Bringing the world to innovation - MIT News Office - 0 views
www.mit.edu/...-inside-d-lab-at-mit-1108.html
Time Magazine 100 most influential people innovation mit world global solutions TED founder Amy Smith Time influential people
shared by Duane Sharrock on 09 Nov 12
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mentions: a popular TED talk Smith gave in 2006 and Time magazine’s
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D-Lab, the project aimed to develop creative solutions to problems facing people in the world’s least-affluent countries — and then hoped those residents would embrace the solutions.
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Awareness of D-Lab has grown in recent years, thanks in part to some prominent mentions: a popular TED talk Smith gave in 2006 and Time magazine’s selection of her in 2010 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
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The program now employs about 20 people and encompasses 16 courses that reach about 400 students each year. Even though D-Lab does little to publicize its activities, staffers are increasingly hearing that this program was a major reason why participating students chose to attend MIT.
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thanks to a major new U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant to D-Lab and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, D-Lab’s instructors and researchers will implement this strategy even more broadly — providing greater continuity to projects around the world, says D-Lab founder Amy Smith, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
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with the new USAID support, “we can harness the alumni of IDDS as a kind of an extremely diverse and dispersed design consultancy,”
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While some students have already managed to turn class projects into ongoing organizations — building better water filters in Africa, bicycle-powered washing machines in Latin America, and wheelchairs in India, for instance — the new funding should enable more such activities, Smith says, by “incubating ventures and training entrepreneurs.”
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The emphasis has shifted,” Grau Serrat says, “more from designing for poor people to designing with poor people, or even design by poor people.”
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Another reason some students are applying to MIT. Undergrads are making a difference globally. "the innovative MIT classes and field trips known collectively as D-Lab, the project aimed to develop creative solutions to problems facing people in the world's least-affluent countries - and then hoped those residents would embrace the solutions." "The program now employs about 20 people and encompasses 16 courses that reach about 400 students each year. Even though D-Lab does little to publicize its activities, staffers are increasingly hearing that this program was a major reason why participating students chose to attend MIT." "All of D-Lab's classes assess the needs of people in less-privileged communities around the world, examining innovations in technology, education or communications that might address those needs. The classes then seek ways to spread word of these solutions - and in some cases, to spur the creation of organizations to help disseminate them. Specific projects have focused on improved wheelchairs and prosthetics; water and sanitation systems; and recycling waste to produce useful products, including charcoal fuel made from agricultural waste." -
"All of D-Lab's classes assess the needs of people in less-privileged communities around the world, examining innovations in technology, education or communications that might address those needs. The classes then seek ways to spread word of these solutions - and in some cases, to spur the creation of organizations to help disseminate them. Specific projects have focused on improved wheelchairs and prosthetics; water and sanitation systems; and recycling waste to produce useful products, including charcoal fuel made from agricultural waste."
