University of Leeds product design students have designed a prototype product for visually impaired schoolchildren as part of a global classroom experience in Mexico.
Ten students from the Leeds BSc and MDes product design courses visited Tecnológico de Monterrey to take part in joint workshops, digital marketing global classrooms and technical entrepreneurship and makerspace sessions.
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One project involved creating a prototype for visually impaired Mexican secondary school students. The brief, set by an external company, was to produce a game for 11–13-year-olds to help them learn new topics at school.
MSc product design student Sahaana Sainath took part in this 48-hour project with two students from Tecnológico de Monterrey and another student from the University of Leeds. Sahaana’s team worked on a toy to understand states of matter. The toy was made up of a ball with a bell inside and would move from box to box from a solid state to plasma.
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Students sketched their ideas and technicians from both the University of Leeds and Tecnológico de Monterrey helped them to make a prototype with materials in the Monterrey InnovAction gym design studio. ‘It was inspiring to see how the project was connected on a more personal level and the ideas being taken forward,’ Sahaana said. ‘It’s fantastic that our prototypes could help people.’
Cristina Reynaga from Tecnológico de Monterrey works with visually impaired students and will take the ideas from the workshop forward.
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Students learnt how to work with project stakeholders including small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and chemistry teachers, while receiving feedback on their pitches. The visit also included a poster showcase exhibition by Tecnológico de Monterrey students from design- and engineering-related courses. Leeds students spoke to them about their work to understand the process they followed.
‘It was great to see the way Tecnológico de Monterrey students and academics worked to compare the differences to how I’ve been working,’ Sahaana added.
The Leeds students were also given a tour of the InnovAction gym design studio at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where they took part in a problem-solving IDEO workshop, which looked at a case study on Mexican business travellers.
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‘It was a great experience,’ said Rosa Alejandrina Martínez Gaspar, a professor from Tecnológico de Monterrey. ‘Being able to meet excellent students and Professor Lisa-Dionne Morris, and work with them towards frugal innovation and design projects was beyond words.’
Following the visit to Mexico, a conference week organised by Professor Morris was held in Leeds. The AKTO conference included presentations about frugal innovation from the University of Leeds, Tecnológico de Monterrey, the University of Cape Town and the University of the West Indies. The week showcased how resource constraints can lead to creative sustainable solutions.
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This provided a cross-collaboration opportunity to work on frugal innovation and a medical devices project in which suggestions are being taken forward in the form of a toolkit book. ‘The event has really helped with networking, and I am still in touch with academics in Cape Town and one of the MSc students,’ said Sahaana.
‘The students have shown that frugal innovation and design is not just about cutting costs – it’s about creating more value with fewer resources, making ingenuity and resourcefulness the heart of innovation,’ Professor Morris said. ‘AKTO, led by the University of Leeds, exemplifies this by transforming constraints into opportunities, demonstrating that limitations can be the catalyst for groundbreaking advancements.’