Designmatters is an educational department that partners with every discipline at Art Center to focus on art and design education with a social impact agenda and “real-world” outcomes that are implemented through a series of unique partnerships and alliances with global development agencies, government groups, academic institutions, local and national non-profits, and leading industry

(IDEO) Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking—inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.

dodgy video

WikiPock is a mobile phone application that allows you to search and read Wikipedia without an internet connection (offline).
Preloaded microSDHC™ memory card available.

In rich countries with well-developed transport networks and high speed broadband, they are just one more means of communication. But here in Africa, they may be the only means.

China wins.

2009 SDN conference presentations + videos

The biggest challenge may actually be trust rather than technology

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, has embarked on a trip through Africa on behalf of the non-profit Web Foundation – which today announced two new projects.

Nokia-research should not be just about finding products that can sell in a market, but also about finding solutions for our fellow human beings who might find themselves in dire circumstances.

This document is the heart of the MW4D IG work. Its purpose is to understand the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones, evaluate existing technologies, and identify the most promising directions to lower the barriers of developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.

Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) Initiative

a simply maintained, easily built, inexpensive, extremely durable treadle-powered generator that can supply electricity for LED lighting in houses and shops and can also be used to charge cell phones

They (Nokia) intend for Nokia Money to reach 300 million people by 2011. As a benchmark, the global microfinance industry has something shy of 150 million clients.

“Everyone is talking about banking the unbanked,” said Andrew Fok, VP Engineering of Movirtu. “We are enabling banking of the unphoned”.

Locally manufacturable & low cost

self explanatory value and ROI