Inspiration
The senior capstone design studio SEEDR has been advising this Spring has concluded with exciting results. The studio consisted of teams of mechanical engineering, industrial design and architecture students working on humanitarian design projects.
The project included a water acquisition and distribution for Nicaragua, a net-zero energy health care clinic for Tunisia, a net zero energy stand alone vaccine cold room for Tunisia, a vaccine cool box, a birthing kit for Papua New Guinea, and an immunization and well-being health care post kit for Papua New Guinea.
These teams went on to compete against thirty-six other teams in the Spring 2010 Mechanical Engineering Senior Capstone Design Expo at Georgia Tech, winning the top four honors in the process.
SEEDR would like to thank Dr. Colton and Sabir Khan for the opportunity to participate in what was an invigorating and enlightening experience. While SEEDR advised on multidisciplinary research and design methods and commercialization, SEEDR learned a great deal from the instructors, other advisors, and students alike.
The success and excitement surrounding the humanitarian and development-centered design studio is a promising sign for expanding the work across the Institute and SEEDR looks forward to participating again next term.
Also, SEEDR and its partners would like to wish the graduating seniors the best of luck in their careers as they continue to sharpen their skills for redesigning global development.
The final reports and presentations are available for download here.
SEEDR managing director, Michael Moreland, presented at Pecha Kucha in Atlanta this past weekend.
Pecha Kucha, also known as 20×20, is an informal forum for creative work encompassing a range of disciplines: advertising, architecture, art, fashion, food, graphics, media (digital, moving, mixed), products, and more.
The forum is held once monthly at Octane and each invited speaker has the spotlight for 6 minutes 40 seconds, showing 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The speakers share and show off their work and the unfolding mix of stuff on show keeps everyone engaged and talking.
Michael presented on the philosophies, strategies, lessons-learned from SEEDR’s work fusing technology, design, global development, and social enterprise. The talk was entitled, “-ATION,” which is the suffix used to denote the result or product of taking an action. It where nouns become verbs and embodies the consequence of acting.
Michael discussed how the scientific advancement that results from our pursuit of understanding how our world works becomes technological functionality. And how this functionality, by itself, is amoral, taking shape only as an extension of ourselves in how we apply it in the products, processes, and institutions we create.
He went on to discuss the consequence of unintended or malicious applications of technology, citing examples from kudzu’s well-intended role in the Dust Bowl to the weaponization of nuclear power. But, he stressed, it is not just how it is applied but we are defined also by and form whom with what accessibility and sustainability. Moreland framed the systemic market reasons behind the gap between those who have access to relevant technologies and those who do not as the context in which SEEDR was born.
Moreland explained SEEDR’s work as a pursuit of the proper application of functionality to aid otherwise intractable problems of both public and private importance. The methods, collaborative partners, technologies, and unique social enterprise structure SEEDR has developed has fostered projects like SEEDR’s work designing a new affordable housing finance product and sustainable building construction process in the Dominican Republic, as well as its current work with CDC reengineering vaccine cold chain containers.
You can see the “-ATION” deck here.
Check out Pecha Kucha Atlanta here, its Flickr here, Facebook here, Vimeo here, and sign up for the newsletter here. And be sure to check out Pecha Kucha international here for more information.
Photos from the event thanks to Terry Kearns.
