Maddy Sides always had strong ideas about how the world should be better. But exactly how to be a force for the change she wanted was much less clear. The idea of, say, getting a PhD, becoming a researcher and writing policy papers just didn’t offer the immediacy she craved.
Then she found product development.
She’d got her first whiff of the thrill of making things in a bioengineering class that required simple shop work. That led to her real initiation: Beach’s ME203: Design and Manufacturing, the gateway for so many into the Product Realization Lab. (see main story)
Part of the joy of the class was how much quick, confidence-building progress she made in a range of skills?—?and how engrossing it was. When Sides first started welding, the experience was so intense she had to remember to breathe.
Her final project was a bar stool, artfully made but not particularly earth-shattering. But she was beginning to grasp a powerful new way of looking at the world?—?asking how things are made, making connections between a product in one area and a problem in another, knowing how to make ideas real.
“You look at something, and you say, I know how to break that down into bite-sized pieces,” she says.
Her senior year she took Design for Extreme Affordability, a hallmark collaboration between the d. school, Business School and PRL, which has a long history of creating life-changing products, such as infant incubators, for a fraction of the traditional cost.
Sides joined a student project working in South Asia to create a low-cost medical device that essentially sucks on wounds like burns and ulcers to promote healing. Negative pressure therapy, as it’s called, is typically prohibitively expensive for many people, she says.
Now an incorporated startup called Healyx, where Sides is co-founder and product lead, the company has had a strong reception, she says. Eventually they hope to launch in India and develop numerous therapies. As young grads, her team has been helped immeasurably by their ability to quickly turn around ever-improving, increasingly sophisticated prototypes. This practice of constant evolution is core to PRL training, she says.
“It created my path forward.”
