Day 5 - Brainstorming and Barbeques!

Having spent Thursday researching past work on their project and the environment in which the problem was situated, participants were free to begin to begin brainstorming for ideas. The day began again with some sessions given by Ben Linder on the different ways that one can potentially capture ideas using tools such as Brain writing, Bissociation and Grouping. After this the participants broke into their respective groups and set about coming up with both general and specific ideas about the direction they felt their project could move in. It wasn't long before the walls of the various classrooms were covered with sticky notes containing seeds of ideas that will hopefully grow to enable the participants to create something special and unique over the course of the next four weeks!

Some sample ideas in sticky note form

Later in the day Ben Linder lectured the participants on Thumbnail and Gallery Sketches. The idea behind this was to help participants to learn how to best communicate and conceptualize their ideas to both their fellow participants and to people outside their individual projects. The participants were then given some time to work within their teams on the sketches and then were due to report back to room 32-155, an auditorium in the Stata Centre where the participants have had the majority of their lectures to date, to give presentations to the other groups. This was a great opportunity to see ideas in their early formative stage and it was interesting to see that a lot of teams had left their projects and ideas quite open ,opting to undertake more research during the weekend to further narrow down their thought process.

We then gave participants time to fill out a weekly evaluation so that they could let us know how they feel the conference is going so far and any improvements they think that we could make over the coming weeks. We really feel that this is important to undertake as the happiness of the participants with the set up at IDDS is paramount to the success of the conference. We then plan to hold a lengthy meeting on Sunday evening to discuss these evaluations and hopefully be able to implement some positive changes for the week ahead.

We finished the week off with a thoroughly enjoyable barbecue at the Kresge Pits in MIT. After a quick trip to the grocery store we took out our bag of hand made charcoal and began the rather sizeable task of barbecuing for over eighty people! A commendation has to be given here to Amit Ghandi and Miguel Chaves for staying by the grill cooking meat, kebabs and veggie burgers for everyone for over two hours. We followed up our barbecue with impromptu games of volleyball, soccer and baseball and the level of interaction between participants was great to see. During the game of soccer, Lamine headed the ball particularly powerful on one occasion and George Obeng's, a participant from Ghana, quick comment "he must have been eating moringa!" exemplified the good natured banter that exists between so many of the participants.

The rain threatened to put a dampener on the event but we simply packed up our utensils and moved the party inside! Participants danced late into the night in the 4th floor lounge to Indian, Honduran and Brazilian music. Unfortunately I did not have any Irish traditional music on me but I have promised(with a degree of trepidation) that I will find some and try and teach some Irish dancing moves to the participants - wish me luck!

Hopefully I can have the participants looking something like this come the end of the conference!

Day 4 - Problems, presentations and photos(and moringa!)

Finally knowing what projects they would be working on for the next month, the participants began today by attempting to define the context of the problem which they were attempting to solve. They were first instructed by Benjamin Linder and Harald Quintus Bosz on how to go about researching their projects and identifying stakeholders before splitting into their groups to start working on their own particular projects. This is an extremely important part of the design process as teams need to be sure of the work that has preceded them to avoid reproducing a similar, already implemented technology. However, the teams recognized this and the diversity of many of the teams helped them to bring a wide variety of examples and real life experience of current technologies available in the field.


In the afternoon we were treated to numerous participant presentations on work they are currently doing in their home countries. Thalia Konaris and Hayley Sharp began proceedings with a talk about Engineers Without Borders, an organization in which they are currently very involved with in the United Kingdom. The organization was set up to help educate and raise awareness among students about development and the positive impact that they, as engineers, can have on real-world problems. It has grown exponentially since then and now engages in propagating what one could deem "virtuous circles".


Through placements abroad engineers can work on a specific project and while there, can also gain facts, information and contacts to function as a different final year project for another EWB participant. These research projects are then implemented and thus the cycle continues on with more and more young people becoming stakeholders in the process. This presentation was made all the more impressive by the fact that the girls had to deal with a dodgy projector which kept cutting out on them! All in all though, this presentation highlighted the potential energy that can be harnessed within young people once the spark of development has been lit within them.


David Sokal and Derek Lomas, other IDDS 2008 participant's, then went on to give presentations about the potential for open cut bike tyres functioning as bike tracks, and "mobile phones as first computers", respectivley. David talked about the potential of converting what is currently an unused piece of waste into something which could have a very real use in developing countries. His idea was not to regrind the tires but rather to cut them open flat, and attempt to hold them together somehow. Derek presented a series of ideas from his MFA studies at UC San Diego and his overall message was on the need for people to address the current atmosphere of technology as the formation of many people's cultural awareness. The potential here for the use of such technology to advocate social change was clear for all to see.


The final presentation was given by Lamine Diakite, a participant currently working as President of the Red Cross committee in Guinea Conakay, treated the room to a fascinating presentation on moringa, a tree which has astonishing properties. He talked of the huge potential this multi faceted plant has to help combat malnutrition and a host of other critical problems facing developing countries. The tree is currently alive in some small pockets of the world but Lamine called for the need for an organization to work with the Red Cross and other projects to help the spread of knowledge about this "miracle" tree to those who are most desperately in need of it.


This presentation captured the attention of the whole room as many of us, myself included, had never heard of moringa and I could hear people typing the word Moringa into google on their laptops even as the lecture was still going on, such was their interest! Lamine delivered the entire presentation through his native French and this was duly translated by Alvaro Feito Boirac, another participant, furthering the multi lingual approach that has become a cornerstone of this years IDDS. Lamine handed some Moringa around the room after his presentation and told us we might even have the chance to sample some at our Barbecue tomorrow evening, if we were lucky!

A moringa tree

Just some of the many amazing attributes of moringa!

We then moved out onto the grass on Killian Court and were put through our paces by Donna Coveney, an MIT photographer who had kindly agreed to organize our group photograph. Eighty people attempted to spell out "IDDS 2008!" as Donna communicated from the second floor of building ten where exactly she wanted us all to be! All very complicated but the atmosphere on the grass was one of great camaraderie as participants defended the merits of their own particular letters with gusto(The second D was the place to be, just in case you were wondering).

We completed what had been quite a long day with a demonstration by Amy Smith on how to convert corn cobs into charcoal. This involved using heat to carbonize dried corn cobs and bamboo which we can then use hopefully as our source of fuel for tomorrow's barbecue!

The participants were then brought by our "Entertainment Emperor", Tombo Banda, for a night of Karaoke in the Thirsty Ear, MIT's local student bar. Participants didn't stay too late, however, as they had to be up bright and early for some idea generation on Friday morning!

Day 3 - Team Building

Wednesday was an extremely important day for all involved in the 2008 IDDS conference. We had previously whittled down the projects to sixteen options from a huge list of over eighty. This morning the participants would finally be the ones to decide which ten projects IDDS will centre around for the next four weeks. The day began with a session where the projects were explained further by Amy with participants then being given the chance to raise any concerns or special interest they had in a particular project. One thing that emerged from this session was the fact that many of these projects had the potential to move in radically different directions. The questions asked by the participants about certain projects, including the system for flash heating of breast milk to help reduce transmission of the Aids virus, highlighted the creative space inherent within as there were clearly numerous angles of design that the teams could potentially take.


The participants were then tasked with choosing three projects that they would be interested in pursuing. This was preceded by as session on "What makes a good project?" to make sure that all involved were thinking clearly about whether or not the projects they had in mind were implementable and rational. Once the voting had been conducted the participants were then given time for lunch before hearing the verdict on the projects for IDDS 08'.


After lunch the atmosphere in room 32-155 was one of both apprehension and excitement. There was understandable worry among some participants that they would not be involved in a project they were interested in but thanks to the excellent system devised by Amy, Ben, Harald and our team of mentors, these fears remained unfounded. All of the particpants that I spoke to were happy with the projects they had been assigned and were looking forward to getting to know their fellow team members.


Here is the list of projects that we will be working on at IDDS 2008:

1.System for Flash Heating Breast Milk to help combat transmission of HIV
2.Incubator for low birth weight infants in rural zones
3.Hand held medical diagnostic tool
4.Micro Hydro Small scale water power
5.Power Generation from Mechanical Devices
6.Ropeway Transport system
7.Charcoal Crusher
8.Pearl Millet Thresher
9.Educational Television Computer
10.Interlocking Stabilized Soil Block Maker


Once we had the participants in their groups we began the all important team building activities. This session began with an innovative activity devised by Ariel Phillips, an organizer from Harvard who specializes in team dynamics. Each participant explained the origin of their name to their team, which then sparked further conversations about their respective families and upbringing. Some participants had some extremely interesting stories to share about their names and all involved found the activity eye opening due to the huge diversity in background of the partcipants at IDDS. One six member team, Micro Hydro Small scale water power, includes participants from four different continents!



The teams were then brought into Lobby 13 for our second, and more frantic, team building activity. Each team was given 100 balloons, a scissors, tape and fifteen minutes to create a free standing tower with the balloons. Once they had been given the go ahead to start the room turned into a frantic hive of activity as teams got to work blowing up their balloons and devising their strategies. All of the teams adopted quite different approaches to the activity and there were, as usual with IDDS, some innovative design structures!

Balloon Towers!

Teams were then given their most important assignment to date - finding a place to go for dinner together! Amy told them that this would be similar in many ways to working on a project with time constrictions(they had to be back by 7.30) and monetary constrictions(the teams were each given $50) both of paramount importance. The importance of the teams being given this time to learn about, and how to work with, each other as we feel that IDDS offers participants more thanb just the chance to work on exciting low cost technology projects. Many people involved in the conference are interacting with people from different countries and continents for the first time and as such IDDS hopes that they can learn as much as possible from each other. And, of course, if a team are working well together they are far more likely to have a successful project.



Anil Gupta, the founder of the Honeybee Network, gave an insightful hour long presentation to the group after dinner on his experiences in empowering, encouraging and documenting grassroots innovation in India. The Honeybee network is an organisation founded by Mr. Gupta which promotes people to people networking and represents the voice of creative grassroots innovators. Mr. Gupta called for the need to develop a "way of thinking" to combine innovative design with a knowledge of the nature and environment in which the work is done. He stressed that "concern, compassion and curiosity to get connected" were key to solving long standing problems.


He went on to identify some myths that currently exist in our collective mindsets. One key attitude that he believed we need to change is that of viewing poor people in developing countries simply as consumers. He argued that they could also provide knowledge, innovations and ideas if we could only open our ears and minds and commit to learning from them. He showed us soms short videos of projects supported by the Honeybee network that highlighted just how innovative the samll scale innovations that people design can be.



The organizing team are delighted that teams are finally together and all the participants I have spoken to can't wait to get down to strategizing and problem framing for their particular projects tomorrow. So overall, a very positive atmosphere prevades at IDDS!

Day 2 - "Building it"

Last night Amy informed the participants that we wouldn't be providing every meal at IDDS 2008 but we agreed that we would provide breakfast one more time, on Tuesday morning
as we didn't want participants who hadn't had a chance to go to the grocery store to start their day on an empty stomach!


Once all participants had gone through their ISO Orientation, ID Registration and basic fire and safety, we were ready to get started on the build it modules. One of the participants, Stephen Gerrard, a final year chemical engineering student at Cambridge, could not get his ID straight away as he still technically had an MIT account from his time spent here on a one year exchange program in 2007. His old ID had to be de-activated first and he was quite disappointed by this, explaining that he had hoped he might have stayed in the MIT system forever!


The three build it projects that the participants had to choose from were a Corn Sheller, Charcoal Press and a Solar Powered flashlight. We had given the participants time during Day 1 to see which of these they would be most interested in and thankfully we were thus able to distribute them into teams of relatively similar numbers. The participants were delighted to finally be given the chance to get their hands dirty as building and constructing technology and physical design's is, after all, why they came to IDDS in the first place!

Amy then decided that she was going to take a different approach to our evening meeting to avoid it from going on for the customary hour as opposed to the optimistic fifteen minutes. She proposed that we run around the group, list of individually what we each needed to get done and then to get people to volunteer to help us out with this within a ten second time frame. This actually worked quite well and Amy maintains that the meeting officially lasted 11 minutes even though we kept talking for at least another fifteen! Kendra Leith, one of the main organizers at both this and last years conference, told me that they employed quite a different system last year - Amy was the one who had to wait 10 seconds before volunteering because she was so eager to help out with all aspects of the conference!

The rest of our evening was spent fraantically combing both the Boson and Cambridge area for one of our most important materials for the conference - balloons! Tomorrow we will be placing the particiapnts, after a lengthly voting process, into thier desired project choices and teams. We are planning some novel team building exercises involving balloons and name game's to help settle the participants into their teams by helping them to learn how to work together. This evening we took the participants to see a local band playing on Massachusetts Avenue to give them the opportunity to let their hair down and get to know each other outside of the hectic atmosphere of MIT and from all accounts, it was much appreciated!

One of the participants, Stephen Gerrard, letting off some steam

Day 1 - And...we're off!

IDDS headquarters, 16-168, this morning doubled up as a registration office and was descended upon by over 50 participants eager to begin their IDDS experience. Each participant had to provide a certain set of important documents and in exchange were provided with a packet of information designed to make life easier for them during their stay at MIT. They were also lucky enough to receive a free IDDS customized mug! Breakfast was then served next door in the larger setting of room 16-160 and participants were soon introducing themselves over a selection of pastries, bagels and coffee.

Our wonderful IDDS Mugs!

A quick commendation has to be given at this point to Kendra Leith and Laura Stupin for all their hard work in helping the participants acquire visa's and flights to the US. Without the huge amount of time, energy and commitment that they have put into this process many of the participants would not have made it this far and we would thus not have had the opportunity to learn and interact with such a diverse group of people.

At 9am, in room 32-155, Amy began the conference with a short speech on what she believed were the overarching aims and vsions of IDDS. She described the idea of the conference to be for people to come away "not with business cards, but with corncob shellers and charcoal press prototypes". Many of the American based students involved in the conference had explained that their interest and belief in development and appropriate technology had been sparked by talks Amy had given in their home universities and it it is easy to see why. Her unfaltering belief in the conference, the appropriate technology movement and the potential of IDDS was powerfully communicated and clear for all to see.

Paul Polak, the keynote speaker for the conference, followed this with a rousing talk about the need for a new approach to tacking key issues of development as he believes that quite simply "What we're doing now to end poverty is not working". He argued that a dramatic shift was needed in thinking and design approach because currently 90% of design is focused on the needs of the worlds 10% elite. He talked candidly about the 12 steps he outlined in his book "Out of Poverty", which he thinks can help change the lives of the world's poorest people. He gave an extremely interesting example of a way in which these twelve steps had been implemented in a project supported by IDE(international Development Enterprises), an organization he founded in 1981.

The project in question was that of the treadle pumps, a device which can extract water which has been stored underground from heavy rainfall to help communities in India to irrigate their crops during the rainy season and thus increase a family's income by up to $300 a year. This may not seem like a lot but when you consider that many of the incomes of these family's are below $500 a year this can represent the difference between extreme poverty and a secure future. He spoke about this project as an example of how it was possible to create sustainable technologies once you worked closely with community partners and local dealers to see how the product could adapt to the specific market environment of individual villages and towns. He also mentioned some interesting ways in which the product was marketed including some wacky ideas such as recording a song about the treadle pumps in Bangladesh and also producing a Bollywood movie that managed to centre around the possibilities the use of the pump could open up!

A picture of the treadle pump in action

Two participants from last year, Zubaida Bai and Bernard Kiwia, then gave a short presentation of what they believed the IDDS experience was all about. Bernard talked about the practical nature of the conference and how many technologies he had been able to bring back from MIT to implement in his home country of Tanzania. This seemed to be the perfect example of what Amy had meant earlier when she had said that the aim of the conference was to produce real, tangible results. The experience that Bernard had at IDDS last year and the work he has done as a result in Tanzania has had a direct impact on people's lives and we hope that he can bring back some new technologies to Tanzania after the conference ends this year!

The group were then split up into groups for lunch, that they would then carry over as their teams for the design activity project scheduled for the afternoon. Each group was led by a mentor/organizer and the idea behind this was to make sure that the groups got to learn a little bit about each other before they would be thrust into the high pressure environment of design! Each group consisted of six or seven members and were first tasked with assigning a set of roles(such as chairman, timekeeper, reporter, presenter etc.) that would help make ensure the involvement of each team member.

The idea behind the design activity is that it functions as an ice breaker of sorts, with teams having to work together to achieve a shared objective. The teams were faced with the challenge of designing a free standing device to travel as far as possible while powered by an electric fan. The materials the participants had to choose from included cardboard, plastics, bottles of water, paper clips, glue and wooden dowels and they were given 70 minutes to complete this task. It was extremely interesting to see the different designs that teams came up with and Amy was amazed that even though the activity and materials had been exactly the same for both this and last year, there had been only one design crossover in both! Have a look at some of the design's in action below..

Winners of the aesthetic category

The multi lingual, European style, approach!

The affordable option

The winners - a very innovative design!!

Benjamin Linder then gave a presentation on the IDDS model and the steps involved in appropriate design, before holding a feedback session on how the participants felt that the design activity session went. One main point that was emphasized by the participants was the shared sense of wanting the other teams to do well. Also, they were interested to have learned that there was no perfectly correct way of approaching design. Different people had extremely different thought process and design strategy and and this was reflected through the fact that not one team had the same design!

We also managed to pack a 75 people dinner in Royal East, a big game of soccer, a computer orientation session and one last late "fifteen" minute meeting that went on for an hour! All together today was a huge success and I think that Amy summed it up perfectly by saying that "if the only thing hat goes wrong during IDDS is that we had a break at 1145 rather than 1115 then we'll have had a stellar conference". I think that everyone, both organizers and participants, are just delighted to have finally started and participants can now look forward to a day of spot-welding, sanding, sawing, metal cutting and casting in tomorrow's all day "build it" modules.

D Day (-1) - Meeting the participants

We organized our first mini event for participants this morning, a Dunkin' Donuts style breakfast! We thought that it would be a good idea to try and introduce the participants that had already arrived to each other and so decided to hold an impromptu coffee morning in the organizers suite, number 441. This actually worked extremely well and about twenty of the participants arrived at our dorm room at 8am looking extremely hungry! I talked to participants from Brazil, India, Guatemala and even managed to find a participant, Sunita Darbe, who is currently an MIT undergrad student. It was great to see all the participants interacting so easily with each other, even though they represented such a wide variety of cultures.

The organizers left the participants to continue to mingle in our dorm, while we hurried to IDDS headquarters, 16-168, for our 9.30am meeting. Everyone was well aware of how exceptionally busy today was going to be so we kept the meeting short for once and soon got down to business. The main task for the day was the completion of the participants packet, the folder that will be handed out to each person at registration tomorrow. We have finally gotten it all sorted, by 2am no less, and everything now looks set to go ahead with no problems, at least for Day 1!

Participant Packet for IDDS 08'

The tours I talked about with some trepidation in yesterday's blog actually went quite smoothly, believe it or or not! Thankfully Sunita, as well as Jessica, accompanied me on the tour so we were able to get just about information about MIT's history and campus between us to keep the participants for over two hours. The mood among participants was definitely one of excitement and anticipation and they were impressed with the size and available space that MIT has to offer.

One participant, Lamine Diakite, asked a question that showed just how much we take for granted in the developed world. He was impressed how the walls in MIT were kept so clean and pristine looking and wanted to know how often the walls in MIT were painted to achieve this end result. The fact that neither myself, Sunita or Jess could not answer his question highlighted the fact that the thought had never even entered our mind. Lamine currently lives in Guinea, was born and raised in Senegal and speaks an amazing twenty two languages. The reverend Geroge Fuachie, from Kumasi in Ghana, was delighted to find that MIT had a church on campus and so he could thus continue attending services when he finds time outside of the workshops!

In the evening Zubaida and Ruben went to the airport to pick up Paul Polak, our keynote speaker for the summit who will essentially begin the conference at 9.45am tomorrow. Paul is an advocate of the design revolution and is passionate about the potential that appropriate technologies, and conference's like IDDS, have in helping to work with and help solve problems faced by some of the world's poorest communities. He is also an extremely nice guy with a wicked sense of humour! Myself and Tombo joined the above duo in taking Paul out to dinner and we decided on a seafood restaurant called 'The Barking Crab', located on the waterfront in central Boston.

We talked on a wide variety ranging of subjects ranging from Paul's recent book, "Out of Poverty", a discussion on psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams(Paul's background is as, in his own words a "shrink") and we finished up with a discussion about blogs, believe it or not. Paul has informed me that he will soon be beginning his own "golb"( blog backwards) as he does not see why he should follow the existing conventions! All in all the dinner was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I am now looking forward to hear Paul address the participants tomorrow morning.

It is now 3.34am Boston time and I cannot wait to get into bed. We have put a lot of effort in over the last few weeks and are thrilled that the day of reckoning is finally upon us. I can imagine that my blog will soon become a lot more interesting now that I shall finally have a conference to cover! Hope you have enjoyed what I have written so far and I look forward to filling you in on IDDS 08' every evening for the next four weeks. Absolutely exhausted but incredibly excited, I await the morning.

D Day (-2)- Breaking the language barrier

Amy said today that "we are in way better shape than we were at this time last year...but we somehow still have more to do!" - I can only imagine how crazy things got last year. We are being kept very busy at this moment in time and there always seems to be little jobs popping out of nowhere. There is now a constant stream of trips to stores such as Home Depot, Office Depot, and the Salvation Army and of course many journeys to and from the airport to pick up the all important participants.

Almost half of the participants have arrived in the dorms and cannot wait to meet everybody and get started . Marcio Botto, a civil engineering student from Brazil, explained to me that he was delighted just to have finally arrived after the difficulty involved in getting his visa sorted and many other participants echoed this sentiment. This only seems to have made them all the more determined, however, to make the most out of their experience in MIT with IDDS.

I also finally got the chance today to meet our three Honduran participants, Jose Pompilio, Federico Recinos and Limbor Sarmiento. They unfortunately were unable to bring their Corozo fruit into the country so that project will now not be feasible as a three week team venture. However, there is a possibility that Corozo seeds could be sourced within the U.S. and thus Pilo, Federico and Limbor will be able to work on their fruit peeler as a side project. My lack of Spanish and their lack of English initially made communication a little difficult but I managed to find a soccer game with some Irish guys and we all seemed to understand each other perfectly well on the football pitch!

We had a number of meetings today with our last being, for the first time in room 16-160 at 8.30pm. Tombo had ordered pizza for us all and Amy said that we were to talk business for no longer than 15 minutes. This, as usual, proved to be far too optimistic and we ended up talking for over an hour on a variety of issues. One such issue was that of two new projects that have been added to the options list for participants. We decided to discuss the merits of each and eventually decided by a show of hands that both the Hand Held Medical Diagnostics tool and the $10 composting latrine system were to be included in our final project list which now comes to a total of seventeen.

The atmosphere in this meeting was most certainly one of intense excitement. The organizers have already grown quite close as a group even after such a short period of time. Let's hope we will still be on speaking terms once the conference is over! Meeting the participants has really invigorated all of us though and we are all really looking forward to working with and getting to know them.


I have also been charged with giving tours of the MIT Campus to participants tomorrow which should be interesting as I have only been here 10 days. Thankfully Jessica Vechakul, a past participant and past winner of the IDEAS competition in MIT, arrived this evening and will be helping to keep me from leading the participants astray!