22 August 2008

New inventions from Amy Smith's students at IDDS 2008

While TED was on vacation last week, Amy Smith‘s second annual International Development Design Summit 2008 was raging at MIT. For four weeks at IDDS, some 50 students from more than 20 countries designed and built new tools that could improve quality of life in some of the world’s poorest communities. Among the projects:

* 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
* An incubator for low-birth-weight babies …

Listen to a radio news story about IDDS 2008 on WBUR radio’s program Here & Now >>
Watch a video report on IDDS 2008 from MIT’s News office >>
Follow IDDS 2008 on its day-by-day blog >>

The photo above, from WBUR, shows 2008 IDDS participant Shaibu Laizer making a weld on a pico-hydroelectric generator.

Next year’s IDDS will be held at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. Applications will be available through the IDDS website in November.

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