Hunter Schaufel is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, and he is passionate about combining Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design skills to solve a user's real problems. Hunter discovered his passion for engineering design while interning for the Exploratorium Museum's exhibit machine shop in San Francisco, CA, and he has carried this passion through into his his work with Design Bloc at Georgia Tech.
As a member of Design Bloc - Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary design collaborative - Hunter has contributed to user-research and prototype-fabrication for past projects to serve the High Museum of Art and Dramatech Theatre. These experiences taught him to start every design project by understanding the user through interviews and observation in context. In his following internship with a medical-device manufacturer, he used this user-centered design approach to define employee's needs for their production workspace, redesign and implement a production floor-plan that served the core needs of the production staff.
In his work with the Fall 2019 UIF cohort, Hunter and his three teammates researched the extensive network of resources available for student innovators at Georgia Tech and interviewed students in order to identify areas where students could gain from further entrepreneurship and innovation resources. The results of this and past University Innovation Fellows research is available in Georgia Tech's Student Priorities wiki page.