Segal students are making some bonkers cool furniture in the shop. A snare drum bench? A table with inflatable steel legs? Our minds our blown. 🤯 So impressed with this quarter’s DSGN 395: Design Objects / Furniture Design showcase. Congrats to the entire cohort and Prof. Hemmant Jha, and thanks to Dean Schuh and Gordon and Carole Segal who attended the event!
Several Segal students won big at VentureCat on Wednesday! Congratulations to the winners. 💜
Rudy Arora took home the First Place prize for TurboLearn AI; Izzy Mokotoff, a Segal Design Certificate student, and her cofounder Alexis Chan took home the Second Place prize and the Audience Favorite prize for SteadyScrib; and Scott Tsangeos, a Segal MMM student, and his team took home the third place prize for Olympus. Congratulations to all the innovators who made VentureCat possible.
📌 Check out the link in our bio to learn more about the competition.
Scientists have struggled to determine how often aquatic predators consume shelled marine life because they lack the proper tools to do so. However, a group of Segal Design Certificate students is changing the game, one conch at a time. 🐚
The team created conch-shaped treats for sea creatures, dubbed GastroPops, to study the behaviors of predators in marine environments. Designed in tandem with the @shedd_aquarium , the decoy shells stuffed with a seafood filling will help researchers measure how often marine predators, like lobsters and stingrays, eat shelled creatures.
The team will visit Miami later this month to test the GastroPops in the field, planting them across the Caribbean and studying the results to find out what predators are feeding on shelled creatures and how often. 🏝️
📌 Hungry for more? Check out the @chicagosuntimes coverage on GastroPops at the link in our bio!
Photo credit: Shedd Aquarium / Heidi Zeigler
Joann Prezekes, a former occupational therapist at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, went to Design Thinking and Communication students with a problem: hand dynamometers, which measure grip strength and are important to test a patient’s recovery from injury, kept breaking. Tasked with creating a case to protect the devices, the students devised an even better fix for the issue that would be simple and cost-effective without completely overhauling the casing on the dynamometers.
“When I brought their prototype back to work, the excitement was over the top,” Prekezes said. “Everyone said, ‘Why didn’t we think of this before?’”
📌 Curious about how they did it? Read more about the team, their approach to the problem, and how they addressed it at the link in our bio!
@northwesterneng student Amelia Hasting (‘27) found that her experience in Design Thinking and Communication (DTC) demonstrated to her the value of teamwork, compromise, and tackling an issue from multiple angles. 📐
Hasting and her DTC team worked with Envision Unlimited, a non-profit organization serving adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, to fix a specific pain point: faulty kickstands on tandem bikes. Her team, guided by faculty members Zachary Berent and Ignatius Aloysius, researched, ideated, and iterated tirelessly, leading them to create a design modeled after a motorcycle’s robust kickstand. 🚲
Read the story at the link in our bio!
Segal professor and long-time entrepreneur Dan Brown emphasizes “Differentiation by design” in the classroom, a principle that recently helped all five MaDE capstone student teams secure provisional patents for their class projects.
Brown holds nearly 45 US patents himself, having practiced “Differentiation by design” as a serial inventor and design engineering professional. He notably developed products such as the Bionic Wrench and founded LoggerHead Tools in 2005. He joined the Segal faculty in 2008 and has been teaching students the importance of human-centered design and competitive advantage ever since. 🛠️
Read more about Brown and how he brings his practical experience into the classroom at the link in our bio!
Engineer, educator, and author of “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World” Deb Chachra spoke to students at the Ford Engineering Design Center on April 11 to ignite discussion about how to design infrastructure that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits for all. During her talk, Chachra highlighted specific infrastructure examples that had great societal and environmental impacts on their communities, urging students to approach infrastructure design in a more equitable and sustainable way.
“We do not have to recapitulate the way we built these systems. We now have the opportunity to rebuild these collective systems to be equitable, sustainable, and resilient in the face of climate change.” Chachra said. “But to do this, we must fix our hearts. This is the work. This is going to shape your life as an engineer and as a designer for at least the next few decades.”
Thank you to Professor @debcha and the students in attendance! Read more about the talk at the link in our bio.
Get fired up, metal-heads. It’s time for the Iron Pour. 🔥
Embrace the heat at the 6th annual Segal Iron Pour on May 4! Segal students and faculty will demonstrate the centuries-old manufacturing process and pour molten iron from a 2,700-degree furnace into 3D-printed and sand-casted molds. The event is a culmination of DSGN 395-64: Leonardo, Geometry, and the Art of Manufacturing
📅 Save the date: May 4, 2024
🕢 Time: 7:30 - 10 p.m. CT
📍Location: Evanston Township High School, 1600 Dodge Ave, Evanston, IL 60201
We hope to see you there! And for the #starwars fans celebrating #maythe4th , may the pour be with you. 🌌
The MaDE You Look Design Sprint this weekend was a success! Teams of MaDE students were tasked with designing a prototype that addressed the prompt, “Living one-handed in a two-handed world,” in just 24 hours. Congratulations to the winning team who created Brush Hump, a design that helps people wash dishes with one hand, and the runners-up who created Le Zip, a design to help people zip up clothing one-handed. Thanks to all who participated, as well as the industry partners who served as coaches!
Join us on April 17 for an opportunity to hear from a Dyson engineer about how to iterate and submit a prototype for the James Dyson Award, an international design competition
intended to get the next generation of design engineers excited about innovating. All students are welcome, and pizza and drinks will be served! 🍕
📅 Save the date: Wednesday, April 17
⏰ Time: 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
📍 Location: Ford Hive Annex (Room 2.340), 2133 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL
RSVP at the link in our bio!
MaDE students, are you looking for a challenge? Look no further than the MaDE You Look Design Sprint! 🏃
Created for MaDE students, the design sprint challenge tasks teams of students to bring a design to life with the prompt, "Living one-handed in a two-handed world," in just 24 hours. Industry partners will be assigned to teams as coaches for guidance and professional perspective.
All MaDE students are welcome to compete, and students from other majors can join as long as there's at least one MaDe major on the team.
📆 Save the date: Friday, April 12 5 - 8 p.m. AND Saturday, April 13 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
📍Location: Ford Prototyping Lab (Room B.300), 2133 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL
Click the link in our bio to register, and good luck ideating! 💡
