21 IN FOCUS nding old pictures of Hong Kong, along with Cantopop songs ranging from Leslie Cheung to Anita Mui. A er locating an abandoned old-fashioned television (which was at least years old), we removed the glass, and assembled the PC, Arduino and speakers inside. I couldn’t believe it. Together with constant mentoring from our professors, we had managed to design and manufacture a novel concept in just four weeks! It was now time to test the invention. On exhibition day, a group of seniors came to the HKUST Library to inspect and interact with the di erent student products. Finally, they reached MemoTV. Naveen turned the television on and a er a few seconds of silence, the screen burst into life. The familiar voice of “King of Comedy” Kee Chan Tang (鄧寄塵) rang out, and our elderly viewers began laughing. The visitor nearest to the television then turned the set’s dials, which changed the content and era respectively, and the screen flashed up a black-and-white image of the HSBC Main Building in Central in the s. “Waaaaaah!”, the seniors sang out in unison. As our viewers continued chatting about and operating our MemoTV, I looked at my teammates and saw they knew it was a job well done. Looking back, this has to be my favorite course to date. Not because of the grade but because it gave me con dence. It convinced me that I could make somebody smile, and has been the highlight of my university life as it unlocked so much untapped potential. Now I am in my nal year and my working life is right around the corner. I hope I will nd another opportunity to experience what true engineering is in the future. When I was admitted to the School of Engineering, I decided on Mechanical Engineering to explore more about the application of concepts and formulas. A er two years, and keen to see engineering from a di erent angle, I enrolled in the interdisciplinary month-long Design Thinking summer course, organized by the Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics Department together with the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Working in groups – two HKUST students paired with two from China Academy – we set out to design and manufacture an interactive product for elderly people in Hong Kong day care centers. As my Thai computer science HKUST teammate Naveen and I were not well-versed in Mandarin and our China Academy groupmates were not comfortable in English, it was a challenge from the start. However, on Day , we went for hotpot and became close friends. On Day , we discovered design thinking was no easy feat: we had no idea what to make. I encouraged my team to apply the design thinking techniques we had learned, such as brainstorming, a nity clustering, storyboarding, and drawing up an importance vs priority matrix. A er ltering, prioritizing, and combining ideas, MemoTV was born. My vision was a television that could display nostalgic photographs, videos, and newspaper clippings of Hong Kong in the past century, drawing the elderly together and helping them share memories. To create this, I assigned tasks to my teammates based on their strengths. One focused on programming the Arduino (an open-source electronics platform), while another assembled the speakers and mounted the personal computer inside. The third began Urvil Sheth BEng in Mechanical Engineering ( ) Urvil Sheth and his nostalgic MemoTV for seniors.
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