The Shoe That Grows

Keeping children in shoes is especially important in developing nations, but the cost of keeping up with kids' growing feet makes it a challenge for many families. The Shoe That Grows is designed to address that, by adjusting its size along with a child's feet from age 1 to 5. It's durable (lasting 5 years) and low-cost (reportedly down to $10 per pair) - and the design of how it adjusts to foot size is downright brilliant. Here's hoping this design can follow through with the impact it seems capable of!
[via Core77]

Situation-Specific Design: Sony's Prison Radio

Most of the attention in gadget design goes to the latest and greatest high-tech toys for first-world consumers - but that's not the only customer who can benefit from thoughtful design. The audio player of choice in prisons isn't cloud-based, streaming, MP3, or even CDs: it's the simple Sony SRF-39FP AM/FM radio. It features a clear housing so it won't be broken open to check for contraband; it eschews anything fancy, like digital reception, to conserve power and deliver more listening time for the prisoner's battery purchase.  And of course, as a radio it comes with a built-in range of never-ending free content. The right design choices for the situation are what makes it, as the New Yorker's Joshua Hunt writes, The iPod of Prison.
[via Gizmodo]

Negative-Space Packaging

ColaLife asks an intriguing question: "Coca-Cola seems to get everywhere in developing countries, yet essential medicines don't. Why?"  Coke is highly profitable, so it's developed a huge distribution network to every corner of the planet - a network that can be piggybacked by a clever design to help bring crucial anti-diarrhea medicine to those who need it. ColaLife's Kit Yamoyo is designed to fit in the "negative space" of a Coca-Cola crate, nestling between the bottles without adding any volume to the overall package. This way, it can utilize an existing distribution system to help people at virtually no cost. It's almost enough to make selling sugarwater seem noble!
[via Core77]

Good Design Starts with the Right Problem

I recently attended a workshop on the Stanford d.school's design innovation methodology given by Jeremy Utley, and he shared an excellent story about defining the right problem before designing the solution. Paraphrasing and simplifying: a project brief called for less-expensive infant incubators (about $2k) for use in Nepalese hospitals, where normal incubators (about $20k) were too costly to purchase and maintain. It sounded like a straightforward, well-defined project - until the team went to Nepal and noticed that there were no babies in the hospital. They learned that most babies were actually born in rural areas because parents couldn't make the long trip to a faraway hospital - and so the problem was redefined. Instead of "a low-cost incubator for hospitals," the real need was to "keep infants warm in rural areas" - in a way that's easy, portable, and works without electricity.  The result of the effort became the Embrace Infant Warmer, a $25 sleeping-bag-like pouch that uses a phase-change material ("rechargeable" in boiling water) to keep a constant temperature. It's a fantastic example of how assumptions should always be questioned as a first step in design - it can mean the difference between merely giving the client what they ask for, versus truly giving  users what they need!

Soccer Ball for the Third World

How do you take a mature and standardized first-world product - a soccer ball - and adapt it for the third world?  The One World Futbol Project found that it takes a little rethinking: instead of a standard inflated ball that would quickly pop on a rocky makeshift soccer field, they designed a "virtually indestructible" solid foam ball that never needs a pump. The effort has all the other hallmarks of a good-for-everyone design: sustainability (the ball far outlasts normal ones, reducing waste), a buy-one-give-one program for first-world patrons, no child labor; heck, even Sting was involved. It's good to see that not all the design effort is being put into the newest state-of-the-art World Cup championship ball - good design can make more of a difference here than there.
[via Core77]

Holstee's Delhi Rang Upcycled Wallet

News today from one of my favorite practitioners of upcycling: Holstee just released the Delhi Rang Wallet made of discarded colored plastic bags collected from the streets of Delhi. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, "upcycling" refers to reusing products or materials in a way that increases their value - which makes it, as far as I'm concerned, even more magical than the other two types of recycling: reuse (where value stays the same), and downcycling (where value degrades, like printer paper being downcycled into toilet paper). Anyway, the wallet has an efficiently compact design for less of a butt-bump, and you can feel good about buying it for all sorts of reasons: their production supports impoverished Indian workers, the packaging is minimal and biodegradable, and each one is unique because the color pattern is made by the plastic bags themselves. Overall, seems like it beats the heck outta leather! Great job, Holstee team.

Cellphone-Camera Microscope: Field tool for the developing world...

Pete Kazanjy is at it again, finding so much material for this blog that I'm starting to feel guilty that he's not on the payroll. This time, the suggestion came with a disclaimer, "not sure if this is Unpressable Buttons material" - oh, Pete, it certainly is! The subject is the development of a microscopy attachment for cellphone cameras, by the University of California at Berkeley. The value of such a tool may not be obvious to most of us, but that's because most of us have never been where this tool has value: in the clinics of the developing world, where (according to the article on ScienceBlogs) "resources are limited and laboratory facilities scarce, but mobile phone networks are ubiquitous." This attachment provides the necessary hardware to enable life-saving diagnoses, while keeping costs down by leveraging existing devices and infrastructure. That is good, usable, well-thought-out product design!

Back to Basics.

Hey, when this is what you need, this is a pretty good design. And yeah, that's all I've got to say!

[by Alejandro Bona of the University of Art and Design Lausanne, via Crib Candy & Gizmodo]

Another View: Design will *not* save the world...

I had mentioned the Q-Drum in a previous post as an example of design for third-world populations which reaches the hallowed "why didn't I think of that" status. But in a recent piece entitled "Why Design Won't Save the World," David Stairs argues that many so-called "appropriate" designs still suffer from a limited understanding of the real needs of these populations - including this very example. He explains:

"Designers are especially susceptible to [the delusion that technology can, more often than not, provide the solution], perhaps because they are trained to solve the immediate rather than long-term problems. By way of example, inventions like the ... Q-Drum water rollers work well at alleviating hard work over level ground, but are less effective than a jerrycan headload over meandering, hilly, narrow footpaths."

The article explores other examples and failings of many appropriate designs, and a pattern seems to be that these designs are more tailored to elicit praise from the design community itself than to truly solve the real and whole problems that exist in the field. This is an excellent point, overall - and one that I regret that this blog and its readers must beware! Your humble author is not in the intended field of use in many cases, does not witness the whole scenarios in which these products exist, and therefore often cannot distinguish when a design is merely buzzworthy or truly effective. Logical analysis is used as much as possible, of course, but even then there are limits.

Then again, I hope and believe that this kind of critical thought and analysis is the whole idea of this blog. Whether or not these things can all be figured out, if you're reading it, hopefully you're having fun trying it. Just like that Q-Drum can work in some situations and not as well in others, it's worth a try!

Rolling Water - sometimes designs just make sense...

It's that "why didn't I think of that?" feeling - or in this case, "why didn't they think of that?" - which identifies a truly well-designed product. This one, the Q-Drum from Hans Hendrikse, pretty much speaks for itself - but I'll speak for it anyway so as to heap some more praise on the already-tall pile.

In third-world countries, clean water sources are often far away from residential areas (as a rule, to the extent that residential areas pollute any immediately local water to the point of non-potability). Porting the clean water takes a lot of effort and energy, which is of special concern where sufficient nourishment is already difficult, and even more so when children are sent to do the work.

So all that's needed is a durable, cylindrical water container - low-cost to manufacture and distribute, almost infinitely reusable, even useful for other purposes - and a rope to tow it. There's a lot of potential to help those who need it most, here. Way to do good by designing well!