Businesses{?} have designs for the poor (CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Steve Mollman
For CNN

(CNN) --
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So, given the stakes, it's understandable why top product designers are a hot commodity in the high-tech arena. But for an increasing number of designers, the stakes are even higher elsewhere: global poverty.

Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that's changing.

At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world. Stanford offers a course called "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability." One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.

Smith was a lead organizer behind the International Development Design Summit (www.iddsummit.org), held at MIT this summer and planned again for next year. Mechanics, doctors and farmers from around the developing world teamed up with top design talents to come up with "pro-poor" technologies that are inexpensive and effective. One, an off-grid refrigeration unit, uses PVC piping, tiny water drips, and an evaporation-based cooling method to store perishable food in rural areas.

An exhibit called "Design for the Other 90%" (http://other90.cooperhewitt.org) recently ran at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The exhibit highlighted the "growing trend in design to create affordable and socially responsible objects for the vast majority of the world's population (90 percent) not traditionally serviced by designers," according to organizers.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/biztech/12/20/digital.design/index.html

The editorial question mark objects to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the innovations cited in the article came through nonprofits, not businesses.

Looks like people are rediscovering the idea of "appropriate technology", a few decades later.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=appropriate+technology+movement&btnG=Google+Search

[patrice]

1. ? So The Poor can have disposable junk they don't need too??? nt

[blogslut]

3. Not junk

From that Cooper Hewitt Show, some of the products featured were:

A drinking straw apparatus that filtered/purified water

A bamboo water pump for small farms

Charcoal made from sugar

A cooling urn, constructed of pottery and sand

A donut-shaped water tank with a strap in the middle for easy portability

The Mad Housers who build small, wooden homes for homeless people

link: http://www.fokal.com/designfile/knowdesign/Design-For-The-REST-of-the-GLOBE-The-Other-90

[Robbien]

2. Off the grid refrigeration, what a great idea

Why just for the poor? I want one.

It is insane that energy efficient ideas are only really allowed to be developed in the underserved area such as the world's poor. The rest of us are stuck with the money/energy hogs offered to us by industry giants.

[sifternat]

4. question mark indeed

way to slap on a headline that misses the mark

[mdmc]

5. welcome to du

peace and low stress to you and yours. :)

[killbotfactory]

6. Yeah, it's called perpetual debt slavery

enriching the extremely rich while eviscerating the middle class and putting the screws to the poor.