Founding dVerse Labs | Donning the hat of a mentor

Deepika Gopalakrishnan
7 min readDec 31, 2020

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It all started with a simple cold message I sent on Linkedin last year after reading one of Shreyas’ articles. I had deeply resonated with what he had written and was curious to know more about his work. We got in touch and he soon became my mentor for various projects.

The pandemic had just started when I mentioned to Shreyas that I was looking for ways to create impact as a product designer when he was reviewing my work over a call. He, Krishna along with a few others had in fact just started OpenCovid India and were looking to collaborate with people to build open-source projects to tackle the pandemic.

When I joined the team I was just a nervous design student who was not sure if I could contribute significantly to the cause but I wanted to give my best. I worked dedicatedly and soon became one of the core members leading the project.

After talking to doctors across India, we identified the need for a portable sterilizer that addresses common touchpoints, preventing cross-contamination in COVID-19 isolation wards and ICUs. We developed Sterilo and got an opportunity to present our work to researchers across 11 Latin American countries. We emerged as winners of the healthcare track in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s COVID-19 challenge.

Sterilo- a portable surface sterilizer for COVID-19 isolation wards and ICUs

Krishna, Shreyas, Vivek and I realized that besides working well together as a team, our visions aligned, that is to leverage the power of design to create impact. This is when we decided to take the next step towards starting our own venture. I turned down the job offer I had in hand and having just graduated with a bachelor’s in product design, I plunged in as a full-time Co-founder of dVerse Labs.

Several studies indicated elevators to be a high-risk transmission point for hospital-acquired infections(HAIs) since they are confined spaces with a lack of adequate ventilation. More than half the medical staff we surveyed were worried about accessing elevators, especially during the pandemic. To prevent the spread of pathogens in such confined spaces, we developed UVfy, an AI-based sterilizer for elevators.

UVfy, an AI-based elevator sterilizer developed by dVerse Labs

For the initial few months, all of us founders were working from different locations- Bangalore, Chennai, Coimbatore, Netherlands and Delhi. Virtually collaborating to build a tangible product came with its own challenges. How do you communicate and discuss ideas through an audio call? In a physical space, a simple gesture might have done all the talking. How do you create a video or a 3D model or a prototype virtually? How do you build a sense of team in a virtual environment? While we are still on our quest of finding answers to these questions, we create virtual co-working spaces and use tools like Figma, Notion and Miro to collaborate and, Slack and google Meet for communication.

As a team, we found hacks to collaborate virtually and build together

If you’re building a tangible product, there’s only so much you can do virtually. Despite the risk of getting COVID ourselves, eventually, we stepped out there taking all the precautions, sourced materials and built an MVP.

Prototyping and testing UVfy

After multiple rounds of iterations and in-house testing, we conducted successful pilots at Aysha hospital, Hotel Cenneys Gateway and my own alma mater, PES University.

Installations of UVfy

We also tested our product for its effectiveness at an ICMR-empanelled lab. We are now reaching out to hospitals across India so we can ensure that their elevators are safer to access for the healthcare workers and the patients.

Reimagining education in India

Krishna and Shreyas being the founders of dHive Labs, invited me to be a mentor for ReImagine India, a hackathon for school students to reimagine the education system in India for the COVID and post-COVID times. While I was already juggling between my IIT Hyderabad internship, my final semester thesis project, my research paper to be published in the International Conference on Research into Design 2021 as well as the OpenCovid project, this was something that I really wanted to do. My sister had been a Teach For India fellow and I could see first-hand the impact of the pandemic on her students. Besides, I loved co-creating with children and enjoyed participating in hackathons. In fact, earlier in April, I was volunteering as a drawing teacher in an online camp we conducted to engage toddlers stuck at home during the pandemic. Being around kids made me feel more positive and hopeful of the situation.

The Reimagine India hackathon was an intense 10-day virtual hackathon in May. Donning the hat of a mentor for the first time, I was able to appreciate my own mentors and teachers who have been guiding me along the way. I was slowly learning to ask the right questions while also not influencing my own biases and thoughts on the children.

We spoke to teachers and students from rural India and learnt that they have no access to online resources and due to the lockdown, are unable to attend live classes. After multiple rounds of brainstorming and feedback from various stakeholders, the children came up with this idea of a framework for concept-based stories which could be created by students for younger students. For example, an eighth-grade student could create a comic on fractions using this framework and this book could be given to a third-grade student to understand the concept of fractions.

Facilitating sessions in a virtual space
Sneak peek into the magazine we created

There was a group of children who were motivated to take this project forward and make it a reality beyond the 10 days of the hackathon. So along with Anna and Sowmya from Lead by Design, I continued mentoring these highly driven children through this project over the weekends in June and July. We used to start each session by sharing our acts of kindness. Right from being grateful for my mom who cooked for us every day to my mentor, who took out time to guide me through a difficult decision, I started being mindful about all the positive things happening around me. There were days when I would start the session feeling quite tensed about other projects. Being around children who were truly in the moment reminded me to be present, for the ‘now’ is all we have.

An illustration I created in 2017 inspired by the book, ‘Power of Now’

Magic unfolded when our sessions moved from facilitation to children taking complete ownership of things. One day, one of our students caught us by surprise when he showed us the content he came up with for the website, working even beyond the hours of the weekly sessions. Taking constructive feedback from the mentors and his peers, he went on to design the entire website.

https://re-imagineindia2020.wixsite.com/change-makers- The website created by the students

Once the website was in place, they started reaching out to their friends and classmates to join the movement of creating concept-based magazines for rural children. Today, our students are themselves facilitating sessions with their friends, pioneering the team towards creating a change.

UNICEF has recognized our project as one of the Top 30 most Inspiring Ideas of Change. We are now partnering with Katha to reach out to as many children as possible across India.

I feel that through these experiences, I am growing as a human, as a designer and entrepreneur. I am looking forward to a new year filled with more such adventures and learnings.

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Deepika Gopalakrishnan
Deepika Gopalakrishnan

Written by Deepika Gopalakrishnan

Exploring the world through the lens of design

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