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A maze of rooms stretches on the third floor of N51, the weathered gray building that has long housed the MIT Museum. The rooms look more like a master’s workshop than a scientist’s lab. There are woodworking equipment, metalworking equipment, hammers, keys, and dozens of boxes just for storing bike parts. Hearths are lined up on a window sill. Containers that cool food through evaporation from a layer of wet sand surrounding a corridor. There is a floating bike suspended from the ceiling, suspended on four pontoons, so a rider can pedal just above the water surface. This D-Lab.

Ask different members of D-Lab what the D stands for and you’ll likely get a variety of answers. People often say “design” or “development”. At one point the letter D was a placeholder for the entire phrase “Development through dialogue, design and dissemination”. Ta Corrales ’16 adds another D-word to the list: “D-Lab derail students,” he says, “and that was me.”

Corrales was a freshman undergraduate student in Costa Rica when he discovered this eclectic enclave within MIT, where 26 staff support 15 classrooms that teach MIT students how technological innovation can bring people together. Students also teach others in less developed regions how to build vehicles that will make their lives easier. D-Lab works in more than 25 countries on five continents to help improve living standards. At the end of his sophomore year, Corrales decided to make the study of D-Lab the foundation of his career rather than pursuing his first love, chemistry.

To solve problems

Today, five years after graduating from MIT with a mechanical engineering (and chemistry minor) degree, Corrales is a leader at the OAXIN Center for Innovation, a nonprofit in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. OAXIN was founded in 2019 after 32 academic, nonprofit and government partners, including D-Lab and the MIT Enterprise Forum Mexico, collaborated to identify ways to improve the regional economy. Today, about 10 OAXIN members run workshops where locals and visiting MIT students design and build tools for Oaxacan use. Workshop participants say they feel connected to their community and empowered to solve technological problems. Often, they contribute to the local economy along the way.

At the start of a typical five-day workshop, 25 participants discuss Oaxacan’s greatest needs and vote on five for focus. Participants may say they want to prepare food faster, avoid breathing fumes while cooking, or light up their home at night. After choosing what issues to address, Corrales leads the locals through a design process where they brainstorm the technology, build prototypes, see what works well and what needs improvement, and then iterate through the process. Small groups of MIT students sometimes travel to Oaxaca to participate, often those who prototype solutions in the lab at MIT.

OC3 PROGRAM

“Ta Corrales showed us that a community needs to understand how to manage technology to be prosperous,” says Enoc Ramírez, a former workshop participant via text message translator.

Ramírez has enjoyed working with tools since he was a child and has long made machines such as agave shredders and lawn mowers. During her first workshop with Corrales in 2018, she learned a framework for researching, prototyping, and improving her designs for design strategies that have made her job as an inventor and welder much easier and more efficient. He now runs workshops through OAXIN and repairs and creates tools in his business.

Recently, she helped a group of women speed up fish processing by helping them design a bladed blade optimized for descaling fish on one side and cleaning it on the other. He hopes that learning engineering and design skills in the workshops he runs with Corrales will open up more job opportunities to Oaxacans and prevent the need to illegally immigrate to the US, as young people like his two children once did.

hereditary activism

Corrales comes from a line she calls “activist women.” Her grandmother runs a cooperative that offers training and micro-loans to women who want to start businesses around their hometown of Los Lagos, Costa Rica. While Corrales was growing up, his mother ran a school for children with learning difficulties from underserved communities. Corrales’ name comes from both. His mother named Tachmahal for him, meaning “treasure” (and shortened by his sister to “Ta” when he was younger). And her grandmother suggested her middle name, Marie, in honor of pioneering chemist Marie Curie. Corrales intended to follow in Curie’s footsteps as a chemist, but he also knew he wanted to follow in the family tradition to promote social justice.

When Corrales started college, he didn’t see himself as an engineer. That changed in his second year during his D-Lab trip to Arusha, Tanzania. Farmers in the area used the laborious process of manually separating plant seeds from their stems, and Corrales helped build a bicycle-powered threshing machine so they could process crops like corn and beans faster.

Growing up, Corrales stayed away from power tools, thinking they were only for boys. But his time in Tanzania proved that he could actually use tools as well as anyone else. “When you find yourself in a position to invent things, there is a change in self-image,” she says.

At MIT, Corrales turned his major into engineering. It was just a few classes shy of getting a chemistry degree, and the move meant an extra six months of schooling, but it felt right. He knew he had found his niche.

Corrales became a gifted engineer and soon found himself holding the title of “Chief MacGyver.” Libby Hsu, D-Lab lecturer and deputy director of academics, MEng ’10, SM ’11, says she once saw Corrales make a waterproof lantern out of materials lying around in one of the Mexican towns where they worked. “Everyone sees him as a great mechanic,” says Hsu.

Novelty on a shoelace

Giacomo Zanello, associate professor in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading in England, says there is a growing awareness of the value of simple innovations like the Corrales lighthouse. “You don’t need to go to the moon to be innovative,” he says, adding that having users of a technology lead the process, as D-Lab does, is a valuable way to motivate change.

In Oaxaca, Corrales helped locals develop several inventions, including a thin, crunchy tortilla press called totopo, which was made only in that region. Standard tortilla presses do not press dough thin enough to make totopos that are traditionally hand stretched and shaped. A specialty press that Corrales helped create significantly increased the production capacity of the local population.

SMITH INSTALLATION

These days, Corrales takes the inclusive spirit of D-Lab through a world class company. Smith Assembly He founded it in the spring of 2020 with fellow engineer Liz Hunt. With this new company, Corrales and Hunt are offering team building workshops to English-speaking companies. With the help of Smith Assembly, colleagues design and create tools or art projects in workshops similar to Corrales leaders in Oaxaca. For example, workshop participants can make traditional Oaxaca dolls in the form of fantastic or mythical creatures.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith Assembly’s remote workshops helped attendees innovate using common materials such as pens, cereal boxes and prescription bottle caps. The company even builds connections between socially distancing colleagues.

Corrales is living with her family in Costa Rica at the time of the outbreak, but that doesn’t mean she’s leaving Oaxaca behind. He and other members of OAXIN have moved to conducting remote pandemic-focused workshops via WhatsApp text messages and audio segments. For example, many coastal communities in Oaxaca focus their food production on fisheries while relying on imported fruits and vegetables from other parts of Mexico. In the early days of the pandemic, vegetable supply chains were interrupted and there was little left to buy in city shops or village markets. OAXIN ran a WhatsApp-based workshop to teach people who know little about gardening how to grow vegetables in their backyard.

“[Before the pandemic] If you had asked me if we could do this virtually, I would have said absolutely no,” Corrales says. But in true D-Lab spirit, he and his colleagues innovated and found a way forward.

Once the vaccines become available, Corrales hopes to start traveling and running Smith Assembly workshops in person, but currently remains in Costa Rica and continues to work online.

OAXIN has recently launched a new project helping Oaxacans commercialize traditional textiles by selling shawls through an online marketplace. As Smith Assembly became more concentrated, Corrales shifted its efforts from running workshops in Oaxaca to measuring the impact of these workshops on the daily lives and incomes of attendees. The two Oaxacan totopo makers agreed to act as in-depth case studies, and Corrales found, with the data collected, that the presses saved every totopo maker two hours of labor per day and increased production capacity by 50%.

This is just one example of how technological innovation can bring people together to solve small everyday problems on the floor or in the kitchen.