He likes to say that the only time a physicist and a brain surgeon meet is when the physicist is about to be cut open—and to his mind that made no sense. Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems.

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common.

7 Rules of Design From MIT's Guru of Low-Tech Engineering

Amy Smith, a senior lecturer at MIT and an editorial advisor to Popular Mechanics, is a leader in the appropriate technology movement, in which engineers from developed countries work with people in the developing world to create practical, affordable solutions to everyday challenges. Here are some of Smith's rules of thumb for design in the developing world.

1. Try living for a week on $2 a day. That's what my students and I do when I teach my class about international development. It helps them begin to understand the trade-offs that must be made when you have only very limited resources. More broadly, it was in the Peace Corps in Botswana that I learned to carry water on my head, and noticed how heavy the bucket was; and I learned to pound sorghum in to flour and felt the ache in my back. As a designer, I came to understand the importance of technologies that can transport water or grind grain.





2. Listen to the right people. Okay, so you probably don't know what it's like to carry fifty pounds of firewood on your head. Well, don't pretend that you do. Talk to someone who has done it. I believe that the key to innovation in international development is truly understanding the problem, and using your imagination is not good enough.




3. Do the hard work needed to find a simple solution. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”—and it is the key to this type of design work.




4. Create “transparent” technologies, ones that are easily understood by the users, and promote local innovation.




5. Make it inexpensive. My friend Paul Polak has adapted a famous quote to the following: “Affordability isn't everything, it's the only thing” and there's a lot of truth in that. When you are designing for people who are earning just one or two dollars a day, you need to keep things as cheap as you can and then make it even cheaper!




6. If you want to make something 10 times cheaper, remove 90 percent of the material.




7. Provide skills, not just finished technologies. The current revolution in design for developing countries is the notion of co-creation, of teaching the skills necessary to create the solution, rather than simply providing the solution. By involving the community throughout the design process, you can help equip people to innovate and contribute to the evolution of the product. Furthermore, they acquire the skills needed to create solutions to a much wider variety of problems. They are empowered.

Here’s what I learned by failing out of art school: constraints are good.

This, by the way, is how lots of innovation occurs in the real world. Eric Von Hippel at MIT’s Sloan School has written extensively about user-driven innovation. “Lead users” push the limits of what tools can do, and adapt them to solve the problems they’re facing. Companies that learn from these lead users can change their research and development cycle, building products that solve the problems their users actually face. Anyone who is interested in lead user theory could learn a lot from hanging out with African hackers.

It may have been a long time since the U.S. built the world's best cars, but nobody can touch us when it comes to spacecraft.

Clay Shirky writes that technology becomes socially interesting only once it has become technologically boring. The web has reached this point.

Whilst Amazon and eBay have become a common way to shop, the expectation that a similar tool might be an aspect of healthcare choices or a child’s education is not yet a reality.

"Think free," the movement's founder, Richard Stallman puts it, "as in free speech, not free beer." You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.

The short list of these books is led by MIT professor Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation.

What I discovered was that - with the caveat of a necessary network connection - life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google’s

Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data during my trip.

he only things I was missing were the passwords to online databases