05. IDDS
Partnership with MIT’s International Development Design Summit
Collaborating with social entrepreneurs from around the world to demonstrate the transformative power of design thinking and to help create compelling solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
How do you create relevant and appropriate solutions to problems in the developing world? Amy Smith, Senior Lecturer at MIT, insists it must be in collaboration with the people who will be using them.
The International Development Design Summit (IDDS), the brainchild of Smith, seeks to do just that. Every year 50 participants from 20 countries convene at MIT’s campus in Cambridge to co-create solutions with the potential to increase incomes, improve health and living standards and provide access to education in the developing world. This diverse group of collaborators ranges from students and professors to masons and farmers, pastors and community organizers to economists and doctors. Since the summit’s inception in 2007, Continuum designers have helped participants evaluate their ideas and navigate design hurdles through design reviews, mentoring, and process workshops. Continuum has also opened up its studio to the annual summit reception celebrating the participants, their projects, and the common language of design thinking. The summit’s cross-disciplinary groups each work to solve a specific problem. For instance, how can clean-burning, solid-fuel cook stoves reduce the 1.6 million deaths a year that result from indoor air pollution? How can breast milk treatments in Sub-Saharan Africa reduce the alarming HIV transmission rate of 50,000 babies a year? How can communication technology be enabled when 1.6 billion people worldwide are without reliable access to electricity? 
This last problem was addressed by a summit participant working with a Continuum “mentor.” For many in developing nations, a fully charged mobile phone can represent the lifeline of a business, yet grid power is often unreliable, if available at all. Bernard Kiwia, an NGO Technology Director from Tanzania with the help from Gwyndaf Jones, IDDS organizer, and Peter Simpson, a Senior Electrical Engineer from Continuum—found a solution: bicycles. Together, in Continuum’s Electrical Engineering Lab, the team developed and tested a circuit to recharge cell-phones using a bicycle to drive a small motor as a generator. Grounded by real world challenges, the solution for this and every problem needs to meet the standards of affordability, availability, and sustainability within the community of use. The technical expertise of Continuum, paired with the contextual expertise of a local Tanzanian, enabled the vision and relevancy of this solution. As important as it is for the summit to achieve real results in the form of actionable and field-testable prototypes, IDDS may have a bigger impact by exposing passionate social entrepreneurs on both sides of the resource divide to the transformative power of design thinking, collaboration, and the creative process. And in many ways, the summit is the perfect manifestation of the logo IDDS has adopted, an African symbol that means “Help me and let me help you.” Related Content |