“The ambitious program, which so far includes projects focused on energy, water, healthcare, agriculture, and housing, calls on students to be simultaneously creative, pragmatic, and entrepreneurial.”
By Leda Zimmerman, MIT Energy Initiative Correspondent
This article appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. Subscribe today.
Taking MIT’s “Mens et Manus” (Mind and Hand) motto to heart, the newTata Center for Technology and Design is pioneering a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving in the context of developing countries. “We are giving our students a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in settings where societal needs and aspirations are no different from anywhere else, but where poverty and limited access to technical capacity, materials, and energy, for example, create an unfamiliar and very challenging solution space for engineers and entrepreneurs,” says Robert Stoner, the program’s co-director and MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) associate director.