Month: May 2007

Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor


The New York Times has an article on a show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York which includes many items to show a grasp of the depths of world poverty and ingenious ways to attack it. such as the 20-gallon rolling drum for transporting water, above.

The OLPC is also there, as well as the design of other things.

I thing there are things people need that are essential — whether they be materially well off or not — and things they don’t need. I believe the exhibit focuses on the former. For example, as Nicholas Negroponte says, the point of OLPC is not the laptop, it is the focus on education that the OLPC enables. It is not that every child in the world should have a new thing.

That said, I think some of the design is….cool. Now if someone would design a half decent cart to help me get my groceries home without a car, I would be happy. But I digress.

The Gadgets are coming!

Ok, I think there is alot of hype behind gadgets, widgets, etc. But there is also alot of potential power, as well. Technically your web site / page / blog / what have you ends up become much like a spreadsheet. Your blog+widgets = the next killer app. (There’s the hype thing again).

Anyway check out LabPixies and decide for yourself. For instance:

LabPixies – YouTube Top 10 – Coolest Gadgets on the Web!

Here’s the source:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.labpixies.com/lib/lp_gadget_syndication.php?_gadgetid=37&_frame_color=light_blue”&gt; </script>

The great Kevin Kelly

One of FM’s author is Kevin Kelly, of Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools

He’s much more than this. He has been doing cool stuff for many years, whether he was working on the Whole Earth Catalog (the Internet in a catalog form 🙂 ) or helping launch WiReD (before it became TiReD). His cool tools section of his web site always has interesting articles in it.

It’s a shame the Whole Earth Review isn’t around anymore. But KK’s web site is: soak it up.

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So check out their author list: it’s a good one.

reCaPTCHA is a fascinating Web 2.0 idea

What is reCAPTCHA?

To quote the WiReD blog:

The idea behind reCAPTCHA is that, as long as we’re all solving these CAPTCHA puzzles, why not throw in some minimal additional data? By adding a second image with an unsolved word from the Internet Archive book scanning project, ReCAPTCHA allows users to channel their CAPTCHA solving skills into real world benefits.

To me, this is an innovative idea of putting the world to work. I wonder how many more companies are employing this approach?