by Lisa Butterworth

At a recent Martin Luther King Jr. Day of service event at Harvey Mudd College, two tables near the campus center drew a crowd. At one, passersby stopped to gift wrap toys destined for donation to local kids. The adjacent table featured checkerboards and craft supplies like masking tape, scissors, and popsicle sticks: the makings of a prototype competition to create a more accessible game of checkers, especially for those with fine motor impairments.

The tables were sponsored by Adaptive Design at Mudd, or A.D.A.M., one of the school’s newest student clubs.

The club, started last year by junior engineering student Leilani Elkaslasy, is on a mission to design affordable solutions to make life more comfortable for disabled and elderly people in the Claremont community. It’s work Elkaslasy’s been doing since eighth grade, when she got involved with the New York nonprofit Adaptive Design Association through the maker club at her middle school.

“I went on a field trip there, and we spent an afternoon making easels to hold textbooks for visually impaired people, who would have to hold their books really close to their eyes,” she said. “And I just fell in love. I was like, ‘Wow, my favorite thing to do is make stuff, and it’s really having an impact.’” She walked right up to the director and asked him for an internship.

Elkaslasy’s interest in adaptive design in part drove her desire to become an engineer. “And I always knew if I ever made it to engineering school, the first thing I’d try and do is start one of these [clubs],” she said. The club works primarily with people with physical disabilities but also with the local senior living community, “doing everything from custom adaptations to more universal things, like items to hold utensils or toothbrushes that a lot of people could benefit from,” Elkaslasy said. “Something that we often forget is these things affect us all.”

Adapted bottle and can tab openers, book holders, large key grips, and drinking straw stabilizers are just a few of the items in A.D.A.M.’s repertoire. When one of the club’s presidents injured her knee, they made a cup holder for her scooter so she could carry her water bottle to class.

The gifts students wrapped at the day of service event were toys that had all been adapted by club members and made possible by A.D.A.M.’s outreach and fundraising at the Claremont Farmers and Artisans Market. Small, inaccessible buttons on bubble makers were extended and given a larger surface area for easy pushing. Remote-control race cars with hard-to-maneuver levers were transformed with large, bright buttons featuring easy-to-understand arrows. A stuffed animal with a tricky interior noise-making button was adapted with a large, external sewing button so a child could easily initiate its sound.

“We focused on things with switches. Those are the things that we see as the biggest barrier for anyone playing with [these toys] and are really exciting,” Elkaslasy said. “If someone can’t necessarily have a toy that lights up and has a bunch of buttons, we wanted to help with that.

In addition to working on items that make everyday living more accessible, the club also fields specific requests. A local special needs teacher has a student keen on flipping chairs; the club is designing a toy that will provide similar stimulation without the disruption. They also partnered with nonprofit Ability First’s Claremont community center to provide 3D-printed card holders used to display communication cards for nonverbal students. The local senior community the club has been working with, whose members love to play bridge, is excited about the card holders as well.

Though A.D.A.M. is new to Harvey Mudd, adaptive design groups exist at universities across the country. Last year, Elkaslasy did a fellowship with TOM (Tikkun Olam Makers) Global, an organization focused on creative solutions for people living with disabilities and the elderly. That allowed her to connect with like-minded students. “There’s a whole network of us,” she said. “You realize so many people are doing it. We have a grad student coming this summer from that fellowship who’s going to be involved in our club and connect us to the grad school’s medical device program.”

The strides being made by A.D.A.M. are sorely needed. “A lot of occupational therapists and nurses end up having to do this work on their own, and it’s a huge burden,” Elkaslasy said. “I mean, as engineering students, we literally study this all day in class, and we’re still scratching our heads sometimes about how to put these things together — it’s a lot of work. That should not be a burden on anyone who’s already a caregiver. That’s why we’re so happy we have a robust community here.”

That robust community includes a core group of about 20 students who attend weekly A.D.A.M. meetings, where solutions are brainstormed, designs are discussed, and tasks are divvied up. Many club members are engineering students like Elkaslasy, but other disciplines, including chemistry, are represented too. “Everyone brings their own skill set,” Elkaslasy said. “And the making skills we teach as we go.”

The club also has an extensive mailing list, all the better for getting the word out. “The more the community knows about us, the more they can be like, ‘Oh, hey, this would be really helpful here,’” said Elkaslasy. “We’ve been doing a lot of outreach, but our dream for the club is that people just know about us. They know where to find us, and we have a constant list of projects that we can deliver.”

Some of the things A.D.A.M. has on deck include creating less grip-intensive chopsticks, participating in the TOM Global Innovation Challenge, collaborating with the school’s student machine shop, and bringing one of the checker game prototypes to fruition, an adaptation that can also be used for backgammon.

“We’re really just trying to get people engaged with the club, and get people thinking about the potential of the club,” said A.D.A.M.’s co-president SJ Caldwell. The potential is huge, and the draw is clear: “There’s something really magical,” Elkaslasy said, “to building something that is really life-transforming.”

To contact A.D.A.M. email adam-leadership-l@g.hmc.edu.