If humanity wants to build a better world, the folks at this summer’s MIT International Development Design Symposium are ready to draw up the blueprints. The four-week conference, which runs through Wednesday, has brought together students, professors and aspiring inventors from around the world to design products suitable for Third World countries. “The idea of getting people from all of these different backgrounds together to create new technologies is just stunning,” said Amy Smith, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior lecturer who put together the symposium. “We’re creating an environment that’s rife with possibilities for innovation and invention.” Smith, a mechanical engineer who Wired magazine once dubbed “MacGyver for the Third World,” launched the annual conference last year to connect developing nations’ inventors with their Western counterparts. Inventor Amy Smith teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana.
Amy Smith's program aims not just to build devices, but also to develop Third World inventors
Inventions to save day
MIT event eyes cheap products for world’s poor
By Jerry Kronenberg
Monday, August 4, 2008 - Updated 1d 6h ago
If humanity wants to build a better world, the folks at this summer’s MIT International Development Design Symposium are ready to draw up the blueprints.
The four-week conference, which runs through Wednesday, has brought together students, professors and aspiring inventors from around the world to design products suitable for Third World countries.
“The idea of getting people from all of these different backgrounds together to create new technologies is just stunning,” said Amy Smith, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior lecturer who put together the symposium. “We’re creating an environment that’s rife with possibilities for innovation and invention.”
Smith, a mechanical engineer who Wired magazine once dubbed “MacGyver for the Third World,” launched the annual conference last year to connect developing nations’ inventors with their Western counterparts.
This year’s 57 attendees are working on low-cost grain threshers, $12 computers and other products designed to improve underprivileged people’s lives.
“So many babies (in developing countries) are dying because they’re premature and don’t have a good environment,” said Marcio Botto, a Brazilian engineering student, this past week as he fashioned PVC piping into an inexpensive baby incubator. “If we can provide good conditions, all of the babies survive.”
Attendees at the conference, which Needham’s Olin College is co-sponsoring, hail from Cyprus, Honduras, Malawi and 14 other countries. Roughly half are college students or professors trained in animal sciences, art design, engineering or other fields.
The other half include a Zambian bike mechanic, a Guinean Red Cross worker, a Ghanaian minister and other non-university participants.
The budding inventors spent the past few weeks learning how to conceptualize designs, build prototypes and use the Internet to solicit expert advice.
Local professional designers dropped by to offer tips, while MIT held workshops to connect visitors with U.S. student volunteers and possible funding sources.
Smith admits conference-goers probably won’t finish their projects by the symposium’s end.
But she said the program aims not just to build devices, but also to develop Third World inventors.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is help people become innovators and creators, so that they’re not just waiting for external people to come solve their problems,” she said.
Consider Bernard Kiwia, a Tanzanian who has attended both conferences.
Originally a bicycle mechanic, Kiwia has become an “appropriate-techology” teacher since participating in last summer’s event.
“Now I teach boys and girls how to design things, so I’ve been collecting ideas since day one (of this year’s symposium),” Kiwia said as he fashioned a charcoal crusher out of aluminum sheets.
Smith, 45, traces her interest in underprivileged people to spending second grade in India, where her father - himself an MIT professor - taught for a year.
She donated half of her babysitting money to UNICEF while growing up in Lexington, then worked in Botswana for the Peace Corps after earning an MIT bachelor’s degree.
The engineer later returned to MIT for graduate studies, spending part of her time creating a self-powered incubator that tests water samples in areas without electricity. Later, Smith invented a low-cost grain mill as part of her graduate thesis.
“I didn’t envision in junior high that I’d be teaching at MIT and hosting international conferences, but I certainly believed I’d be doing things for kids in the developing world,” she said. “There are simple technologies we can create to help improve peoples’ lives - and that just seems to be the right thing for me to do.”
