Amy Smith designs cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries. Among her many accomplishments, the MIT engineer received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004 and was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Prize for turning her ideas into inventions.
Why you should listen to her:
Mechanical engineer Amy Smith's approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith, working with her students at MIT, has come up with several useful tools, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity, a simple grain mill, and a tool that converts farm waste into cleaner-burning charcoal.
The inventions have earned Smith three prestigious prizes: the B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, the MIT-Lemelson Prize, and a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her course, "Design for Developing Countries," is a pioneer in bringing humanitarian design into the curriculum of major institutions. Going forward, the former Peace Corps volunteer strives to do much more, bringing her inventiveness and boundless energy to bear on some of the world's most persistent problems.
"Smith has a stable of oldfangled technologies that she has reconfigured and applied to underdeveloped areas around the world. Her solutions sound like answers to problems that should have been solved a century ago. To Smith, that's the point."Wired News
Blog Posts on TED
-
Digitally fabbed house for New Orleans rises at MOMA – July 15, 2008
If you were inspired by Neil Gershenfeld's TEDTalk on the FabLab -- where you can build just about anything you can dream of -- read on:
Larry Sass, from MIT's department of architecture, is leading a team that's building a digitally fabricated house in a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. yourHOUSE is composed of thousands of interlocking pieces, cut on a ShopBot -- a computer-controlled milling machine about the size of a conference-room table.
yourHOUSE is a ground-up rethinking of how we make a house. Sass and a team of students analyzed the traditional New Orleans shotgun house, using digital imaging tools and old-fashioned research, such as interviewing people who live in these wonderful little homes. They modeled a way to build a house out of parts that could be created on-site and assembled in days without nails or screws. For the MOMA project, the parts were cut from recycled plywood on two ShopBots in Virginia and trucked to New York, where Sass and his team have been slotting them together to make a classic NOLA cottage, complete with front porch and lacy wooden trim.
You can follow the research and construction on MOMA's blog. Sass's team reports every Thursday on the MOMA site with build details and photos. ShopBot has been posting videos from the project too:
The MOMA exhibit, "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," opens July 20 and runs through October 20, 2008. Four other amazing small or manufactured homes are also part of the exhibit, including the beautiful Cellophane House from KeiranTimberlake and the adorably precise micro-compact home.
Photo above from ShopBot
-
MacArthur "genius" grant to TEDster Saul Griffith – September 25, 2007
Saul Griffith (watch his TEDTalk) has been awarded a 2007 MacArthur "genius" grant.
Griffith is one of the brains behind Instructables, a community website that lets users share directions for ... almost anything, from building your own home lathe to "How to Kiss." His think-tank design firm, Squid Labs, has invented an array of new devices and materials -- such as a "smart" rope that senses its load, or a machine for making low-cost eyeglass lenses through a process inspired by a water droplet -- and has now spun off several separate companies to dig deeper into some of the technologies it has pioneered, including Potenco, which makes the groovy pull-string power source for the XO laptop.
Look for other talks on TED.com from MacArthur grantees, including Majora Carter (2005), Anna Deavere Smith (1996) and Amy Smith (2004). With more to come ...
-
Low-tech, high-impact design at Amy Smith's IDDS – August 17, 2007
Not all inventions need to be grandiose, complex things, Amy Smith said at TED2006: sometimes they can be simple and smart ideas that just help a lot of people (watch her speech - read summary). That's the philosophy behind her first International Development Design Summit (IDDS), which just took place at MIT, where she teaches and heads the D-Lab (understand the "D" as placeholder for both Design and Development).
The IDDS is not a conference. It's a monthlong collaborative learning program, as Jonathan Greenblatt describes in a nice wrap-up he wrote for WorldChanging:
People from locales as disparate as Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, Pakistan, and Tibet converged on MIT for the program: a month of intensive collaboration and learning. Participants self-organized into teams and were paired with mentors from top-notch design firms such as Continuum and IDEO. IDDS's rich classroom experience involved case studies and lectures taught by MIT faculty, as well as development experts (...) IDDS put forth incredibly basic design criteria. Teams were required to create innovations to serve a clear development need, to use locally available materials and to do so at a low cost.
The end products offer fresh takes on old problems, including an off-grid refrigeration unit tailored for rural areas, a low-cost greenhouse from recycled materials, and microbial power sources (a list of all the IDDS projects is available here).
Greenblatt offers more details on a specific product designed to enable efficient and hygienic water transport:
Typically, women and children in rural settings often can journey up to six miles daily to retrieve water for their families.
They frequently return to their homes carrying between
20 to 40 pounds on their backs or heads in unsound, unwieldy and often unclean vessels such as petroleum cans or ceramic pots. It's a
ritualized behavior that sustains the cycle of disease, reduces human
productivity and creates tremendous physical strain. An IDDS team created a striking device, SODIS Safiri, to deal with
these challenges. (...) Water is carried in ergonomic, low-cost plastic pouches that
can be worn like apparel. Imagine a "backpack" that can be manufactured
for five dollars and efficiently bear up to four liters, or a poncho
that can carry twice that amount at a cost of only seven dollars. Along with improving transport efficiency, the SODIS Safiri device
capitalizes on the otherwise non-productive return journey: the
transparent design facilitates solar disinfection (SODIS) of the water so that
the water can be consumed upon arrival at the village. While some
contaminants cannot be handled solely by ultraviolet rays, this
zero-cost approach could be sufficient in many non-industrial locations
where basic microbial contamination creates diseases.Brilliant. Simple. Relevant. I can imagine Amy Smith smiling in the back of the room while the students presented this idea.
-
New inventions from Amy Smith's students at IDDS 2008 – August 22, 2008
While TED was on vacation last week, Amy Smith's second annual International Development Design Summit 2008 was raging at MIT. For four weeks at IDDS, some 50 students from more than 20 countries designed and built new tools that could improve quality of life in some of the world’s poorest communities. Among the projects:
* A device for decreasing the transmission rate of HIV/AIDS from mothers to their babies
* A charcoal-crushing machine to help make charcoal briquettes from carbonized corn cobs
* A rope-way system to help craftswomen in the Himalayas get their products to market
* An incubator for low-birth-weight babies ...
Listen to a radio news story about IDDS 2008 on WBUR radio's program Here & Now >>
The photo above, from WBUR, shows 2008 IDDS participant Shaibu Laizer making a weld on a pico-hydroelectric generator. Next year's IDDS will be held at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. Applications will be available through the IDDS website in November. Having trouble leaving a comment? (We're working on it...) Email it to us: blog at ted dot com
Watch a video report on IDDS 2008 from MIT's News office >>
Follow IDDS 2008 on its day-by-day blog >> -
PopMech's 2007 Breakthrough Awards – October 17, 2007
Some familiar TED faces and themes turn up in Popular Mechanics' 2007 Breakthrough Awards, published in the magazine's November issue. Jeff Han's multitouch wall (watch his 2006 TEDTalk) and Hod Lipson's print-anything printer (related to his work on robots) are named as two of the awards' "8 Bold Ideas" for 2007. If you were moved and inspired by Amy Smith's TEDTalk on her developing-world technologies, check out PopMech's profile of the like-minded Ashok Gadgil and Christina Galitsky and the cookstove they developed for use in Darfur, or 2006 winner Jock Brandis and his portable peanut sheller. If Dean Kamen's robotic prosthetic arm TEDTalk interested you, dive into the video report on Johns Hopkins' project. It's a fascinating, well-reported awards package.
