Media Labs break out workshop

Two workshops were conducted as part of Media Labs break out.

1. 1) What happens when every Indian is a film director? - conducted by Mihir Sarkar
   
2. 2) How do you get health care without medicine? - conducted by Vinay Gidwaney
   

I attended the first workshop where we were given 5 topics to choose from and all participants who chose the same topic formed a team. The topic I chose was "How do we address the opportunities and challenges of self-expression by Indian people?"

The exercise was to

• 1) Discuss and come up with one use case per team
• 2) Come up with one question per team and get five responses during dinner
  

A fact worth mentioning is that I was made the moderator of my team.

And by the way, I never talked to Pranav Mistry. Its just that I stood less than 10 feet away from the legend and both times I spoke, he heard me. That again is not the highlight :) It is a great feeling though!

Here is how it happened

• Day1:
• We chose our problem topic, we discussed, we wrote the use case and we broke up.
• Two of my teammates confirmed that they wouldn't attend the conference the day after.
• Then I was on my own and starting scribbling some random solutions. I framed the question I was to ask over dinner. You may please find the responses in the next post. Based on these responses, I created a new use case (please refer to next post)
• The third teammate messaged me that he can not make it at 8:15 hours in the morning. However, he emailed me the question he had asked over dinner and the replies he got. He also sent me his new use (also posted next).
• Day2:
• Very few people turned up and I made my presentation along with the others. This was when I saw Pranav Mistry for the first time - Live! He heard me and a few others and so did Prof. Ramesh Raskar
• After the presentations (there were 4 presentations), Mihir told us to form two teams and choose one topic each out of the four presented. We would have to now write a use case and brainstorm and conclude.
• Two teams were formed and both the teams chose "Education".
• I was again the moderator of my team.
• We discussed till 9:15 AM and broke up given that my teammates wanted to attend other lectures/talks. I on the other hand was there on the second day for only this workshop. So, I decided to stick around and complete the use case. This time, I did not ask any questions. I was joined by Sanjli Gidwaney(from MIT I guess!) and we worked together. We came up with two use cases and a combined conclusion. (I don't quite remember her use case but I will post the discussion summary anyway)
• At 11:25 AM, we together presented both our use cases and our solution to the problem. We got three minutes each.
• Each of the panelists gave us comments (Prof. Ramesh Raskar, Pranav Mistry, Jason Pontin)