[tt] NYT: Low Technologies, High Aims

[Premise Checker]

Interesting stuff and not at all unrelated to transhuman technological 
developments. What I have always wondered, though, is why people in the 
countries that stand most to benefit from these technologies wait around 
until they are developed in the developed countries instead of developing 
them themselves. What happened to "necessity is the mother of invention"?

Low Technologies, High Aims
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/science/11mit.html

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Beneath the bustling infinite corridor linking
buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a
boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded,
stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at
saving the world, one village at a time.

M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral
realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the
institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to
improve the lives of the worlds bottom billion, those who live on a
dollar a day or less and who often die young.

This summer, it played host to a four-week International
Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together
prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work
in the real world.

Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP
on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic
backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches
bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an
easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.

Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica
Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a
cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from
corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough
electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for
a year or more.

The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy
Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her masters there in 1995
and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation genius award, and Kenneth
Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of
Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering
school near Boston, were also involved.

The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center
and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies
that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage
to Ms. Smiths passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the
lab is nicknamed Amys World.

Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work
with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water,
electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into
products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.

Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster,
cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into
the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.

She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. Everyone calls this an
experiment, Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind.
I call it the realization of a vision.

The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As
Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just
graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up
of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.

We have a real friction problem, Ms. Stupin yelled.

The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr.
Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a design revolution a
shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and
scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the
worlds poorest places.

Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on
creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the
worlds population, Ms. Smith said. The point of the design
revolution is to switch that.

She added: There are several different places where that revolution
has to take place. We started thinking, How do we train engineers
so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering
theyd want to pursue?

Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as
workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also
had to be sure that their creations could be built of local
materials cheaply enough to be bought by the worlds poorest people,
that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have
deep-rooted rhythms.

The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50
visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other
countries.

Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from
individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate
Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university
programs to develop commercially viable products that advance
society.

The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist
turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems
of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the
design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and
insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that
improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.

He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up,
including the importance of first listening and watching, then
following the old dictum small is beautiful with another, equally
important one: cheap is beautiful.

The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to
make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments like a
drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmers income rises.
Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the
push for such initiatives was coming from young people.

Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as
yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set
of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was
no paper, just prototypes.

In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only
paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of
blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards.
The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food,
energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from
the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a
well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).

Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came
round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the
first three-dimensional models.

Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their
ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of
Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from
Ms. Smiths black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters
people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning
metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices.
They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned
the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to
lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker
cabinets for a Guns N Roses concert.

The mentors task was making things work. Ladies and gentlemen, were
on the verge of a Home Depot run, announced Jock Brandis, who had
driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career
building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the
Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village
work.

Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller
for a Malian village was far different from that for building a
camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas
galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling
a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.

The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a
blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: Its, Heres the model high-rise
made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it,
and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles,
and next Tuesday its got to happen.

At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one groups
design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to
hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down
stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful
smoke.

What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives
more efficient, he said. Thats what the big revolution in America
was between 1860 and 1960 that a person doing a days work can
produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable
and that means he has more time to do other things.

Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal
of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a
cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical
components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived
with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks
in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a
vendors inventory.

Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums, explained
Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as
a graduate student in Kanpur, India. He comes with all his fruit
and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and
whatever is left he has to throw it away because he cant store it.

Ms. Thomas said, Amys class is about the hardest class to get into
at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about
how to make a million dollars after you graduate.

She added: Its taking industrial design theory and applying it to
where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle
iron and towels could mean a months supply of food. To me, thats
just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working
on designing a slick new computer.