Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas

Technology for human needs:

• The Outquisition
• Engineers Without Borders
• MIT International Design Summit
• Free/Open Appropriate Technology
• Transition Towns
• Technology for Humanity

The Outquisition

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the looming climate crisis,the futility of survivalism; and we began to play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts, political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people who are left trapped in degrading places, who don’t get the green collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

- Alex Steffen: Link.

Via Boing Boing.

Engineers Without Borders

Engineers Without Borders – International (EWB-I) is an international association of national EWB/ISF groups whose mission is to facilitate collaboration, exchange of information, and assistance among its member groups that have applied to become part of the association. EWB-I helps the member groups develop their capacity to assist poor communities in their respective countries.

- ewb.org: Link.
See also Appropriate and Sustainable Technologies Databases: Link.

MIT International Design Summit

“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,’ Ms. Smith said. ‘The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”

- MIT Helps Third World With Hands-On Approach: Link.

D-Lab: Introduction to Development @ MIT: Link.

Free/Open Appropriate Technology

http://appropedia.org/is like wikipedia but, predictably, for appropriate technology.

http://hexayurt.com/ is a nice little emergency shelter (that’s my project.)

http://globalswadeshi.net/ takes Gandhi’s ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations

http://akvo.org/ [akvo.org] does water technology

http://openfarmtech.org/ does a wide range of systems for a very high standard of living

http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video has a series of video interviews with people working on appropriate technology in this general vein.

Hexayurt – open source refugee shelter

- vkg @ Slashdot: Link.

Transition Towns

This website is a WIKI for use by all the communities that have adopted the Transition Model for responding to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

This site provides a focal point for all of these towns, villages, cities and localities around the world as they implement their own Transition Initiative.

- TransitionTowns.org

Technology for Humanity

“Our mission: To build human and social capital by connecting the disconnected.”
- Link.

~ Karl Jones

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at %1:%Jul %p and is filed under Conscious Living, Design, Humanity, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.