Tag: Social Impact

Walking the same path I’ve anxiously trudged many a time before, I felt a little bit disappointed. I had signed up for this digital making course to learn new things and find ways to stay curious in my field. Yet, everything we had done so far was so familiar to me: the slight sweat building up from the far walk to the DRES testing center, the awkward stillness of its lobby, and quickly redirected glances to avoid eye contact with the strangers you’ve been thrown together with in the class; all of this was familiar. What was unfamiliar was our descent from the first floor to the wheelchair sports training room and the brief retelling of the history of wheelchair sports told to us by our mentor, Adam. What was unfamiliar was learning about how someone who had taken the same class as us mere years ago now had a multinational company whose product had made a significant impact on sports technology. It was incredible learning each individual mentor’s story and the way they made the most out of what they had, using existing technology in unique ways to not just make a profit, but make an impact. Hearing about Jenna and Ron’s struggle to become an athlete, I couldn’t help but relate to the yearning they experienced, having had to stop my own sport, track, due to chronic shin splints.

This is all to say that the whole experience of interviewing experts with experience in disability related products was an especially empathetic and inspiring experience for me. Throughout the course of the interviews, their emphasis on affordability and accessibility inspired many ideas in me to help solve not only problems they brought up about physical disabilities but also problems that my friends and I – who have mental disabilities – experience daily. Given the stigma against such disabilities, the budget constraints of helpful projects tend to be lacking; what really sparked my brain in the interview was all the ways that the experts we talked to innovated creatively through utilizing existing objects and ideas to create solutions to completely unrelated problems. As a business major interested in consulting, this emphasis in cost effective innovative solutions is a particularly interesting mentality that I will carry with me into future problem-solving situations. I had been thinking of innovation in terms of creating new things completely from scratch, but moving forward, I will be keeping the ideal of adapting old inventions to newer and more modern, salient products.