As an undergraduate at MIT, Ned Burnell began thinking about the entire process of making products, and all of the decisions that lead to designing products in a particular way. This is what motivated him to pursue mechanical engineering. "It was coming here and seeing, oh, there are actually all these ways in which these things do get made by people, and hey, I can be one of those people," Burnell says.
When Edward (Ned) Burnell sees a design problem, he is always ready to find a better solution. Even while chatting with a journalist outside his office, he points out ceilings and windows in different spaces and describes how he would improve them. For Burnell, a master's student in mechanical engineering, thinking about design is a way of life; whether he is creating a novel windmill or improving engineering software, he enjoys using his skills to figure out innovative solutions to familiar problems. Growing up off the grid Burnell's unconventional way of looking at the world can be traced back to his upbringing in Northern California. Burnell describes his childhood home in Mendocino County as "off the grid," located in a remote area that had only dirt roads at the time. "The town I grew up in actually is not even a town," he says. "There's no municipal service besides the fire department.
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