Hello everyone – I’m Miho, an undergraduate senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering with the concentration in Biomedical Applications and International Development. My interest lies on product development, user-interface design and capacity building. I’m pretty heavily involved in D-lab (http://d-lab.mit.edu/) – where we design appropriate technologies needed in developing countries – and Little Devices Lab (http://littledevices.org/) – where we develop DIY health technologies both for developed and developing countries.
I’m from Kyoto, Japan – and about twice a year, I return there to hang out with my family and friends as well as to work on my project, SoHub (http://sohubjapan.wordpress.com/). Oops sorry, the website is only in Japanese yet. SoHub helps to connect many different people for the purpose of designing technologies for rural communities in Japan. In short, we connect and create.

I am taking Introduction to Civic Media because I think that what I’m doing via all D-lab, Little Devices Lab and SoHub has something very similar to the concept of civic media – participatory media for the collaboration. I strongly believe in the collaborative creative solutions, and think all the projects that foster them are for good. I have been doing different projects in hardware design as well as workshop design, but it would be a new challenge for me to design something through media – and I’m looking forward to tackling on this challenge! In terms of media, I am very interested in photography (some photos can be found on my website here: http://mkitagaw.wordpress.com/) – so would like to explore the area around it as well as hardware.