Teaching development skills on three continents
This summer, dozens of people in Colombia will learn how to make trash-picking into viable, sustainable businesses, while others in India will learn about low-cost, locally based approaches to medicine and health care. In Botswana, members of local desert populations will work on improved ways of making use of their constrained resources. It’s all part of this year’s International Development Design Summit, or IDDS, which began on the MIT campus in the summer of 2007. What started as one intensive month-long training in designing technologies for the developing world has been expanding and refining its process ever since. This year’s iterations will be especially ambitious and focused, with sessions on three continents spanning almost three months of collaborative brainstorming, prototyping, and field-testing. A fourth session will take place in Pakistan in January. The expansion of IDDS into different locales and topic-focused sessions is just one part of the evolution of this exercise...