How a Diverse Team Led to Innovating a Wheelchair: Ross Desmond at TEDxSpringfield

This past year, Ross Desmond and his team at WPI designed and developed semi-autonomous electric wheelchair modules for legacy and new commercial powered wheelchairs to assist challenged individuals in navigation.

In this TEDx talk Ross, who is now a software developer at Oracle Corporation, shares how he and his team approached that design and what he learned along the way. Success or failure is determined by three important factors: the team you put together, the work environment, and the interactions throughout your endeavor. The seemingly casual conversations with individuals from different disciplines, when guided carefully, can give you the upper edge. Ross firmly believes a carefully crafted conversation with diverse individuals can give your project the upper hand, as it helped his team to collect ideas that enabled them to produce a semi-autonomous wheelchair.

The theme of TEDxSpringfield's inaugural event held on October 18, 2013, was "Driving Innovation Through Diversity and Inclusion." We are a group of passionate volunteers that believe Springfield and its surrounding areas are full of Ideas Worth Spreading. Springfield is the "City of Firsts" -- the first basketball game, the first motorcycle, the first "Springfield". This event focused on how to use our diversity to bring back the innovation.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)