A few months ago, I wrote this piece of response to Boston Review. It distils many things, we strive to D - lab, HII and the largest community MIT: development of invention a set of tools that can be integrated into our community partners. For those of you who have asked for links, here's an excerpt and the full piece after the jump.
Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster noted that health and education interventions must complete more complex machines: human behaviour. They are right. And their argument can go a step further. Engaging local stakeholders in the design of policies and solutions can stimulate the innovative behaviour of the people which we evaluate the well-being.
Then D - Lab of MIT, we believe that the users in the developing world have the potential to be the daily inventors of their own solutions. A Nicaraguan hospital, a nurse could quietly create neonatal UV protective layers of surgical gauze. At the corner of the operating room, surgeons are trading sutures valve line and drainage for cut - up soda bottles that work as well for fishing. These inventive behaviors are often hidden. The drawings are remaches, geuzas, improvisation, hacks. Not exactly the stuff of professional associations. It is only because they are not the last bit of formal engineering which reveals the brilliant solutions that they are in fact.
Traditionally, technology designers who focus on the developing world are trying to create affordable solutions can be adapted to the local environment. They could develop effective water pumps that run on the power of the pedal, phones with longer strings and more intelligent features and syringes which are safer and more accessible, with retractable needles that automatically turn off. Our approach is to encourage the co-creation in the design process: we want to empower locals to invent, then they can be contributors, not just clients. In our fieldwork we teach students to seek imaginative behaviour, and many of our interventions have originated with users. Cultivate the inventiveness and the tools of the invention of the poor, it is our priority.