Akshay Sharma

Akshay Sharma is an Associate Professor of industrial design, is passionate about using design as a catalyst for positive change. He has led multidisciplinary student teams looking at issues related to social impact. He has worked on projects related to financial literacy for micro financing that is being implemented in rural NE india and will reach 100,000 women in next four years. Another project uses cell phones for creating an information management system vaccination records to be used in developing countries; a version of this system is being used by jaipur foot for managing their patient information. He believes good design ought to translate into joy and happiness for the end user. Akshay, along with faculty in SPIA and Mechanical engineering has tested the idea of distributed collaboration where a project that starts in a community engagement studio can become the starting point for a studio in industrial design which leads into the international development studio taught by a different faculty. Here is a link to a news story about this this model of collaboration. His website, ID4Learning.com has documentation about the projects his students have worked on as well as the collaborative relationships he has developed. He plans to use the support to create a guide for distributed collaboration among faculty and students at Virginia Tech.