Designing With, Not For

Surbhi Agrawal holds a Master's degree in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, a cross-disciplinary program focused on urban design, policy development and systemic interventions.

With her background in architecture and urban design, she used her time at MIT to expand her understanding of the physical fabric, socioeconomic systems and human landscape of cities, especially as they are being transformed through emerging digital technologies and urban informatics. Her 2022 Design Fellowship research focused on these transformations for urban applications from a responsible design and digital equity perspective, especially in developing contexts.

Surbhi worked with the MIT Senseable City Lab on digital equity in India, towards the creation of a digital inclusion framework. In previous years, she worked with the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and Civic Infrastructure Equity Lab as a researcher and project manager for the Living Data Hubs, a community-based internet network in Nairobi.

Surbhi has worked as a consultant with city governments, urban innovation companies and design agencies across the world, including the San Francisco City Planning Department, LinkNYC in New York, Responsible Sensing Lab in Amsterdam, MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, MIT City Design and Development Group, RMA Architects in Mumbai, and Vo Trong Nghia Architects in Vietnam.

Her research has been published in several books on built environment studies and she is currently authoring a book on a value-based approach to urban digitization with the Taylor & Francis group.

Aditya Mehrotra is a 2022 MIT alum and current graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Adi spent some time in Ghana working on low-cost ambulances for Moving Health (an MIT D-Lab spinout), and is a current instructor for D-Lab's Mobiles for Development class (focused on exploring the potential uses of upcycled electronic devices in South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda) that is part of D-Lab's KOICA-supported project Design for Second Life Innovations. He’ll also be leading a team of students from his class to Tanzania in August. He was also recently featured on MIT News here.

Richard Perez is the founding director of the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Richard’s expertise and experience combines human centered design with business thinking, management and strategy. His area of specialisation is design thinking for innovation and strategic leadership. He advises organisations (private and public) in both South Africa, the Africa region and internationally.

Perez’s education includes a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Cape Town, a Masters in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College of Science and Technology (London) and an Executive MBA from the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, where his research topic focused on the inter-relationships between constraints and creativity

Amy Smith is the Founding Director of MIT D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the founder of the International Development Design Summit, co-founder of the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge, co-founder of Rethink Relief conference, and originator of the Creative Capacity Building Methodology.

Following her graduation from MIT in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering, she served in the US Peace Corps in Botswana. She went on to receive a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering and Master of Engineering degree, both from MIT.

In 2002, she founded MIT D-Lab. D-Lab works with people around the world to develop and advance collaborative approaches and practical solutions to global poverty challenges. Over 20+ years, D-Lab has developed more than 20 MIT courses, hosts research groups, and through the International Development Design Summits, established a diverse international network of more than 1,000 innovators from four continents as well as local innovation centers in countries in Africa, Central America, South America, India, and Southeast Asia.

Amy was selected as a 2004 MacArthur Fellow and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2010 for her work promoting local innovation and technology creation. She has done fieldwork in Senegal, South Africa, Nepal, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, and Indonesia. Her current projects are in the areas of water testing, treatment and storage, agricultural processing and alternative energy, and humanitarian innovation.

MIT D-Lab, founded by Smith in 2002 is a highly regarded education, research and development, and international development program with more than a dozen staff members, enrollment of ~300 students annually; creator of 10 MIT courses focusing on technology design, international development, and humanitarian innovation; inventor and community organizer committed to poverty alleviation. In 2019, D-Lab was a recipient of a Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award.

She leads the MIT D-Lab Humanitarion Innovation program with Martha Thompson.