Alex Kurk (MechE 2T6) has spent much of his time at U of T Engineering pursuing a set of projects based on a single idea — one that first came to him when he was in Grade 8.
“My middle school friend’s mother was blind, and they explained all the difficulties that they had with reading websites on computer screens,” says Kurk.
“I was already tinkering with an open-source electronics platform called Arduino, so I came up with a bunch of prototypes to help make those digital interfaces more tactile. Ever since then, I’ve been using school projects to refine that same design.”
Eight years later, that work has helped Kurk earn the 2026 Troost ILead Difference Maker Award.
The honour recognizes an exceptional fourth-year undergraduate engineering student who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to leadership development, improving their community and growing their vision of the future. It comes with a $50,000 scholarship to help support their continued growth and development.
The prototypes that Kurk has been designing converts 2D images, diagrams and user interfaces — including websites — into 3D models that users can physically interact with. For example, a virtual button that you activate by clicking on it becomes a physical button you can press with your hand.
One of the very first versions of the design formed Kurk’s entry into the 2018 Toronto Science Fair, which was held that year at U of T Scarborough, where he won a bronze medal. He was already familiar with the university since both his father and his sister are also graduates, but the science fair was one of the first chances he got to see U of T in action.
“I got to meet people and see the types of projects others were working on,” he says.
“That really captivated me and enabled me to see that helping people is what I wanted to be working on in the future.”
Though he later switched to mechanical engineering, Kurk’s first year was spent in the Engineering Science program. There, he worked on a 3D interfaces project as part of Praxis, a first year-design course.
“The clients in that project were blind and low vision members of the Leaside Curling Club,” he says.
“There we were trying to represent what the curling rink looked like at different stages of the game: where the stones were, etc. It gave me a different perspective on the problem, which helped improve what I had been working on earlier.”
By his second year, Kurk had connected with Professor David Steinman (MIE), who had a collaboration with Professor Peter Coppin, an expert in visualization and cross-sensory interaction design for accessible graphics in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. Coppin is also cross-appointed to U of T.
Together, they took on Kurk as a summer research student between his second and third year, to further advance the technology to address needs identified by Coppin and others through a project funded by Accessibility Standards Canada.
In his third year, Kurk made the 3D interfaces project the subject of his undergraduate thesis, with Steinman and Coppin as his supervisors.
Kurk later made the project part of his fourth-year MIE capstone course, working with a team of three other students to further refine the system.
“We got pretty good at using AI to convert interfaces into a 3D model, which we could then print with 3D printers,” says Kurk.
“The challenge is that you can’t print a custom model for every single interface you might encounter. What we’re working on now is a way to make it dynamic, where a single model can change shape to represent multiple interfaces using our robotic system.”
“It’s a bit like those pin toys where you push something into a bed of pins to create a 3D copy, only this one is motorized.”
In addition to the technical aspects, Kurk is also very interested in the ways that new inventions find their way to market. As part of his involvement with U of T Engineering’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, and as a fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab, he is developing Haptic Vision, a startup that aims to help commercialize his technology.
He also served as a director of the U of T Engineering Students Consulting Association (UTESCA), where he led a team assisting a local advertising business with their software pipeline.
Next year, Kurk will be heading to U of T’s Rotman School of Management through the Jeffrey Skoll BASc/MBA program; the scholarship will help pay for his tuition. He says that all of these experiences helped him see the connections between technology and business.
“There’s a lot of great research being done on innovations for people who are blind or who have low vision, but too often, it never turns into a product that actually gets into people’s hands,” says Kurk.
“I want to bridge those two worlds to help ease that transition and also help others commercialize their own research projects. That’s how I think we’ll make a real difference.”
