Read the daily IDDS 2008 blog

IDDS back with a bang – Monday 14th July

Eleven months and five days since the closing ceremony of 2007, the International Development Design Summit is back at MIT. On Monday, July 14, about 60 people from 20 nations will be descending on the MIT campus to begin an intensive month-long process of developing new technological solutions to the real needs of people in the world’s developing nations. The goal of the program is to develop simple, inexpensive devices that can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities.

This year’s International Design and Development Summit is the second incarnation of the workshop, which was the brainchild of MIT Senior Lecturer and D-Lab founder Amy Smith, a past winner of the MacArthur “genius” grant. The event is co-organized by MIT, Olin College, and Cooper Perkins, a local design firm.

This year’s IDDS organizing team includes several of the participants from last year’s inaugural conference. “It is wonderful to have them back on campus and hear what they have been up to since last year’s summit.” says Smith. “In many cases, IDDS really changed the direction of their lives.” The event is intended as a collaboration between people of a wide range of backgrounds: students, faculty, mechanics, social workers, doctors, carpenters, farmers, and professors from around the world, who will join forces to build technologies that could improve the quality of life in the developing world.

As they did last year, the participants will split into about 10 teams that will each spend the four weeks working on a specific project to design and develop some piece of technology or software, as in the case of one potential project, the $10 Computer, that could meet significant needs of local people in the developing world, especially in small rural communities. In many cases, building, selling and operating these devices could also become a source of revenue and jobs at the local level.

Several of the technologies that were developed during last year’s summit, including transparent containers for transporting and sterilizing water, devices for reducing the smoke from cooking fires, and low-cost refrigeration systems, are on their way to being produced in various countries around the world, Smith says.

As Niall Walsh, a student from Trinity College Dublin who is helping to organize the event, describes it in his blog in which he is tracking the whole progress of the conference, its purpose is to “challenge convention by creating physical solutions. A team … from around the world will work together to attempt to create, within a few weeks, technologies that could change lives.”

To follow this year’s conference read the aforementioned daily updated blog at
www.iddsummit.blogspot.com

Any further information you may need is listed on the website.