See It: The Community being helped
As students at an engineering college with a passion for making a positive difference, our interests lie at the intersection of engineering design and social responsibility. We view engineering as the art of solving problems, and already a host of problems—from education to appropriate technology—are topics in which we can make change, even as college students. Drawn together by our common desire to empower others, we have come up with a plan for a socially conscious design firm where everybody wins. We envision non-profit organizations and socially conscious start-ups empowered by inexpensive engineering and design services, students empowered by access to positive design work experience within the venture, and us, the designers, empowered by a system of positive change. Our mission is to provide the design and engineering services necessary to empower those listed above. First, our customers will be non-profit organizations and small socially conscious businesses and start-ups with a focus in an area such as international development or education. There currently exists a gap in the design services these organizations often require; it lies between what they can do themselves and what they would take to a professional, big name design firm. That’s where we come in. We are making a venture to bridge this gap. Currently and unofficially called IdeaTree Design, we are (but are not limited to) college engineering, business and liberal arts students whose experience with design could provide a valuable service to our customers. With a host of nearby colleges to draw members from (Olin College, Babson College, and Wellesley College), we will also empower our own designers with professional-level design experience. Our location in the suburbs of Boston already puts us close to a large number of potential customer organizations, and our contract with Olin College’s enterprise hatchery, called “The Foundry” provides us office space free of charge. Although only a startup, IdeaTree has already started contacting organizations with which it might be able to do business. For instance, we’ve talked to a Chicago-based home for mentally and physically disabled about building a wheelchair coupler to help them save expenses, a Boston-based non-profit working in Haiti and Guatemala about designing a composting toilet, and a Texas-based non-profit about clean energy methods, among others. But this is just for starters— IdeaTree has hopes of becoming the go-to name when someone thinks “socially conscious design”.
Visit us at www.thinkideatree.com!
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Build it: Steps taken to create the project/org and the kind of impact made
Vital Stats
| Started On: | January, 2007 | Ended On: | no end date |
| People Involved: | 10 | People Impacted: | See project description |
| Money Raised: | $1300 raised; donated office space, supply space, etc. | | |
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Related Cause: Education
Project Updates:
Oct 21-- We finished the TB project and now we're onto the monkey project. What the heck is a monkey project? Funny you should ask. Over the summer, we worked on a project for another research team at our school (not a non-profit, but will potentially form into one at a later stage in research—also, highly accessible) that wants to design an automated tuberculosis testing device for use in the US and abroad. Most Tuberculosis microscopy is done by lab technicians, by hand—that’s 5-15 minutes per slide, a few slides per patient, multiplied by thousands of patients, especially in the developing world. Fortunately, technology is at a point where computer algorithms are well able to identify bacilli from images taken with digital cameras. As their team furthered research in the algorithm, design, and third-world implementation of the product, they asked IdeaTree to do some research on US interface design. This involved us traveling to a number of local hospitals, checking out in-depth how technicians interacted with their machines, and taking a look at the computerization of the hospitals themselves to get a feel for what sort of features, functions and feels the device has. As it would turn out, it was an absolute blast, and after we left for the summer to our respective home states, we came back in the fall to organize another project with a local NPO called Helping Hands. As seeing-eye dogs work for the blind, Helping hands trains monkeys to help quadriplegics and paraplegics. These monkeys live at the patients’ homes, and they have their own cages too. One of the main problems with these cages, says the organization, is trying to open and close the door once the monkeys are in there. They need some sort of remote control so the patient can lock their monkey’s door once the monkey gets in to sleep, and unlock it in the morning. This requires a little knowledge in electronics, and so we have formed a team of upperclassmen engineers to tackle this problem during the fall semester. We’ve also talked to the school, trying to see if the engineers can get research credit while working on this project under the guidance of a faculty member. So far so good, and the future’s looking up.
We also have plans to integrate heavily with a design lab that a professor at our college is starting this semester.
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