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Yale combined necessity, creativity, and hard work to secure the silver design award, but his father feels that his academic career at Maharishi School prepared him for his success.
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by Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, The Review and by Maharishi School Alumni News blog
30 January 2016
Maharishi School graduate Yale Shaw (2009) was recently honored with a silver design award in the 2015 international Spark Design Awards competition for his life-saving medical device, "Epi."
With more than 500 entries in 10 categories, Mr. Shaw's award places him in the top 5% of worldwide competitors.
Epi is an auto-injection epinephrine device that is lighter, more stylish, and accessible than previous devices. Users can carry it with confidence, and without social stigma.
When the user senses an allergic reaction, Epi can quickly be accessed to inject epinephrine into his or her muscle tissue, temporarily neutralizing the reaction. Upon injection, Epi triggers its smartphone-integrated application to notify 911 emergency services of the user's exact location, allergy susceptibility, and personal information, saving valuable time that can make the difference between life and death in the case of severe anaphylaxis. Shaw assures, “The information would be encrypted so that only professional emergency authorities would be able to see it”.
As a kid Yale Shaw suffered from food allergies so severe that he needed to bring an Epipen everywhere he went. An Epipen injects a dose of epinephrine into muscle tissue, halting an allergic reaction for ten to twenty minutes, long enough to get help at an emergency room. Even though Yale knew on an intellectual level that this was a necessity, he couldn’t help wanting to leave the device behind and be like his allergy-free friends and peers. The Epipen felt stigmatizing, a visual marker for his medical condition.
Yale remembered this feeling and arrived at a solution with “Epi”, his entry in the 2015 international Spark Design competition. “A large part of the project actually addresses the social stigma with carrying medical devices,” Shaw said. “I wanted to create a device that people would be confident about carrying—changing the paradigm.” His design is sleek and modern, not even identifiable as a medical device at a glance.
Yale combined necessity, creativity, and hard work to secure the silver design award, but his father feels that his academic career at Maharishi School prepared him for this arena. “I attribute a lot of it to the fact that he went to Maharishi School and practiced Transcendental Meditation growing up,” Craig said of his son’s success. “He’s very fortunate; from the time he was a senior in high school he knew exactly what he wanted to do.”
Mr. Shaw graduated from the University of Iowa and is currently an MFA student in Industrial Design at Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
It’s wonderful to see Maharishi School graduates shine in their field. To read more about Epi or Yale’s other projects visit http://www.yaleshaw.com and keep checking back in the future to see what he creates next.
© Copyright 2016 Maharishi University of Management and Maharishi School
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