IDDS - International Development Design Summit News

IDDS 2008 Draws to a Close

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:10:00 GMT

IDDS 2008 has officially concluded. For four weeks, more than fifty participants from over twenty different countries worked intensively at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create technologies with the aim of improving the quality of life for some of the world’s poorest communities. Click here to see a short video about IDDS.

IDDS 2008 projects include:

A device for decreasing the transmission rate of HIV/AIDS from mothers to their babies

A charcoal crushing machine to help make charcoal briquettes from carbonized corn cobs

A rope way system to help craftswomen in the Himalayas get their products to market

A pearl millet thresher

An incubator for low birth weight babies in the developing world

A super low-cost computer for educational programs

An interlocking stabilized soil block maker

A pico-hydro electric generator

A hand-held tool for isolating DNA for improving diagnostic capability

A device for generating electricity from a treadle pump

IDDS 2008 participants have now returned home to begin the next stage of implementing their projects. Stay tuned, we’ll be posting more information about these projects soon.

Looking Forward – IDDS 2009 in Ghana

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:39:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that during July/August 2009, IDDS will be hosted at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. KNUST faculty John Quansah and Crossman Hormenoo attended the first IDDS in 2007, returned to help organize IDDS 2008, and are now prepared to lead the summit in Ghana. IDDS 2009 participants will work with villages and develop prototypes in the workshops at KNUST and Suame Magazine. Suame Magazine is an informal manufacturing cluster of 80,000 artisans, a haven of metalworking micro-enterprises. However, IDDS will continue to include projects for a variety of communities and countries, and the projects will not be solely focused on implementations in Ghana.

Applications for IDDS 2009 will be available on this website in November.

The International Development Design Summit is a month-long collaboration that brings together people from around the globe to build technologies for communities in the developing world. The program is the brainchild of MIT Senior Lecturer and D-Lab founder Amy Smith, a past winner of the MacArthur “genius” grant. The event is organized by KNUST, MIT, Olin, and Cooper Perkins.