DtM Fellow Matt Eckelman on the Nepal Field Study
Matt Eckelman is a graduate student in environmental engineering at Yale, working on energy modeling and green industrial design. After returning from the Peace Corps in Nepal, he worked with Design that Matters as Fellow for the spring and summer before returning to school. Matt is a great resource to DtM as he is always willing to be shipped off to a foreign country for a great cause.
In 2005, I was freshly back from the Peace Corps in Nepal and working with Design that Matters at their home base in Cambridge. When Tim called me earlier this year to ask if I wanted to help out on an incubator project in Kathmandu, of course it was easy to say yes...
I had the great fortune to be able to return to Nepal twice: once with Tim in January for an initial assessment, and once in March with the Stanford/IDEO team. For both trips, I was in the multi-task position of acting as designer, guide, and translator. As such, I was somewhat apprehensive when, on our second full day in Nepal, we split up the team and sent Alex and Colleen with a guide to Chautara, very close to Tibet, while Leslie, Linus, Nick, and I conducted interviews at a couple of hospitals east of Kathmandu. For the entire trip I had been impressed with the Stanford students--how thorough they were in their questioning, how excited they were about the project, how well they seemed to adapt to the often chaotic streets of Kathmandu. I was even more impressed when, after a long bus trip back to the capital, the teams came together with stories and insights from both trips.
Alex and Colleen related the inspiring work of the one doctor who was running an entire district hospital; he minced no words in his desire for a cheap, functional incubator. Our team talked about the young nurses we had met who had been trained at the Children’s Hospital in Kathmandu, who so clearly wanted to do the best they could with the pair of available incubators in their neonatal wards. It was inspiring to watch the team synthesize all of the different information from our daily observations--I had never seen so many post-it notes on a wall before--with Colleen bringing many of the techniques from her work at IDEO to bear on this new project.
I think it was sometime in the middle of watching the Stanford students create a mine map of local incubator functions that I realized I wasn’t really guiding the team at all on the actual project. They had succeeded on their own in taking in the findings from our trip in January, generating new design ideas, and even presenting them to Ray Avery, the founder of Medicine Mondiale, DtM's client.
DtM Fellow Matt Eckelman outside the Kanti Children's Hospital NICU in Kathmandu.
The Nepal Field Team, minus Matt, outside the Kanti Children's Hospital in Kathmandu. From L: IDEO volunteer Colleen Cotter, Alexander Butterwick, Linus Liang, Nicholas Webb and Leslie Oestreicher.
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