The Faces behind the project
We are students from the University of Twente, Netherlands, where we follow an educational program called ATLAS. During this program we get semester wide projects, one of which was about solving a problem that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. We decided to go with the food insecurity in the slums of Mumbai, India. In this section we will all give a quick introduction of ourselves, our role in this project and why we are interested in this project.
"I wanted to design something that could also be used outside of a pandemic situation."
Hello, I am Luuk Winters, 19 years old. Hello, I am Luuk Winters, 19 years old. The moment I noticed the importance of our project was when we did research and found that a third of the children in India are malnourished. It broke my heart that there is so much suffering in the world due to the pandemic and we are complaining we can’t go to the movies. It is even worse to think that COVID didn’t cause it but just made it worse. That’s why I wanted to design something that could also be used outside of a pandemic situation. I think our product suffices on that front, I am proud of what we, as a team, have managed to pull off.
I really like this team, we are all contributing to it in our own way, in a way that nobody else could. We have a diverse team, yet we easily work together and establish a project like this from scratch. I am proud of our final result and proud of the team. We had some difficulties in the beginning, but we managed to be resilient, reflect, and improve a lot.
"We needed to dive deeper into their world."
Hi, my name is Loes Henstra and I am 19 years old. I am the secretary of this project group, meaning I take notes during meetings, keep the planning up to date and I am the contact person of our team. I also am responsible for the website. I personally like our project because we develop a solution for people that live in a totally different part of the world. To make the final product optimal for those people we needed to dive deeper into their world; their culture, their climate, their norms and values. That is something I find really interesting and I believe this contributes in my sense of empathy that is needed to become a well rounded new engineer.
I also like the team itself. We are all really different people, creating an unique kind of team dynamics, which I really like. We are all very ambitious and work hard to obtain our goals.
"Why look for complicated solutions to problems when something simple, efficient and cheap is at hand."
Growing food in one of the most densely populated areas of the world with very scarce resources, capital and expertise might sound like quite an impossible task. However the team chose to dive into this with strong hearts and not a thought towards failure. This is the mindset that drove our team and myself through the long months of this challenge and has proven to me that everything is possible. My main role in this project was that of giving ideas and finding ways to go around the many issues using simple cheap and natural techniques. Giving insight into the culture and day to day life in India I was able to give an understanding of how things really work in a country that is quite hard to understand from the outside. Bringing my understanding of farming, low-tech innovations, and hydroponics helped conceptualize the final solution which I designed finally using some high-tech software. Overall this challenge inspires me to take a go at finding solutions to complex problems while not being afraid to dive head first into them.
"I am keen on finding solutions that will help the most vulnerable people."
At the beginning of this project, I was very happy to find that my teammates were interested in designing something for resource-poor people. I am very passionate about that, especially when technology can be used to increase equality and justice. There is a lot of suffering and injustice in the world and that touches me very deeply. Therefore, I am keen on finding solutions that will help the most vulnerable people. This results in me constantly nagging about price and ease of use (sorry guys, haha). I also like to come with new ideas, however, these are not always that realistic or suitable. Luckily my teammates can deal with that very well; we are really complementing and reinforcing each other and I am proud of what we accomplished.
