Businesses Have Designs for the Poor
Friday, December 21, 2007
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. As anyone who’s fallen in love with an iPod or Wii game console can attest to, good product design matters. It can matter more, in fact, than how many (or what kind) of features are crammed into a device.
Consider the N-Gage game phone that Nokia launched four years ago. Despite some great features and a global marketing campaign, poor design made the product a highly ridiculed disappointment. (You had to shut down the phone, open the casing, and remove the battery simply to swap game cartridges, for starters.)
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.
Amy B. Smith, an inventor who lectures at MIT, said her course on design for the developing world gets about a hundred applicants, but she can only take 30.
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.
Getting attention were items such as the StarSight utility pole, which draws energy from its solar panels to provide lighting, wireless Internet access, security surveillance and more (see www.starsightproject.com).
Meanwhile, a pioneer of pro-poor technologies is behind a new organization that will churn out even more ideas. Paul Polak, who started International Development Enterprises (www.ideorg.org) about 25 years ago to aid the rural poor, helped launch a new organization called D-Rev a few months ago. D-Rev is keeping a low profile to ensure a smooth take-off.
Continue reading “Businesses Have Designs for the Poor“
Source: CNN (link opens in a new window)
