one of the costliest fireflies around. The function of the satellite is to gather information regarding flood, drought and disasters. Jugnu will take 14 to 15 rounds of earth to gather information. An indigenously designed hi-tech camera for near remote sensing and GPS receiver are fitted in the satellite. Jugnu will send photographs regarding agriculture, weather, river courses and soil to the base station. The project is in the final stage. It will be handed over to ISRO in November for further testing and launch. 

It would be for the first time in the history where a student team will be credited for designing, fabricating, testing and flying a satellite that is mostly made of aluminum alloy at an altitude of about 800 km above the Earth's surface. Although it sounds ambitious, it appears that the project is under control. Sanjay Govind Dhande, the Director of IITK, said: "Though the MoU between ISRO and IIT-K for the project was signed in February, regular review sessions are being carried out by ISRO to check the progress."

Jugnu's design will have to overcome many challenges as it will have to survive high vibrations and high doses of radiation that can affect the system memory. Due to the limited power availability, there are many constraints in adding many functions.

Jugnu is in a race to beat other projects under development, such as Pratham (IIT Bombay's satellite), VITSAT and StudSat (built by about 8 different colleges). All four are first generation of Indian nanosatellites. It remains to be seen if Jugnu becomes the first Indian nanosatellite to be launched into space.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

It sounds like a German movie. But it isn’t. Wolfram Alpha already nicknamed as ‘Google-killer’, has impressed many experts during a demo presentation. It is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram and he calls it ‘Computational Knowledge Engine’. The name is horrible and can’t be more complex. Ironically, to get to know more about it, I had to use Google to throw up some pages.

Some, who have got a glimpse of its function, believe that in the future, if one types the question, ‘Google market share’, Wolfram Alpha would compute a graph of Google’s dwindling market that may be shocking to believe. I personally feel that Google is still superior. Wolfram Alpha and Google are entirely different in their function.

Google is like a library and throws up web pages for a search query. On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha answers factual questions based on syntaxes, which one can easily learn. Google is for finding and Wolfram Alpha is just for calculating. For example, Wolfram Alpha is equipped to answer “What was the average rainfall in Kerala last year?” Stephen apparently is a fan of Google and is open to collaboration. It is least likely to happen since any talks of collaboration will happen once Google believes it can gain from it. That may take a few years for Wolfram Alpha to prove what it claims.

Regulators have long constantly watched Google. Google has been walking a tight rope since it has been seen as being monopolistic, an image that it wants to shed. It seems Google is optimistic about Wolfram Alpha’s success. If it succeeds, the chances are that Microsoft would be interested in acquiring it. And when that happens, Google can add those key functions of Wolfram Alpha into its own search engine. Google is blamed for already killing Lycos and Altavista, amongst many forgotten search engines. Now it seems Wolfram Alpha is aiming to do the same with Google. Such a situation helps Google to convince the public about its new approach towards competition. I doubt Google would wait for such a thing to happen. I am sure, by now, something is already cooking inside Google.

Nova Spivack, a technology visionary and entrepreneur, explains in his blog, “Wolfram Alpha uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, which represent real-world knowledge. One drawback is that it does not answer natural language queries — you have to ask questions in a particular syntax, or various forms of abbreviated notation. The vision seems to be to create a system, which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).”

Some believe the site is over-hyped but many are optimistic. For that matter, even Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, seemed to talk about Wolfram in his letter to shareholders this year.

“I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be.”

If you are interested to know more about Wolfram Alpha, you can read a detailed explanation here.

It remains to be seen what will be the effect of Wolfram Alpha on the world. I doubt if it can unsettle Google anytime soon. I feel that Wikipedia should be more worried about it rather than Google.

By Sanjay Basavaraju