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About E/ME 105
"Product design for the Developing World" is a collaborative course amongst CALTECH, the Art center college of design, and Universidad Rafael Landivar, being taught in the Fall Quarter. This class is focused on designing products for the 2 billion people in the world who exist on less than $2/day. Our area of interest is the rural Mayan community of Guatemala. This class is a collaboration between Caltech, Art Center College of Design (both Pasadena), and Universidad Rafael Landivar (Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango Campus). The 2008 class is the fourth iteration on this subject.
E/ME105 has undergone revisions following each implementation in order to improve both the students' experience and the quality of the projects that they create.
Three years ago, the course was initiated through collaboration with the Caltech chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW). We welcomed as well students from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. We worked on designing products that could benefit the two billion people in the world who live on less than 2 dollars per day. It became immediately clear that additional information on the unique cultural and economic factors of the developing world was needed.
To address this need, in 2005 we focused on designing products for Guatemala's rural poor, which allowed the course TA to compile a wealth of background material and also a list of contacts who had direct knowledge of the realities of life in the course's target market.
For 2006, we decided to further enhance the context and relevancy of the products with the incorporation of students from the Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala City into the product design teams. As students from either the Industrial Design or Agricultural schools of the University, their technical knowledge and skills complemented those of the Caltech students who are involved in the course. In addition, the Instructor, Course Consultants and the TA traveled to Guatemala to meet the Landivar students. Due to their relative geographic proximity to the course's target market they were able to conduct first-hand market research and product testing in rural areas, greatly enhancing the chance that the products developed in the course could be successfully disseminated.
For 2007, we further enhanced the experience by traveling to rural Guatemala for a week prior to the course with 12 Caltech, Art Center and Landivar students.
The purpose was to do field research with actual customers to determine their needs and to better understand their culture. This information was then reduced into a list of product needs. These requirements, in turn, were attacked by eight joint Caltech/Art center/ Landivar student Teams as the major activity of E/ME 105 2007.
The trip reports, photographs and movies and the problems themselves from the trip are found elsewhere on this site as well as the student results from all previous classes. A paper on the results of the first three years of this course has been presented at the ASEE meeting in June 2007.
The trip for 2008 was co-sponsored by the Caltech Y. We increased the number of students to include 6 Maya rural university students, 14 Caltech and 7 urban Landivar students.
The trip was extended to two weeks including a week in a rural village. We tested and deployed some of the previous year’s prototypes. One of the class creations, a corn sheller, was introduced to the market establishing an income generation activity for a group of local women thus achieving one important E/ME 105 goal. In collaboration with the Caltech Y and the local community, we built two drip irrigation systems.
Thus we see progress in conducting an intense, useful Design experience in E/ME 105.
For more information, please visit Ken Pickar's website
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