Motivation: At one stage of life, I was left without any vision in my right eye. Fortunately, the best eye surgeon could correct most of it. I have empathy for the blind.

Provocation: Recently I had meet Hugues from Lyon, France. He and his team at Human Kit, have developed a printer for the blind which is like a personal desktop printer that you and I use. I am wanting to take it further.

Price point: IDEO begins all design efforts by keeping the customer in the center of it. I do this with an artifact of figuring out the price range at which 50% of my potential customers would stop thinking about the price of a product and start looking for its features. All buy decisions are a combination of price and features.

Price point aimed at: A desktop printer frees a normal person. His readings are no longer confined to what somebody else has printed. He can print anything available on the net and he can print whatever he writes himself enriching the contents of his writings with contents created by others. The desktop printer for the blind should give them similar freedom, but at a price that is about double of desktop printers for normal people. The double price is a consequence that the volumes of production are going to be very small compared to normal printer. A good quality Canon desktop printer using ink-jet costs about Rs 10,000 or US $150. I am aiming for a desktop printer for blind at about $250.

I took part in the InnoCentive Challenge # 9933299 - 3D Printer with 10X Speed that was posted on Feb 28, 2014. The Seeker desired proposals for 3D printing with 10X the speed and was particularly interested in disruptive innovations to dramatically increase the throughput of 3D printers. I decided that this challenge suited me. Within three days time I had developed a solution based on my experiences in various fields and my understanding of how to eliminate waste.