Volume 121 >> Issue 30 : Wednesday, August 8, 2001

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MIT Design Convention Contrasts ‘Needs,’ ‘Wants’

ADVISORY BOARD

For every design innovation that fills a need, there are many others that only fill wants. In the developed world, that’s not so bad, since our needs -- food, clothing, shelter, water -- are pretty much taken care of. But the same is not true in the developing world. The challenge, then, is to get more designers thinking about filling more needs, so that people in the developing world might some time soon be afforded the luxury of wants. And to some extent, that was the theme of the Development By Design conference held at the Media Lab last month.

The conference brought together designers from MIT and around the world to discuss the process of designing “appropriate technologies” for developing countries, as well as the technologies themselves. The day alternated between presentations of papers by individuals grouped into panels, and multiple break-out workshops run in parallel.

One of the workshops I attended was about how to get academic acceptance for this type of work. Libby Levison, from the MIT Lab for Computer Science, led the discussion. She explained how The TEK Project (Time Equals Knowledge) allows people with limited Internet access to e-mail an MIT server with Web search queries. But in a world where networking journals publish about gigabit connectivity, optimization for one kilobit falls short of the current academic standard for innovative work. This raises the questions, who is the academy supposed to benefit, and who sets its standards? We didn’t come up with an answer.

Other big questions touched upon: How do you educate an entire country with extremely limited resources? How do you design something so that it is socially accepted in the place it is to be introduced? How can you justify spending money on technology when there’s not enough money for food?

Some fascinating projects were discussed. Stephen Gitonga, from Intermediate Technology Consultants, demonstrated his company’s solar-powered lantern and explained the microleasing system that allows poor people to acquire one. Vijay Chandru displayed the Simputer, an inexpensive, Linux-based, open-spec’d pocket PC meant to bring information technology to “the common man.” Anil Gupta distributed copies of the Honey Bee Newsletter, part of the Honey Bee Knowledge Network that, like a honey bee with flower pollen, spreads information about agriculture and other topics without hurting those the info is taken from. Amy Smith, from the MIT Public Service Center, discussed her mechanical redesign of electrical devices for inexpensive production and easy operation and servicing. And Susan Murcott, from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said of her efforts to provide clean drinking water to the 1.7 billion people who need it, “This is not rocket science -- this is something we should know how to do.”

There are lots of things we should know how to do that we just haven’t yet put the time into doing. But this conference was a first step toward doing them. It developed from a semester-long workshop organized and taught last spring by a group of graduate students at the Media Lab called “Design That Matters.” And one of the projects that developed out of that workshop was , an ArsDigita Community System-backed collaborative design environment meant to take advantage of the spare “thinkcycles” of people (as SETI@home takes advantage of computers’ spare processor cycles). The idea is that it’s not a lack of technical people, but a lack of their attention going to these basic problems, that is the problem.

Perhaps a foundation will develop out of this workshop that will pay technical people to put their attention to these problems, like Teach for America does for education. And perhaps a global network of technical people concerned about these problems will develop out of that foundation. And perhaps some time soon these efforts will no longer be necessary, since the world’s needs will finally be met, and the designers can then go back to wants -- which by then will be a problem that’s not so bad.