 So, thank you for Chakravarty for calling me here. That is me. So, I started my journey as a mechanical engineer at Shippur and then did a masters in mechanical systems design at IIC Bangalore. Then I had a small stint at University of Motors as a design engineer and then I moved out to do my PhD. I did it in design synthesis at a University of Cambridge on a Nehru Cambridge Fellowship and there I actually studied and also developed a program early AI program artificial engineers has has gone through a resurgence you know in the 1960s to 80s it was a heyday of AI and then now again we are seeing a resurgence of AI but very different avatar and at that time highly symbolic manipulation oriented rather than statistics oriented. So I wrote a program that can actually invent new ideas and then I stayed in Cambridge for about 10 years leading its design synthesis group and then I came back here and joined IIC where I now teach since 2001. Let us take a few examples which I hope you will excite you about the kind of things that the students or ex-students do. The first one is a chappal, you know a flip flop. This is Govind Sharma here and Anup Chandra and 2017 they received Red Dot Award which is sort of the Oscar of design awards for redesigning chappal such that it does not splash water. You know a major problem with chappals is that you know if you are in muddy water you will start getting a nice spray on your on your back this is a slightly different emphasis it is on invention and this is Mona Sharma another ex-student who is working in a Bangalore based startup she is the design head and her startup BEMPU it created a wristlet that goes into the hands of babies and just senses temperature and whenever the temperature goes beyond a certain number it will send an alert to the caregiver whether it is mum or whoever else is in charge and by doing that they actually saved lives of 25,000 newborns in 15 countries. Why because hypothermia a sudden drop in temperature of babies in major cause of death you have to warm them up but how do you know that temperature has gone down when has temperature gone down so it is a very simple invention but very very effective invention. The third one outstanding industrial design and that is TVS Apaches so this is Arun Francis another ex-student who has done the the form design for TVS Apaches RR310 as you know TVS actually makes the BMW bikes in India and these are first their first venture into creating a racing bike in the country and of course it had to have a form that matches that you know of course you can come up with good ideas nice inventions brilliant solutions but if it doesn't go to the society it doesn't make the change right. So sickly innovations is a is a startup that was created about five years ago by two M.D. students Nikhil Meshram and Nitin Gupta to basically pick cotton from the field okay that's a difficult task not many people are interested in doing and it doesn't give them enough money to stay in that business okay and there is a small window during the year in which you pick cotton you don't pick cotton every day and that makes it even more challenging to skip some of these people interested in that profession. The last example is where the importance of research shows very clearly and that's Purakh Purakh is a prosthetic arm this is a colleague of mine his name is Egnathan and he was one of the finest welders before he lost his forearm and as a result he is unable to do that quality of welding and these two students Vinay and Nilesh they wanted to bring him back to the workforce so they did a masters project on creating an advanced affordable prosthetic arm okay so prosthetic arm that becomes far more affordable than anything that is available and at the same time in order to make something so incredibly affordable you have to really think out of the box and look at technologies beyond just changing the current technology a little bit okay so for something to be seriously affordable it has to be also seriously advanced so they they got interested then by welcome trust which is a global funding body based in the UK they gave them another 10 crores to develop this further with a with a collaboration with the University of Oxford and now they have created a company called Russ Bionics this is an example of good research the way in which you pick something depends on the something now imagine a prosthetic arm that has to do that giving a flower is very difficult okay it's a very soft object even more difficult is a very flimsy plastic glass with water and holding it such that the glass doesn't deform right how are you doing it we are doing it with multiple sensors and actuators right so what did people do people said alright let's throw as many sensors and actuators and then put some controls around them so that an arbitrarily shaped object with the arbitrary flexibility can be held by multiple fingers what happens as a result you have a very heavy bulky complex device that people find very difficult to use so it's very difficult to train and also is very expensive because there are so many actuators and so many sensors and therefore you know these things cost somewhere between 5 and 50 lakhs so these students say can we do it at 20,000 and they did that and how they did that that is because of good research and they were able to come up with what is called under actuation where you use a single actuator to operate five different fingers in a coordinated manner so that it wraps around an arbitrarily shaped object and something called myomechanical sensing whereby the movement in the muscle can be sensed as a signal for it to operate okay now what is it that enables somebody to do all of that so to do that we need to understand there is this thing called business which is interested in money it doesn't matter whether you are doing social innovation you know or not you have to fill your stomach right somebody has to pay you so there has to be money so they are doing it for money they call it profit the difference between the price at which they sell and the price at which they did everything else for that object so that they can sell there is this thing called society okay and what the society does it says okay I want value what is value you know the value is not just based on price right so one simple way of looking at it is what is it that you want and what is the price that you pay for it right if you take this thing how does it produce that value it produces that value by either integrating technology or by creating technology okay so if we agree with that then value is performance by price and profit is price minus cost what is it that is in control for us at this designer we can actually tweak two things one is performance okay and the other is cost it can be the cost on the environment it can be the life cycle cost of a product and so on now for this venture to be successful both business and society have to agree that we like it okay the business likes the profit and the society likes the value if they don't they don't is not going to work it has to be a win-win situation okay so we need to understand the needs of the user right and the aspirations of the user and immerse in the user context and to do that we need to have two things which I broadly call domain knowledge and process knowledge domain knowledge means knowledge of what is okay what are the users like what are their aspirations and process knowledge means how to find that you know how to process how to create knowledge is process knowledge here is the second example now there is this disorder called muscular dystopia okay so there is a protein called dystopia that is in our body that is essentially a messenger between the signals that come from the brain and the muscles so if there is less dystopia there is less weaker signals that would go to the muscle muscle will not operate often and as a result over a period of time muscles will not remain strong and this is something that is dominant in younger children men and it's recessive in women so women will survive for a long period of time but at a very low quality of life so one of the things that we did in Cambridge that I was part of was to develop a simple device which we called mobile arm support now what is mobile arm support these people have would find very difficult to move their arm up and down okay because that requires much more force than going sideways so we developed basically a glorified lead screw okay that you can rotate with a with a motor here so if you have a screw that you rotate and if there is a knot then the knot will go up and down if you don't allow it to rotate and that's all that it had okay that's the knot and then here there is an arm okay arm with a sling with enough degree of freedom that the arm can use inertia to move about and with just that simplified device and you have a just a two way switch going up going down and two limit switches over there and over there to make sure that the knot doesn't go out of the lead screw that's all that it has as a result is very inexpensive so we went to British muscular dystopies society and they said brilliant product okay so we we had to do field trials talk about piloting later on we had to do field trials so we went I went with a colleague of mine at the outskirts of London and there was a lady recessive in ladies so she survived she's 37 38 she agreed to be a guinea pig for us so she had her wheelchair so we connected the device there and we said what would you like to do she said well I want to type on my computer so it's a fine let's go and she sat there and there is this keyboard right keyboard is about one and a half feet and she put her hand like that and she slid her arm like that okay it to take less than a second for her finger to go from one side of the keyboard to the other she started crying so we all got very very worried because normally people would not show their emotions right in front of strangers anyway she collected herself and we said is there anything wrong she said no no this is the first time in my life that I saw that I could take my finger from one side of the keyboard to the other in less than five minutes so this is the kind of change that you can bring to people's lives okay and only if there is profit okay so what happened was that for 10 years we could not find a person or a company that was ready to take this as a product and turn that into a business what why did they not do that because who are the customers they are the customer they are all wheelchair bound right they don't really earn any money so the amount of money available for them to do stuff is limited this product is what is called a high risk product in case one product fails and somebody gets injured they will sue the company okay and the company will go bust unless the company has taken a large insurance to ensure that in such cases somebody will pay for that okay and you want to take the large insurance what are they going to get the money from they're going to get the money from the same people from to whom they are going to sell the product which means the product price is going to go up if the product price goes up and the ability for people to pay is low this product is not going to sell therefore it's not a business proposition therefore for money many years nothing happened until in 2008 I received a message from a colleague of mine in one of the professors Ken Wallace he said finally your product is out in the market okay what happened was government agreed to pay for the difference okay and suddenly it became profitable because the company gets the profit and somebody pays for it partly paid for the person and partly paid for the government and then it becomes a value proposition again okay so once again you need to have domain knowledge what is the cost of the material what is the cost of labor what is the cost of manufacturing and so on but you also need to have the process knowledge of modeling costs last but not the least of course is technology this piece of hardware was so liked by the customers that Rolls Royce has to stop producing it now why do you stop producing something that everybody likes because if you don't do that they will not buy your new products there is a particular part of it that I would like to talk about this little piece here which is called nose cone you want to have the nose cone so that the airflow around that becomes nicely distributed and you don't lose energy much but it also has a side effect you know imagine an aircraft is flying at 1000 kilometers an hour 30,000 feet the temperature is such that where snow will start forming and because of the the compaction that will happen because of the airflow the snow will turn into ice very brittle it will break it will become little bullets that you are shooting at this very expensive high temperature okay the blades are very tiny here right and very be here because it is getting pressurized when the air is getting pressurized it requires less space right so those are very expensive blades there are single crystal blades that operate at a temperature higher than the melting point of the material now think about how they do that they are very interesting technologies to do it how do you ensure that they are not shot at with bullets right so this is a problem that engineers and designers have been working for a long time what did they do the first thing that comes to your mind is heat the cone so that there is no formation of ice bad news because you remember value is performance by price what is the price of that you know heating against minus 50 degrees Celsius and then somebody said why don't we think of these as two pieces where the front piece can be attached with a wiggle motor it rotates and then rotates in the opposite direction stops now if you have a wiggle meat motor that you can program at a frequency at which it wiggles is such that it's faster than the time that it takes for snow to become ice snow will never become ice and therefore snow will simply break and it will fly into the aircraft engine and nothing will happen because it hardly has any inertia right it's like fluffy so it's lower cost right so remember performance by price now you are getting the same performance but you have less price why can't we make these out of flexible material so if I can keep the front part slightly flexible then what will happen is that the object will vibrate because there is enough energy around see if it vibrates a little bit that will be enough for preventing formation of cone and now you have increased the value very substantially right you have shifted the problem from the energy domain to material domain right pretty much everything can be done either using material or using energy the biological systems all push the solutions from energy domain to material domain because energy is so expensive for biological systems so the knowledge of society what people value and so on and knowledge of business what would be sellable what would stakeholders like and knowledge of technology what is possible must come together and design is the great integrator see it's interesting that human beings become more creative when they have less resources so deprivation is not a bad thing so here is an example from computer product design cpd so in this case deprivation was that you have a handled air dryer that have to design except that you cannot use heating elements right so what he wants to did was he looked at something that aerospace engineers hate okay and that's turbulence when you have this wing for example you want the air to flow nice and smooth on that that way you reduce the or minimize the energy dissipation across the layers and when energy is less dissipated the system is more stable when there is swell in the air okay there is greater chance of mixing and as a result of losing energy so basically what they created is a glorified vortex generator and how did they do that by bringing in technology can you use two fans for example to create two opposing flows of air which will then mix and create these twists you know you can use methods and tools to look at the flow and see how it is going to come and so on but also you have to say okay what's the message okay how is the person going to hold it so this was something where you hold in the middle and you get two spouts of air coming out in order to dry the air and of course it should look good and it should be usable so usability aesthetics and functionality must come together so this is a sketch for another sensor in this case it is sensing corrosivity how corrosive this blue acid is for this yellow specimen so what you do is you have a bath acid bath and you put the acid there you take the specimen you plug that in you leave it for a while for a specified period of time you take it out and see the difference in size between the original specimen and currents specimen and it is the difference in size which is an indicator for how corrosive the acid is for that particular material of the specimen but the problem is that acid is very democratic and it doesn't discriminate between the lining of the baths and the specimen so as a result is very expensive lining also gets corroded away and that leads to a very expensive process of relining or throwing it away and creating a new one okay so there is a problem and there are many solutions that people have suggested in order to overcome that one of which is of course changing the material of the lining of the baths right but then can we have simpler solutions this has driven people and this is my personal favorite turn this specimen into a bath right what you do is you make a little hole on the top a blind one and then you put drops of acid there leave it for a while and see the difference in size of the hole after a certain time amount of time has passed so the question now is that you did not need any further domain knowledge than you already had here in order to create this idea so therefore it requires especially its knowledge that something that we can inculcate and it's not domain knowledge so what do we do train our students in a structured design process when you are designing something that is incredibly complex one example would have been the trend 700 engine that I showed you which is have something of a million parts okay and typically it would require about 5000 engineers to be or people to be to be collaborating with each other you need to have a process that can synchronize that activity of course if you are working on technically intensive product then you need to have a technical orientation you need to have understand the user we remember society was one block so emotion to user environment understanding them as they understand their problem is very important the realizability is very important you know we are going to talk about piloting and production and so on later on you know being able to make and see whether it works where it works where it doesn't and how to change it is very important therefore learning by doing becomes very important and as I said to you earlier research can play a significant role in all of that okay you need to have the domain knowledge and the process knowledge with which to do it so here is one process that I want to run through with you okay and the process has only four steps we start with task clarification okay so that's sort of doing the research so in the society you need to ask who are your stakeholders okay who is going to make it who is going to consume it who is going to distribute market maintain and you know retire who are your competitors what pain would be relieved and what gain would be received if you created a solution technology what are the current solutions that are there right now where do they not work what are the gaps in the current situation that you would have that are both novel new and also useful and finally what is the current market like how many people would benefit if you did that okay how much money is there for them to spare on this what kind of equivalent of money that they will save or receive and this is something that we need to ask for all stakeholders not just the people who are going to pay so what is in it for each of them so basically the question is if you think of the entire process of going taking your product from your head to the society there is somebody who is going to do it right there are multiple somebody's are all of them benefiting if not all of them are benefiting somewhere the chain will break and I will give an example later at the end when you have done all of that you should have a value proposition so you should have an understanding of how big is a group of people what kind of people who are the stakeholders how they will benefit from the solution who will pay for the solution who will use and so on and why should they do that what's the big deal for them second is a list of intents that your eventual solution must satisfy and third is how important these intents are if you ask people what do you like they will say I like this I like that I like this they like everything but if you say okay which ones are you ready to pay for the number will come down dramatically so you need to look at what are the monetizable needs that are there and which of them are essential which of them would be nice to have if you are designing a machine with which you are going to get a certain level of quality of cleaning on the floor then cleaning is essential right you cannot compromise that there may be many other things that can be compromised but not that one so there are some essential requirements and there are some would be nice requirements okay it would be great if you can have the would be nice requirements as well but the essentials must be possible to satisfy the second part is once you have created what's the intent of the product of solution is going to be you are then going to design and prototype it which we call conceptual design okay so what do you do there you create multiple alternative ways of you know satisfying those requirements normally you know you looked at those examples right so you can heat the cone or you can put a wiggle motor or you can just use a material that is more flexible and there are many other possibilities the important thing is to bring all these possibilities together explore them see which one works better in what respect and bring them together and don't get fixated to the first one don't have your favorite one you have to have multiple alternatives and you need to model and evaluate all of them and see which one really works what works fix the ones that don't and eventually bring it to the same level so you can compare them with each other and so which one is really the best that I should go for okay and then select the one that satisfies all the major requirements the one that you cannot do without and also ensure maximum satisfaction of most of the other ones we call those requirements that you cannot compromise demands and those requirements that can you can but it would be nice to have wishes so make sure that your solutions satisfy the demands and maximally satisfy the wishes and one message here is that you should fail fast it's good to fail actually okay the more you fail and learn from it and the faster you fail and the cheaper you fail the more knowledgeable you become very quickly so fail fast cheap and learn from it and then what you do is you essentially have come up with a principle that works so if I take an example from primarily technical functionality the basic principle on which a chair works is that it is a spring that's a principle solution that's looking at the core of what the chair is trying to provide and that's what you figure out of course that's not the only one you figure out you have a distributed load you know the bottom of people are very different each person's bottom is different and the chair has to cater for all of that so and then once you have done that you can create a spring in a shape and there can be zillions of shapes I can have a chair that has only the backrest and the and the and the bottom rest and not the rest of the things I can have one where there is a support at the bottom I can have one there is no backrest also okay but only the rest resting just the body and so on so I can have multiple embodiments bodies with which I can embody the principle right so again you need to do the same thing you need to look at multiple alternative embodiments now should the chair look like this should the chair look like that and so on and you need to again model and evaluate the alternatives and now your requirements are becoming different so what you are creating now is spatial layout rather than the principle so you are focusing more on the components and the interfaces okay and you are looking at all kinds of other best practice requirements such as reliability it must do the same thing over and over again that's reliability you know somebody sits here goes back somebody else sits here goes back all the time it must support the person that's reliability what is robustness each chair is slightly different from each other however hard you try to make something the same it's not the same or that however similar you think the environment is it is not the same right so if I can vary the parameters with which an object is made whether it is a size whether it is a material with the production process whether it is the quality of the interfaces with which they are connected to each other the welding and so on they are never the same so if I can make a lot of variation and here the object functions then it is robust challenger was a space shuttle so challenger was going up right and its o-ring one particular ring that basically gasket to hold the fuel that gave in the temperature on that particular Friday evening was particularly cold and as a result the material went beyond the level of brittleness at which the thing gave in never happened until that point of time so it was not robust enough to survive that range but so robustness survived the first 22 I just want to sensitize you to the fact that there is a whole bunch of requirements that are respect these requirements you don't write it down it should be maintainable it should be safe of course it should be safe so you have to bring them together okay so that the part the material the implementation details are right okay right enough that you will survive reasonably survive okay and then of course it doesn't work the first time so you keep fixing it until you are okay with that finally you know if you are happy with that then you can go to detailed design the last of the four stages of design where your intent is to make sure that it's producible in large quantities so once again you are now focus has gone from spatial layout to the components the parts the specific quality of the materials okay so focus is getting smaller and smaller so I want you to now here focus on the detail of every piece remember the o-ring o-ring failed this very complex spacecraft everything worked all right except one o-ring and why did it fail because this brittleness was changed to a value which surpassed the temperature on that particular Friday night so you have to be careful