I was an undergraduate at MIT, Course
2, Mechanical Engineering.
Soon after I graduated, I joined the Peace Corps.
I spent four years in Botswana, and then I
came back to graduate school and wanted
to learn more about engineering and how
it could apply to the development work
that I enjoyed doing in the Peace Corps.
As a graduate student, I started by integrating development
projects into existing classes, and then I
started creating my own classes.
And then eventually, that evolved into D-Lab
where we not only had classes, but they were integrated
into field trips, and so that really
was when I feel like D-Lab itself had its birth.
We said the early D's were development, design,
and dissemination, where we really wanted students
to think about not only creating the technology,
but what's the context, and how could you
understand the context, if you aren't able to travel and see
the place.
So we started doing that particularly
focused on Haiti in the first year,
and then expanded to add in Brazil and India.
One of the important things that we do
is not just foster design and innovation here at MIT,
but we do a lot of work in the field,
teaching people about the design process.
So that they're creating solutions
for themselves not waiting for people to come from outside
to create solutions.
So that's where I spend more of my time these days is not here.
But one of the things that I think is also critical
is that you think about who is doing the designing,
because I sometimes talk about design for development,
but there's also design as development.
Because there's an empowerment that
happens when you create a solution yourself.
One of our oldest projects is the Charcoal Project
that we started in Haiti, and we developed a way
to create charcoal from agricultural waste materials.
And so that can have huge impacts
for a couple of reasons.
One is just not cutting down as many trees.
In Haiti alone, eight million trees
are cut down for fuel wood every year, so reducing deforestation
through that mechanism.
But also there's economic benefits
because charcoal is a very high value product,
and so people are able to generate income, which
means they're more likely to adopt the environmentally
friendly alternative.
And then in addition to that, there's the health benefits,
because it burns cleaner than wood charcoal
or uncarbonized agricultural waste.
I applied with a colleague from Brazil
with the World Wildlife Foundation
to look at using Biochar as a way of sequestering charcoal
and not doing it on a huge scale,
but doing it on a more either individual farmer or farmer
cooperative scale.
And in so doing, one of the things that we're looking to do
is to develop income generating or service provision
technologies that use the waste heat and gas
from the carbonization process.
So that the farmer is motivated to produce the Biochar not
only because it will help the fields,
but also because using that heat you
can maybe do something to retain energy
for cooking or for powering certain machinery.
It's difficult to scale because the market is incredibly
fragmented, and so things that work to scale things here
just don't work effectively.
Because the communication is difficult,
the market, supply chains are broken, et cetera.
It's also true that people don't have as much disposable income.
So if you want to scale things there
aren't a whole lot of ways to do it.
And one of the best is to do it as a product
that people would buy, and just people
don't have as much purchasing power.
Another thing is that it's not always easy for us
here to understand the entire context.
And so that's one of the reasons why we try to do a lot of work
either through co-creation or in capacity building.
So that it's the end users themselves
who are highly engaged in the design process
and it's not people who live in Cambridge, Massachusetts who
are trying to design things for farmers in Mali,
having never been there not even knowing what people farm.
Part of what D-Lab does is to try to better educate
our students to understand the context so
that they can do a better job designing for those contexts.
But we're also trying to increase
the capacity for people to create their own designs,
and then the really important thing
is the link between those, the co-creation.
So that you can bring sort of the analytical power of MIT
towards some of the projects that
are really extremely well understood
by the users themselves.