For Some of the World’s Poor, Hope Comes Via Design and Innovation

It is late. About 12:10 in Colorado Springs. I am fascinated by the social and business ramifications associated with Mike Kimmelman's New York Times story on design and technology through "Why didn't someone think of this before" solutions. The photos below provide a multitude of implicit ways to better the world locally. Indeed Kimmelman’s article is awe inspiring not from the standpoint of observation but transformative participation. Which is the point. 

Below a renovated public walkway, along the canal in Bangkok, where residents are helping to design cleaner places to live. With families in flimsy homes on stilts above polluted waters, architects from nearby Sripatum University were enlisted to devise row houses, detached houses and semidetached houses, along the lines of what residents said they wanted.

via nytimes.com

In the photo above the solution is absolutely simple. They have enriched a community. That enriches familes. Do you think the value of the improvements have been achieved? 

A community cooker is fueled by refuse that residents collect in return for time using the oven.

A few solutions:

1. a filtered drinking straw that prevents the spread of typhoid and cholera
2. a bamboo treadle pump that helps poor farmers in Cambodia and India extract groundwater during the dry seasons
3. The Q Drum, a doughnut-shaped plastic container, easily rolled, even long distances by children, which is used to transport up to 13 gallons of water.  I suggest reading this article in entirety via New York Times.

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