Background Essay: Simple Solutions

Amy Smith, a mechanical engineer on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designs low-cost products that provide practical solutions for people in need. Her inventions, which are influenced by particular constraints, may cost from a few pennies to hundreds of dollars. Because of financial and other limitations, her goal when developing appropriate solutions to the design problems that confront her often involves creating low-tech rather than high-tech designs.

Smith attributes the wide adoption of many of her inventions to the importance she places on involving local communities in the design process. To ensure that her proposed solutions will work, she first tries to understand the lifestyle of the people who will be using the devices. She talks with them to find out what they consider to be their most important problems, which may be different from what she thinks they are. Once she completes a device, she makes sure that the people know how to properly use and maintain her invention.

When designing the water-testing incubator featured in this video, Smith set out to develop a cheap, simple, and effective way to ensure that test results would be reliable. Her design controls the storage conditions so that bacteria colonies, if present in a test sample, will grow in a culture or test tube. Because most remote village communities lack money and centralized power facilities, the incubator had to be cheap, easy to maintain, and not reliant on electricity. Smith's final incubator design is simple: a store-bought cooler containing many small plastic balls filled with the phase-change material described in the video. However, this unpretentious design emerged only after many earlier prototypes were rejected for not meeting the three criteria.

Smith used her invention to supplement the activities of a regional laboratory facility in Honduras. As a result, the lab staff learned that one community's long-trusted source of mountain spring water was in fact contaminated, while a source of well water the people used for washing was actually clean. With new information on which to base their activities, the people could correct the error and prevent further harm to themselves.

Amongst her other inventions, Smith has developed a natural cooking fuel for Haitians to replace wood and charcoal, whose widespread use has contributed to Haiti's near-complete deforestation. The new source for fuel is agricultural waste — specifically, the abundance of plant fibers left over after the juice is squeezed from sugar cane.