technology - eyal matsliah on Diigo

24 Nov 09

Appropriate Technology - Latest Inventions From MIT Lab Help Developing Countries - Popular Mechanics

sustainability technology innovation appropriate-technology

7 Rules of Low-Cost Design for Non-Profit – Amy Smith - Popular Mechanics

innovation sustainability technology design

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.

By Amy Smith
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.

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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.

…My heart’s in Accra » Innovation from Constraint (the extended dance mix)

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sustainability innovation environmentalism green lead-users technology

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.
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- Our constraints: no electricity, local materials, built and maintained locally, with a price point under $5.
  
  Here’s how you do it. (Here’s how you do it if you’re an extremely creative and innovative Nigerian engineer.) Make two clay pots, one smaller than the other so it can fit inside it and leave a gap. Fill the gap between the pots with sand. Thoroughly wet the sand. Cover the top of your apparatus with a wet cloth. A couple of times a day, wet the sand and the cloth.
- Don’t fight culture. Or, if you do, be cognizant of the fact you are, and that you may well lose.
- Charcoal is an environmental nightmare. You get it by cutting down living trees, digging pits and partially burning them. Then you take the resulting coal and put it into sacks and sell it to women, who bring it home to cook with. They often cook inside, creating fumes and smoke that damages their children’s health.
- One way or another, they violate the principle of locally made, local materials, local repairs.
- There’s another great thing about biomass charcoal – it creates jobs. It takes a lot of people to work the press to produce this stuff, to prepare the “mix” for pressing, to dry the finished briquettes. But you can work within existing market mechanisms – people who make their living selling charcoal can make their living selling biomass charcoal, and people who made their living illegally logging and creating charcoal can create biomass charcoal. And the wooden presses can be made and repaired locally.
- The platform that’s seen perhaps the most innovation in Africa is the bicycle.
- Because bikes are so common in Africa, they’re very well understood. Because they’re well understood, they’re hackable. A technology that’s precious, strange and scarce won’t get hacked – everyone will be afraid of breaking it. Tech that’s common, repairable and replaceable will.
- William Kamkwamba has never met Peter Kahugu, but they’re spiritual kin. William got interested in electrical power living in a Malawian village that’s disconnected from the electric grid. One of the few ways to generate power is to use a bicycle dynamo, a simple tool that captures the motion of a spinning bicycle tire and uses it to rotate a coil of wire within a magnet. The current that results can be used to power a light for the bicycle… or, really, anything else, if you can just figure out how to keep pedaling the bike.
- Another function change phones are taking on is becoming location-sensitive tools.
- That’s the system called “sente” in Uganda, and known by different names in different corners of the continent. It relies on the fact that prepaid mobile phone cards have the remarkable property of turning money into information – your $50 turns into a series of numbers, which can be turned into $50 worth of value at a later point. Information is lots easier to move than money, so you can get money to Auntie Grace without getting into a cab or trusting the cab driver.
- Here are the seven principles of innovation from constraint that I shared with my audience in Barcelona:
  
  - innovation often comes from constraint
  
  - don’t fight culture
  
  - embrace market mechanisms
  
  - innovate on existing platforms
  
  - realize that problems aren’t obvious from afar
  
  - understand that what you have is more important than what you lack
  
  - build infrastructure on infrastructure
- I’d add two other observations that I’ve realized in giving this talk more recently:
  
  - objects need to become familiar and pervasive, then they become hackable
  
  - the really amazing innovation happens when objects change function

23 Nov 09

WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future

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18 Oct 09

YouTube - 2008 Latest Edition - Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year

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trendwatching.com: Consumer trends and insights from around the world

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15 Aug 09

Technology, Evolution, and God | Integral Life

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technology evolution spirituality kevin-kelly to-read must-read

07 Aug 09

The Technium: Technophilia

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technology culture technophilia predictions

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an "evocative object."
Turkle says, "we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with."
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- I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it's the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful.
- The web smells like life.
  
  It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.
- If you can honestly love a cat, which can't give you directions to a stranger's house, why can't you love the web?
- But the goal of every robot, and every machine and tool, is to exist for its own sake. To exist not only because it is useful, but because its existence is beautiful.
- e don't "need" a lot of what we maintain. We keep specific technology around not only because it may be useful, but because we like to have it around. The gear, devices, networks form an interdependent ecosystem of interrelated parts, and we have a technophilia for its survival. We love the jungly mesh of the technium, and the way we can lose ourselves in it. We rebel at the negative costs of this interrelatedness, and its negative externalities such as pollution (global warming is a type of pollution), but we have a deep affinity for its web. We continue to manufacture new ideas and new artifacts, not because we always need them, but because the technium needs them, and because we find the technium attractive.
- As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: "We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don't worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber."
- No human can turn away from the trick of anthropomorphism, and not be seduced by the humanity we project onto look-alikes, but the attraction of highly evolved technology is not only in its reflection of our faces. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution.
- Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this technology's charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.
  
  And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

06 Aug 09

The Technium: The Choice of Cities

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globalization technology urban

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them.
As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, "Cities are wealth creators; they have always been." He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world's population, "produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations." A Canadian demographer figured that "80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities." The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens.
5 more annotations...
- As Suketa Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai, and quoted by Brand) says, "Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?" Then he answers: "So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment…"
- Then Mehta continues: "For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn't just about money. It's also about freedom." Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children."
- The migrants don't have to come. Yet, they come by the millions from the villages, or the deserts and scrublands. If you ask them why they come, it's almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities.
- Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desires to migrate to the city because their villages lacked the options of education, jobs and opportunity. It is true there's an imbalance of options — that's the point. But there is work in the villages; it is just that this work does not pay cash (by which to buy cell phones and movie tickets), and it is boring for many, although it can be very satisfying if one is patient. That livelihood of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, strong conformity, rewarding physical labor — all this treasure is unquestionably available to them. They could stay. But they do not choose it. They choose possibilities and opportunities.
- A certain small percentage of the river of people streaming into the cities today are being pushed by the expansion of the technium. It is a horribly stupid policy to destroy natural habitat this way, and a horribly stupid policy to displace tribes. It does not have to be that way. Wiser people would not allow it.
  
  But today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities — the hundreds of millions per decade — is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head towards possibilities and increased freedoms.

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

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technology evolution free-will

another great article by kevin kelly - eyalnow on 2009-08-06

"human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen." And so as historian David Apter writes, "to be modern means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices" in "a process of increasing complexity in human affairs within which the polity must act," that is within a course that is determined.
the dozen or so attributes I describe as "what technology wants." These are: an increase in complexity, diversity, specialization, efficiency, consilience, socialization, structure, ubiquity, opportunity, beauty, sentience, and evolvability. All these values are increasing on average in sustainable systems like life, evolution, and the technium.
16 more annotations...
- Lastly, who you are in the richest sense of the word — your character, your spirit, what you do with your life — is determined by what you choose. An awful lot of the shape of your life is given to you and is beyond your control, but your freedom to choose within those givens is huge and significant. The course of your life within the constraints of your genes and environment is up to you.
- Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.
- "So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse." More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.
- God grant me the serenity
  
  To accept the things I cannot change;
  
  Courage to change the things I can;
  
  And wisdom to know the difference.
- In contrast to these two, the third force is our free will to make individual choices of use, and collective policy decisions. Compared to all possibilities that we can imagine we have a very narrow range of choices. But compared to 10,000 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, or even last year, our possibilities are expanding. Although restricted in the cosmic sense, we have more choice than we know what to do with. And via the engine of the technium, these real choices will keep expanding (even though the larger path is preordained).
- There is a misguided idea that GM food is more engineered, when of course ordinary crops are highly technological, having been deliberately "engineered" through breeding for millennia.
- "technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions."
- As in personality, technology is shaped by a triad. In addition to the primary drive of preordained development (force #1), and in addition to the escapable influences of technological history (force #2), there is society's collective free will in shaping the technium (force #3).
- "So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse." More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.
- "human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen." And so as historian David Apter writes, "to be modern means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices" in "a process of increasing complexity in human affairs within which the polity must act," that is within a course that is determined.
- "technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions."
- God grant me the serenity
  
  To accept the things I cannot change;
  
  Courage to change the things I can;
  
  And wisdom to know the difference.
- the dozen or so attributes I describe as "what technology wants." These are: an increase in complexity, diversity, specialization, efficiency, consilience, socialization, structure, ubiquity, opportunity, beauty, sentience, and evolvability. All these values are increasing on average in sustainable systems like life, evolution, and the technium.
- There is a misguided idea that GM food is more engineered, when of course ordinary crops are highly technological, having been deliberately "engineered" through breeding for millennia.
- The French philosopher of technology Jacques Ellul says "the process of technological advance surges along an ineluctable path largely because human agents have abdicated their essential role." In other words, technologies are only inevitable if we let them be.
- The lessons of the technium's triad are this: 1) Anticipate the technium's inevitable macro developments, and build better tools to predict them; 2) Make choices in technology that further the extropic principles of increasing opportunities, socialization, consilience, sentience, and so on. 3) Choose details and defaults with the awareness that our choices today form the constraints of tomorrow.

Technology is Nature « BLACK MIRRORS

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technology related:kevinkelly

05 Aug 09

The Technium: Triumph of the Default

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technology choice design

“and if you choose not to decide/you still have made a choice”
- rush

17 Jun 09

The Addiction to Control

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technology book-online

Utopia Postponed

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technology book-online

10 Jun 09

The Ascent of Humanity online text

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gift-economy technology

The Technium: Reasons to Diminish Technology

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technology philosophy-of-technology

One reason to diminish technology is that technology tends to bring our attention mainly, if not only, to external inputs, giving less time and space for listening to our inner happenings. Technology, especially Internet, is feeding the infinite crave of the mind toward novelties, which reduces our clarity and awareness, as every meditator knows.

06 Jun 09

The Technium: The Arc of Complexity

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Complexity technology

Each of those lines of code is the equivalent of a gear in a clock. The Windows OS is a machine with 50 million moving pieces.

05 Jun 09

The Technium: Increasing Specialization

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technology predictions

At the moment computers seem to be headed in the opposite direction. They seem to becoming evermore general purpose machines, as they swallow more and more functions.
The portals into computation, or the net, will specialize to a remarkable degree. The keyboard, for one, will loose its monopoly. Speech and gesture input will gain a major role. Spectacle and eyeball screens will supplement walls and flexible surfaces.
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- All the things we make with our mind, and the creations of artificial minds, will all tend over time to become more niche based. The "long-tail" is not merely a characteristic of media, but of technological evolution itself: the tail of niches gets longer and longer. We can imagine the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. Technology wants specialization.

30 May 09

The Technium: Increasing Ubiquity

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technology

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Appropriate Technology - Latest Inventions From MIT Lab Help Developing Countries - Popular Mechanics

7 Rules of Low-Cost Design for Non-Profit – Amy Smith - Popular Mechanics

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

…My heart’s in Accra » Innovation from Constraint (the extended dance mix)

WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future

YouTube - 2008 Latest Edition - Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year

trendwatching.com: Consumer trends and insights from around the world

Technology, Evolution, and God | Integral Life

The Technium: Technophilia

The Technium: The Choice of Cities

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

Technology is Nature « BLACK MIRRORS

The Technium: Triumph of the Default

The Addiction to Control

Utopia Postponed

The Ascent of Humanity online text

The Technium: Reasons to Diminish Technology

The Technium: The Arc of Complexity

The Technium: Increasing Specialization

The Technium: Increasing Ubiquity

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