They say that feeding to inquisitiveness knows no bounds. It was winter, the time when I had just finished my first semester. Under the burden of changing my branch to Computer Science from Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, I had succumbed to poor grades and not an expected performance.
All I knew, just after finishing my exams, was that I would have to spend my entire vacations speculating over the grades getting crushed under this constant coercion, had my mother not come up for a rescue with an idea of an internship at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Alike any other student, I was sceptical whether I'd even get a consideration, let alone getting an intern, being in the first year. I somehow, managed to get a recommendation from a professor, who had taught me a course then. There was no looking back.
After constant trials and tribulations, I finally had a connect with the Deputy Director of IIT Delhi, Prof. M. Balakrishnan, who showed some mercy to my cynicism and took me in. I was guided to a project associate, Pulkit Sapra, who co-ordinated a lab named Assistech, which produced low-cost, affordable products for the visually impaired. The lab, apparently, worked as a startup, having a team completely devoted towards the tech and product.
I was introduced to a few of their fascinating products: Smart Cane Device (an Electronic Mobility Aid), OnBoard (a Bus Identification System), TacRead (a Tactile Readout Device) and tactile graphics. I could rhapsodise the products for their very cause. Let's get started!
Enthused as I was, acquaintance to my task eventually came into picture. As a 'Mechanical Engineer', I had to design a reading stand which should be fold-able, portable, light weight, compact and easy to assemble & carry. Stand should also bear a phone holding mechanism which can allow adjusting the phone's position in accordance with the orientation of the page. Moreover, height adjustment must be supported by the stand to scan sheets of the likes of A3 size (default being A4). Additionally, the stand must be affordable with the material being readily available. Phew, That seems too much! Ain't it? It was sheer product designing.
I finally got down to the brainstorming. Numerous designs and ideas meandered over my head, as I wrangled to choose some keeping the constraints in mind. I would sketch my designs and discuss them over hours concerning the feasibility with my mentors and the Assistech team. This helped me quintessentially, as I learned several facets of product designing and could think from a visually impaired person's perspective. This path witnesses several anomalies in design, defects and feasibility/affordability issues. Few designs that did not see the light:
Design 1: The idea could not be implemented due to increased number of parts, and hinging mechanisms. The structure would wobble with improper locking of hinges after placing the device.
Design 2: Here, we could not use adhesives since there was a possibility of spillage which would render the adhesive ineffective after some time. There was also scepticism regarding the sturdiness.
Design 3: Similar to selfie-stick mechanism. Although fold-able, the material would increase the cost.
Design 4: Use of triangle to increase the sturdiness was felt. It was decided to make the base as sturdy as possible, to reduce the wobbling tendency and prevent toppling. Thus rods had to be used for the base too.A month full of efforts, in the end, bore my first working prototype, which looked something like this.
First Working Prototype
The Deputy Director and Faculty were happy with my work. The prototype, however, had to be refined. I worked again, over the free body diagrams of the stand, analysing the cases where the weights of different mobile variants topple the stand, introspected over its sturdiness and modelled the design on Solid Works.
Being a developer at heart, I also worked on offline voice recognition libraries and implemented the same for Android devices, that would trigger their OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application on speaking "Open camera", with inputs from Ankita Gulati.
A clearer picture, ultimately helped me conclude my project with something of this kind:
Final Working Prototype
The product design is now being refined by the lab, before it hits the market as an accessibility for the visually impaired.
I was content, for the entire process had turned me into a new self. The gradual learning and attempts to always think "out of the box" was something I'll always cherish, along with one of the the best team I could ever get to work with, for the noblest of causes.
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