Thinking About Design Then Thinking About Culture

This year, as part of orientation, we showed a couple videos to students to get them thinking about the key questions:

  • Why are we here?
  • What do we want our culture to be like?
  • What do we need to do to make our culture the way we want it to be?

The one I showed, a TED talk by Tony Fadell focuses on how he sees the world as a designer: looking for those small nuisances to which we’ve become habituated by paying closer attention to detail, looking for the big picture, and trying to see things with new, childish eyes.

I think it was successful in that I’ve been hearing it come up–particularly the term habituation (although the students could often not remember the actual term)–a few times already this semester.

Appropriate Technology: Innovation with Light

Not a lot of light penetrates the galvanized steel roofs that are ubiquitous in slums around the world. Alfredo Moser came up with one ridiculously cheap solution (via the World Social Forum, 2011).

While this the kind of cheap, elegant solution I would go for in a heartbeat, I’m pretty sure my wife would veto. For the more stylistically conscious – and for people with a bit more money in their pockets – there are $2.00 LED lights advocated by The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC). A lot of people in dire poverty live in the slums, but that’s not the case for everyone.

The ATC’s seems to focus on projects designed by university students and implemented in the third world. If they work, the designs are published with a Creative Commons license so that other Non Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) that work in poorer countries can use and distribute them. Their blog has a lot of good information. And, there’s also the Global Bucket project that I’m still keeping an eye on.