Prof. Ken Pickar and his Students Change the Lives of Many in Guatemala 

Every few days, a group of Caltech students in Prof. Ken Pickar’s class call up the Quetzaltenango campus of the Universidad Rafael Landívar, a university in Guatemala, via an Internet connection with video and audio. Working with industrial design students from Guatemala and from Art Center College of Design, these Caltech students design products for Mayan villagers who live on less than $2 per day. The students are making water filters, stoves, dehydrators, vegetable carriers, and zero-electricity refrigerators. And these aren’t pipe dreams: one of the three-year-old course’s projects, wheelchairs made from bicycles, won a Popular Mechanics 2008 Breakthrough Award and is rolling ahead through a spin-out company, Intelligent Mobility International (IMI). This course is the brainchild of Caltech mechanical engineering professor Ken Pickar, who described the course model to the Caltech Associates at a luncheon at the Athenaeum.

Pickar collaborated with the group Engineers for a Sustainable World to shape the course. He arrived at Caltech 11 years ago after holding senior executive and research positions with Allied Signal, General Electric, and Bell Labs. He also has decades of volunteerism under his belt and understands that engineers attempting to help people in rural and impoverished areas must attend to their target customers’ needs and desires as rigorously as designers who serve more affluent clients.

While outlining the course concept to the Associates, Pickar also described the various design issues uncovered by the students who later formed IMI. “The concept of the course is to provide the Guatemalan people with a product that is very inexpensive and yields a very fast payback. We have a good mix of design students from both Guatemala and the Art Center in Pasadena, plus our own Caltech students, who of course are very technically oriented. And the result is that they come up with all sorts of wild and wonderful ideas that you would not have dreamed of before the class began.”
Caltech Alumni Rudy Roy and Ben Sexson, joined Pickar’s class in fall 2006. Through conversations with students and faculty at Landivar University, they came to see a need for a wheelchair that was both affordable and durable for disabled villagers. While sketching a wheelchair prototype on a whiteboard, they realized that it looked much like a bicycle. That insight prompted them to try constructing a wheelchair from two used mountain bikes, which made for a cheaper and very rugged chair. At the end of the term, the wheelchair team won the course’s $500 first prize for best design.

They continued to make prototypes for their wheelchair design, eventually switching from reassembling old bicycles to using new ones, so they would have a uniform manufacturing system. In order to see how their product did in the real villages of Guatemala, Roy and Dan Oliver, who had also taken Pikar’s course, visited Transitions, a Guatemalan charity that manufactures, repairs, and donates wheelchairs to poor disabled people. They came back with a better understanding of the needs of the Guatemalan disabled and incredibly motivated to help. When they graduated from Caltech, they, along with Sexson and Charlie Pyott, a student from Art Center who had also worked on the project, launched IMI, a nonprofit enterprise that builds wheelchairs and other mobility aids for the poor in developing countries.

“We came into this thinking it would be a huge learning experience about wheelchairs, but it ended up being a huge learning experience about education, about family and societal connection and about hope,” said Roy. “Every one of those items is a door that is opened once someone buys or receives a wheelchair that IMI makes.”

“Ken [Pickar] has been the biggest driver for us at [Caltech]. He teaches from a very business oriented viewpoint, which is important since it emphasizes the sustainability of the initiatives,” explained Roy. “We also had a really unique chance to experience the design talent of Art Center students combined with the engineering talent of Caltech students and have carried that through to our company. Today about 40 percent of the people who work for us are designers and about 50 percent are engineers.”

Pickar and the Caltech graduates who started IMI enjoyed meeting with and talking to the Associates members at the luncheon. Many had questions about Pickar’s course model and wanted to know more about the amazing work that is being done at IMI.

To learn more about IMI, please visit the company’s website at www.intelligentmobility.org. To learn more about the Associates, Caltech faculty events, and how you can become involved in events at the Athenaeum, please contact the Associates at (626) 395-3919 or http://associates.caltech.edu.

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