Photograph by Christopher Lamarca

The lessons that Amy Smith has learned developing the phase-change incubator, screenless hammer mill and sugarcane charcoal in the Third World are equally applicable to any design project. You might ask how “try living on $2/day” is relevant to everyday design projects. Sounds like deep understanding of those you are designing for to me.

I especially like the idea of providing skills, not just finished technologies. How does a solution go beyond just solving a problem and actual enable people to create solutions themselves?

For more, check out Amy Smith’s TED talk.

Photo credit: Amy Tiemann and The Laptop Club

Not only are they paper-thin, but infinitely customisable by the user and recyclable to boot. You can even make one yourself. Alright, they may not be commercially available (yet) but clearly are some of the most innovative computers around.

Amy Tiemann, creator of MojoMom.com and c|net contributor blogged about The Laptop Club, where 7-9 year-olds at a local school were creating paper laptops for play. From a research perspective, this is serious stuff and reminiscent of one of my favourite research exercises, Draw The Experience. Looking for insights, particularly from young children? Crack open a box of Crayola crayons and have them draw what they are thinking. We recently used this approach with children travelling through Ireland West Airport to understand what they liked, disliked and wished for in the perfect airport.

Be sure to check out this interview with Amy Tiemann, which includes a gallery of the laptop designs.

New Zealanders have been given the chance to write their own laws, with a new online tool launched by police.The “wiki” will allow the public to suggest the wording of a new police act, as part of a government review of the current law, written in 1958.

Read the article

End users are a dispersed R&D department, you just need some tools to observe them and potentially integrate some of their iterations back into your development process.

I was reminded of all this while reading this article about user uses of free Internet-based talk technology.

via How to Change the World

Threadless is a great success story of a business model built entirely on co-creation. The idea is fairly simple; users create a tee shirt design and the community votes on whether it should be produced. If your design is selected, you get paid. Co-creation is as close as you can get to involving your user in the design process. Allowing the community to decide whether a product is produced or not certainly lowers the risk of new product launches. Also consider the benefits of a global R&D department that only gets paid when they produce.

Guy Kawasaki posted this short interview with their Chief Creative Officer.

Ever picked up a device and thought with just a little tweaking, it could be even better? (Of course you have; that’s why you’re designers, right?) Well, even non-designers have good ideas: The New York Times examines the concept of user-driven innovation, the value of letting users of products modify them or improve them, because they may come up with changes that manufacturers never considered. MIT professor Eric von Hippel, a leading advocate of user-driven innovation, says that by harnessing this concept, companies can develop products more quickly and inexpensively than with their internal design teams. Still not convinced? Consider this: 82 percent of new capabilities for scientific instruments like electron microscopes were developed by users.

Read the NY Times article