Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html

by jmonegro • 15 years ago

91 24 15 years ago

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

I showed this story to my dad, and he said, "so in other words, he reinvented the wheel." In all seriousness, though, this is cool.

ph0rque• 15 years ago

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses...”

How about $7 eyeglasses? http://www.zennioptical.com/?price[from]=6&price[to]=8

jws• 15 years ago

Since you mention zenni… If you are using a 27" monitor and blended bifocals, you really owe it to yourself to get a pair of $14 single vision computer glasses tuned to your work distance. (anti glare pushes the price up from $7.)

gzp• 15 years ago

"A billion customers in the world... are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house."

Interestingly, this article doesn't even touch upon the real challenge: It's not in mass producing these items at low cost; it's in gaining widespread distribution to those one billion customers -- across different countries and cultures, to thousands of groups of people each motivated by different things.

Motivation is key. It's hard to figure out what motivates people, and it differs enormously across cultures. You could have the most effective $100 house around, and you could even have a way of distributing the physical product to hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty. But what happens when no one wants to live in your house -- because, as it turns out, your house is foreign, not cozy; it just doesn't feel like home.

Does that seem like a silly example? It's not. The poor are not as easy to figure out as some people think. Understanding their motivations -- immersing yourself in their cultures and understanding what they really want, what really drives them to make certain decisions -- is the key to good design.

And, unfortunately, it's an aspect of good design that's not easily scalable.

Obviously, there are pockets where you can start and grow from. But saying that a billion people are waiting for $100 houses -- as if the only issue is designing that damn thing to get the price down! -- strikes me as not being the best way to begin a dialogue on poverty alleviation.

egiva2• 15 years ago

By 2050 it's estimated that over 50% of the world's population will live in "chabolas" - i.e. in semi-urban shanty towns with no formal infrastructure, yet still very close to major city centers. So distribution is increasingly less of a problem than you would assume, simply because population centers are concentrating at a very quick rate.

It's an antique method of thinking about these things, but one way to conceptualize "third-world" countries is that they lack a middle class. However, these aren't entirely "urban poor" people either. The movement to these poor slums also has a large degree of private innovation and some leap-frogging that brings millions of these new urban dwellers into a "pseudo-middle-class". They have cell phones, they organize informal water and electricity for their dwellings, improve them, and basically begin to see an slowly improving standard of living.

So, there really is a billion people who aren't well off, but not too-badly off to not afford a $2 pair of eyeglasses. They're working, and moving up socially, and this new class of people need affordable products. There's an enormous, growing market for this stuff.

Anyhow, just my two cents.

adbge• 15 years ago

That seems highly dubious. Citation?

mvidal01• 15 years ago

Are the the "hobbit houses" that Michele Bachmann always talks about?

kitsune_2• 15 years ago

Motivation is the problem?

The poor are as easy to figure out as any other human being, they are not different from us. These are people laboring away in sweat shops and farms for 2 hours a day in hope for a better life. How is motivation a problem here?

The problem is that the current economic system is one of exploitation.

ams6110• 15 years ago

The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Until the child arrives at a downhill slope....

csomar2• 15 years ago

So when he is taking the usual jerrycan he won't go by the downhill?

mapleoin• 15 years ago

...which is when the fun begins. Yipeeeee!!

_djo_• 15 years ago

I've seen both the old way of carrying water and a Q-Drum being used in a rural village and was blown away by what a difference the Q-Drum makes and what a fantastic idea it was.

It's inspiring how even seemingly-simple ideas can make a difference in people's lives.

csomar2• 15 years ago

The solution is good, and this intelligent design is needed. The other obstacle is scaling. Production and distribution are two issues. This one billion might not have enough money to afford this cheap solutions; and the average person has the money, scale distribution is still an issue.

A needed (and obviously better) design is how to make these people help themselves. Access to education, and improved culture to motivate them to work. The designs are good to get them starting with cheap solutions that just works.

petervandijck2• 15 years ago

"improved culture to motivate them to work" - cough. Lack of motivation to work isn't an issue for the world's billion poor.

Hitchhiker• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_th...

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

Something I'd be interested in is where I could find these sort of items in the first world.

Aloisius• 15 years ago

With solar lanterns or houses, you can just make prefab ones and sell the same one to everyone. If you can make them cheap enough, middle men will pop up to make a profit selling them to help with the distribution problem.

Eyeglass lenses on the other hand, need to be made for a person and often changed every couple years.

The problem is not making $2 glasses, but determining the prescription of 1 billion people with limited access to an optometrist.

Adaptive Eyecare[1] has done some interesting things with liquid lenses which solves both of the problems for people with spherical ametropia. Unfortunately, it won't work for people with astigmatism which is quite common (upwards of 30% in people over 30 according to some studies).

A portable device that allows someone with minimal training to determine a person's prescription, even if fairly expensive, would go a long way to solving the problem.

[1] http://www.adaptive-eyecare.org/

bbq• 15 years ago

Do eyeglass prescriptions make a normal distribution? If you measured that you could produce a whole bunch of lenses following the distribution.

Then I wonder if you could loosen tolerances in your production process so that the lenses produced follow the prescription distribution in the population. If you can loosen tolerances like that you can potentially save $$$.

Now you have a bunch of lenses whose distribution matches the population. At this point, could the people who need these lenses not simply walk up and try on glasses until a matching pair is found?

anmol• 15 years ago

See Netra: http://mashable.com/2010/07/01/netra/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~pamplona/NETRA/

Netra is an MIT Media Lab project ($2 attachment that attaches to a cameraphone) for measuring prescriptions. Huge market.

They're in the process of making it into a company and putting the team together. If you send them a friendly email, might even get you a job/consulting position.

kitsune_2• 15 years ago

This is just horrible, we're living in a world of humongous wealth and this is the solution? Really? That's the best we can do?

Groxx• 15 years ago

Are you providing any suggestions, or just degrading the few successes that actually exist at a sustainable price? These are relatively reasonable options at almost incomprehensibly low cost, and are miles better than what existed before.

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

I went to the cooper-hewitt last year and I was bummed out at how lame it was, largely because the two exhibits at the time were fabric and jewelry. I spent about 5 minutes going through the actual museum.

Then I spent 45 minutes in the Gift Shop, which was actually super awesome. They had rad books on typefaces, architecture, Bauhaus and everything related to design.

This exhibit would be cool though.

Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

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