Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore, organised a four day workshop on ‘Design Thinking’, July 10-13, 2017. The resource person for the workshop was Prof. Eric Blanco, the Deputy Director, School of Industrial Engineering and the Associate Professor, Product Design & Development at the University of Grenoble Alpes. 

The main objective of the workshop was to impart hands-on experience with creativity and knowledge based system design approach to solve need based problems. The workshop was organized by collaborating with industries Larsen & Toubro and Roots Industries Pvt. Ltd., Coimbatore. Participating industries offered three real time industrial problems and the students were expected find solutions to the problems using a structured methodology. 

The participants were divided into nine groups with four students per group and were required to make a physical prototype of their concept. The initial session of the workshop was on ‘Methods and Implementation of Design thinking’ by Prof. Eric Blanco. It was followed by an interaction of students with the industrial executives on problem definition. There was also a session on conceptualization and to develop the morale among students, the session began with a warming up session by a Marshmallow challenge. 

This was followed by a session on ‘Conceptualization’ by Prof. Eric. The prototyping session had each group working in various laboratories such as carpentry laboratory, dynamics laboratory, and fabrication shop. The students presented their project concepts to the panel comprising of faculty and executives from industries and the finalization of the prototype of the different groups were done. The concepts developed by the students were impressive and were appreciated by the industry. The workshop was concluded with a feedback session and certificate distribution for the participants.