"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Necessity...
...is the mother of invention, right?
I just finished reading the blog post at Design in Africa which dealt with the issue of how to innovate in a country where resources and financing are constrained. Four different authors shared the benefit of their experience to describe how to best create leverage.
I've become obsessed with the idea of leverage, of late.
Archimedes famously said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." It's something to which anyone wanting to make a difference in the developing world should pay attention.
The idea that a small force can make a massive impact is one that resonates with me. Providing water filtration bottles like those Michael Pritchard describes in his TED talks not only provides clean drinking water, but it means that you no longer need to ship clean water halfway around the world the next time disaster strikes in the form of a typhoon, or an earthquake. It means that people don't have to congregate in massive refugee camps for clean water, where ch***ra or typhoid can breed and spread. There are second and third level effects to inventions like this that go far beyond first-order effects of just having drinking water.
Michael invented his water filtration bottle in his garage. He didn't have access to billions of dollars in investment. Companies like General Fusion are doing crazy things with limited funds by using existing, relatively inexpensive technology in new ways. Who knew that a piece of copper wire wrapped around a post with a current passed through it could become the telegraph? There are so many examples of innovation occurring by looking through a slightly different lens, and often that lens is there as a result of constraint.
Typically, you don't have enough money to do it the way you'd like to do it. Perhaps you only have access to certain materials. Your expertise may lay outside of the field in which you're trying to innovate (I'm a big fan of this one). But in the end, the fact that you have to do more with less, and can ask stupid questions that nobody in the field ever asks, means that you might just hit upon a magical solution to your intractable problem.
Africa is a continent of constraints. Cultural constraints. Financial constraints. Governmental constraints, Educational constraints. So what better forge in which to temper the metal (or mettle) of innovation?
The solutions will be modest, of necessity. Ain't that a mother?
I just finished reading the blog post at Design in Africa which dealt with the issue of how to innovate in a country where resources and financing are constrained. Four different authors shared the benefit of their experience to describe how to best create leverage.
I've become obsessed with the idea of leverage, of late.
Archimedes famously said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." It's something to which anyone wanting to make a difference in the developing world should pay attention.
The idea that a small force can make a massive impact is one that resonates with me. Providing water filtration bottles like those Michael Pritchard describes in his TED talks not only provides clean drinking water, but it means that you no longer need to ship clean water halfway around the world the next time disaster strikes in the form of a typhoon, or an earthquake. It means that people don't have to congregate in massive refugee camps for clean water, where ch***ra or typhoid can breed and spread. There are second and third level effects to inventions like this that go far beyond first-order effects of just having drinking water.
Michael invented his water filtration bottle in his garage. He didn't have access to billions of dollars in investment. Companies like General Fusion are doing crazy things with limited funds by using existing, relatively inexpensive technology in new ways. Who knew that a piece of copper wire wrapped around a post with a current passed through it could become the telegraph? There are so many examples of innovation occurring by looking through a slightly different lens, and often that lens is there as a result of constraint.
Typically, you don't have enough money to do it the way you'd like to do it. Perhaps you only have access to certain materials. Your expertise may lay outside of the field in which you're trying to innovate (I'm a big fan of this one). But in the end, the fact that you have to do more with less, and can ask stupid questions that nobody in the field ever asks, means that you might just hit upon a magical solution to your intractable problem.
Africa is a continent of constraints. Cultural constraints. Financial constraints. Governmental constraints, Educational constraints. So what better forge in which to temper the metal (or mettle) of innovation?
The solutions will be modest, of necessity. Ain't that a mother?
Views: 47
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Comment by Piratekitty on March 4, 2010 at 5:57pm
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Leverages! Huhu! I was thinking while reading your aweshome blog that all those inspiring people (including you :P) really lever me up to think more about what i can do and not feel helpless because it feels as if there is no beginning or end to it. And in turn when you lever up, you inspire other people to, levering them up also. XD Does this make sense a little bit? Because i don't always make sense. :p
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Comment by Ian Tuck on March 5, 2010 at 3:40am
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Thanks for the kind words, Piratekitty! I totally get what you're saying. I feel like if we can influence anyone, we can be levers ourselves. The force we (or our ideas, or our passion) exert on someone else can influence them to change. If that either cascades from them to someone else, or if your idea or passion influences more than one person, that's a multiplier, and what a lever is best at.
The thing I'm most intrigued by is what are those things that result in the smallest of forces having the largest of impacts? Identifying those levers (or people, or ideas) is what can change the world.
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Comment by Monica Toth on March 5, 2010 at 4:22am
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Ian, thanks for commenting earlier -- I'm glad I found you. Wonderful post. In our age of microchips and silicon wafers, I think it's easy to forget how simple and resilient technology can be. Back in the days of the Vietnam war, the military could throw computers out of a helicopter. Nowadays we're lucky if our laptop survives a fall off the desk.
When you assume technology is on a linear path of progress, with small and fragile objects replacing all others, any disaster can create an ecosystem of helplessness. That's bad enough when you live in the US; what about Malawi? Thank you for writing so eloquently about this. I would love to see a rising movement of hackers and inventors spread across the globe, and libraries stuffed with manuals and schematics. What an inspiring future that would be!
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Thanks, Monica. What I do like about where technology is going (see one child, one laptop) is that you no longer need libraries stuff with anything! As long as you have a USB key and some sort of computing device, that information costs *nothing* to store and distribute wherever it is needed. That's a great thing.
Hmmm. A distributed "hacker's library for social innovation". That's an idea I'd get behind.
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A few versions exist! I'm a subscriber to MAKE, myself. There's also Instructables, which is free. But I have a soft spot for books, I'll admit it.
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Yeah! I read MAKE and Instructables too! I'm trying to let go of books (but not reading!)
It's so hard, it's true. But just like they've leapfrogged technology like landlines (via cellphones) in Africa, perhaps they can leap from (not many) books to access to every book online. That wouldn't be a bad thing for developing countries. The last thing we need to do is cut down trees and ship books halfway around the world for entirely new markets.
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Comment by Marc Skaf on March 5, 2010 at 4:42am
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Thanks for sharing that Ian. I had just posted a video of Nikola Tesla, the father of invention. You should watch it if you have the time, but I am sure you are probably familiar with Tesla. It's such a shame that sometimes greed hinders innovation, as the video said, they couldn't put a meter on it so they stopped funding Tesla's wireless electricity to the world. The same message is portrayed in the new movie Watchmen. Some people want to keep resources scarce cause it drives up the value. However, I would like to bring up the term pareto efficient, that is that people seem to want to make themselves better off while making others worse off. That is not pareto efficient.
A question though, do you think making resources that are typically scarce, such as oil and energy, free is a good thing? What kind of externalities do you think this would have? Just curious what you think.
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Hi Marc, thanks for the comments. I'm an electrical engineer by degree, so am very familiar with Tesla and his work.
As for your question, I think the idea of making scarce resources free can be dangerous, although it depends on the resource, and the consequences of using it. Water, for example, is nominally free throughout the western world (don't get me started on bottled water). Oil and (non-green) energy use have some serious side-effects, such that you'd want incentives to minimize their use, so I don't see the free model working at all - you want to incentivize positive behavior (conservation), not negative ones (use more energy!)
That said, even green energy needs a distribution network, so I don't begrudge paying for green energy to help defray those costs. I'm no pure "free-market" capitalist, but think companies willing to make the investment in green infrastructure should be rewarded. And government subsidies are one way to indirectly internalize the externalities that are not accounted for in current oil and coal-based energy generation. Does that answer your question? I got on a bit of a rambling roll, there.
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Thank you Ian,
A great response, a very rational way of thinking. Too often am I conflicted with the idea that people have to pay for such essential resources, but then again I have to think of the externalities that would come from the demand created if something was "free". Of course, we all know there is no such thing as a "free lunch".
"Oil and (non-green) energy use have some serious side-effects, such that you'd want incentives to minimize their use, so I don't see the free model working at all - you want to incentivize positive behavior (conservation), not negative ones (use more energy!)"
This is a great statement! Thanks for the enlightenment.
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Comment by Jenn on March 5, 2010 at 7:38am
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"So what better forge in which to temper the metal (or mettle) of innovation?" International development puns are rare, this made me smile. I really like your post, it's a great framework to think about the entire design article. Using what's already available and "leveraging" it to constructive use is a great way to think about how to create change. Thanks for sharing!
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