Coby Unger
Technical Instructor | MIT
Coby Unger believes in the inextricable link between design and making, ideas and the physical world. While studying at Philadelphia University, he realized that his skills and temperament weren’t suited for most design jobs, which led him to focus on work that teaches “making” and to his position as a technical Instructor at the MIT Hobby Shop. Coby leveraged the Hobby Shop and led the project’s prototyping effort, and shares with students the joy of “thinking with their hands.” Coby fills his free time with favors for friends, passion projects, classes at MIT, and volunteering with local food rescue organizations.
UNNOVATION – A New Perspective on Designing Inclusive Healthcare Technology
In March 2020, as the U.S. was going into lockdown, a multidisciplinary MIT team formed to help in addressing the impending shortage of ventilators. How could we design and disseminate a device that would be functional for patients with COVID-19, safe and fabricated widely, and at a fraction of the cost typically associated with medical devices? Our lighting-speed research and prototyping helped to support ventilator efforts worldwide. Over the course of the project, we coined the term “unnovation” to describe our process of stripping away complexity, looking back through the history of a technology, focusing on the fundamentals, and combining old and new.
The MIT Emergency Ventilator Case Study – emergency-vent.mit.edu
