The fall 2018 semester has seen some exciting events and workshops so far that were conducted at the Design Lab in the NYU MakerSpace. Please reach out to Raksha or Cherisha, the Design Lab Coordinators with any ideas for the space or events. Some highlights of the industry events are described below.
ANSYS Simulation Tools on Sep 20
This workshop was conducted by Gilles Eggenspieler, who is a Worldwide Academic Program Sales Operations Director at ANSYS, Inc. He gave a good overview of how NSYS simulation tools allow you to simulate fluid dynamics, structural dynamics and electromagnetics phenomena with great accuracy, and how they influence product design. Young engineers found it interesting and a good learning opportunity. They also learnt wonderful multiphysics simulation examples and techniques.
Empathy Mapping and Ideation Workshops with IBM on Sep 24, Oct 10
The collaboration with IBM was a great opportunity for the students to learn about the design process with multiple design sprint exercises. These workshops were led by Nicholas Petrihos, who is the Engagement Transformation Program Manager for Watson Financial Services in IBM Industry Platforms. In his free time, he volunteers as a Design Thinking mentor with IBM iX’s partnership with Design for America, equipping students to tackle community challenges through design innovation.
The Empathy Mapping Workshop helped students learn how to gain deeper insights into customers as they take the form of a persona. It also allowed them to identify and focus on your users core needs and challenges to design for them the best possible solution. The Ideation Workshop helped students to learn different ways to ideate and how to problem solve with no limitation. It gave them an opportunity to step beyond the obvious solutions and increased their potential to innovate and think outside of the box, while deferring judgement and encouraging wild ideas.
Facebook AR Studio Workshop on Oct 1
The month of Oct started with a bang when we had a very exciting workshop by the Facebook team. Aniket Das and Sophie Ye of the AR Partnerships team at Facebook spoke about Augmented Reality, the current state of the AR industry and its future, and Facebook’s platform for Augmented Reality. They also did a short demo AR Studio, their tool for creating AR Effects on the Facebook platform to help students get a glimpse of the platform and its features. They also spoke about their new Student AR Creators program – an AR Effect Jam that gave the students a chance to create AR effects with guidance from Facebook for a chance to have it featured amongst curated content for the Facebook AR platform.
Intro to Simulink and MATLAB on Oct 15
This hands-on session by Balaji Sharma introduced the students to the use of Simulink and MATLAB for developing algorithms for engineering applications, and deploying code to low-cost hardware. The workshop helped students to learn about the workflow for development and deployment of algorithms to low-cost hardware, like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with MATLAB and Simulink. It also helped them understand how to acquire data from mobile sensors from smartphones and develop simple algorithms using MATLAB for real-world applications. They also understood about examples of hardware and software innovations in academia and industry.
How to land a job in Product Design on Oct 24
This excellent workshop was conducted by Ajayan Subramanian, who is a User Experience Designer at VMware. He spoke about job strategies in UX Design, learning to project yourself in the market and creating an effective portfolio to impress recruiters. Ajayan shared crucial insights from both the applicant and the reviewer perspective. He gave useful tips and tricks to land a good job and also conducted 1 on 1 portfolio reviews with interested participants, where he provided actionable feedback on the content and visuals. The attendees found the workshop very useful indeed and were glad for this opportunity to get personalized feedback to tailor their resume and portfolio for best results.
Front End Web Development: Mini Bootcamp on Oct 29
This workshop was conducted by Karan Rajpal who is full stack web developer at Moat, an ad-tech shop in Manhattan recently acquired by Oracle. He works on the company’s analytics dashboard and he has extensive knowledge of React, Redux, Postgres, NodeJS and other web technologies and app development. With his interest in NLP, he has worked on an intra-company chatbot and even conducted the ‘Create a Chatbot’ hands-on workshop at the NYU MakerSpace in April 2018.
Through the front end web development workshop, the participants learnt basic fundamentals of Redux and React. Karan also spoke about NPM, ES6 JavaScript, Parcel, Sassy CSS among other topics. The attendees found the workshop very useful and helpful and walked away with a ton of information to try their hands on building their own front end applications.
View our list of upcoming events.
Follow us on facebook, twitter and instagram for the latest events and activities!
