Designs for the poor

Very inspiring. A good thing to read when you're feeling repulsed by being a human being.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/biztech/12/20/digital.design/index.html

updated 9:12 a.m. EST, Thu December 20, 2007
By Steve Mollman, CNN

But for an increasing number of designers, the stakes are even higher elsewhere: global poverty.

Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that's changing.

At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world. Stanford offers a course called "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability." One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.

Amy B. Smith, an inventor who lectures at MIT, said her course on design for the developing world gets about a hundred applicants, but she can only take 30.