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@@Design.Theory +1 total crackup. I went to create a software incubator and found people wouldn't live there, even for free, because it doesn't reduce their parents bills.
Here's an example, the lucky iron fish that add iron to the diet to supposedly treat anaemia in Cambodia. The story goes that they observed local culture and redesigned the iron block to a fish shape to convince the locals to use it. What is not told is that in follow up studies it seem like the locals didn't need iron supplement in the first place.
Have you ever heared about the "Museum of failure"? It's a collection from failed products from all around the world. They have a Segway there, a Virtual Boy, Lasagne made by Colgate and an entire section just for Trump products.
As a designer from a developing country, I see this problem even when designers from those countries try to design for rural communities or less developed communities in the same country. Designers are more likely to come from developed cities, and higher income households. So they rarely have the knowledge or the understanding of the needs of other communities.
This was another thing that's very important that I didn't get a chance to cover in the video. Within any given country, there can be massively different communities and subculture.
@@Design.Theory Goodness, the amount of trouble I had at work trying to get people to understand that there was an inherent problem with “the address of your business”. Even _outside our own building_ in Silicon Valley we had food trucks!
Unfortunately, the issue is not exclusive to developing countries. It is not exclusive to being rich or educated, it is just context, and it is actually a huge problem with politics. City-people simply do not understand the needs of rural people and probably vice versa. It would not be much of a problem if the majority of voters did not live in cities and assumes that their solution's applicability might stop a mere afternoon bike ride away from where they live.
@@pflasterstrips7254 It's dumb people not being competent to accomplish the task at hand. Money doesn't matter. Rich people donate to these NGO's but it is the organization itself that is unable to fulfill their mission. Incompetence is a waste of money and charity.
Read this during my MBA days. Coke deviced an advt Picture of a Sad Child > He drinks Coke> A pic of a happy child. Then They launched this Advt in Arabian countries where people read from right left :)
@@ForOne814 LOL reminds me of those people who call everything out in extremes. If Coke would be toxic it wouldn't have been a legal beverage for over a 100 years SMH
Modern day philanthropy is primarily self-serving and ego-driven more than it is actual altruism. A bunch of very wealthy people, largely divorced from reality, seeking accolades and affirmations that they are good. Some may have their heart in the right place, but time and time again, the results show a disconnect, and that being in such a privileged position does not automatically qualify someone of "knowing what's best" or that their ideal "greater good" is, well, actually good.
Agree. There are plenty of very effective foreign aid/international policy programs. But a surprising percentage of them are insanely wasteful and self-serving.
I think philanthropy should have the same oath as medicine, first do no harm. You're harming people by forcing things top down because you feel good about them. You can't force help on people, they have to ask for help first, they're still humans and have their own volition. I hate when people go creating policy and trying to force things top-down on others.
It is either that or given whoever in power resource to siphon the fund away from their people. Nations have enough fund to develop their own infrastructure. They just don't want to allocate those money. Truth bet told, should western nations stop doing charity and give out aides... the world wouldn't fall a part.
that kind of "charity" is just a tax write-off and a way to placate the masses at this point. it would only take like .75 of one elon musk to eliminate world hunger. yet here we are, the weath gap widening like never before. really wish our governments would actually tax billionaires like they used to... maybe we could do some good in the world, rather than waiting for billionaires to get around to funding the projects we actually need, you know?
The OLPC project worked quite well in Uruguay. In my opinion, it was largely due to two main factors that were addressed by the local government and NOT by the international program itself. First, by the time the XOs came to Uruguay, there was a robust electrical grid and internet was everywhere (and where there wasn't, schools were hooked up to it), and secondly, the program was widely supported, both for repairs as well as for teaching the technology at schools. Ah, and third, we are a small country both in extension as well as in population, which I think makes it easier for country-wide schemes to work. These conditions, good technological background and support was what made it a success, (as well as its continuation in the long term) and are exactly what the video addresses as thougthless thinking from the OLPC part, and why it didn't work as well in other countries.
Yeah, there seems to be this huge gap in what people think the developing world is and what large parts of the developing work actually is, and this video just lumps them all together and says things not designed uncontacted african tribes is bad design.
@@jasdanvm3845 that a huge part of the developing countries is a lot more developed than most African countries, so you can't put it all in the same bag
@@grantflippin7808 that's it, it was perfect for areas where the internet and computers were a known thing but only accessible to the upper classes. In this video he takes every developing country for an indigenous tribe without proper access to education or electricity.
I rarely comment , but had to. My father Lars (RIP) worked for SIDA to develope road construction in developing countries. What he saw was that western aid in Africa always failed by bringing european engineers and their ordinary road construction techniques to their world. It failed because it was dependant on the workers from europe, their machinery breaking down waiting for spare parts for months, and most importantly - that the road built was not the "property" or the work done by the locals themeselves - which resulted in the roads never being used or being poorly maintained after the aidworkers had left. My dad changed that completely with what he called "labour intensive road construction"... which was; doing away with all the machinery, employing the locals with shovels and wheelbarrows building the road going past their village. Then an elder in each village was appointed "Road Chief" to be responsible for the upkeeping and maintenance of their designated stretch with salary from the aid-program. This proved to be a very successful model, gaining roads in good quality that the locals considered their road (since they'd built it) and would use and maintain with pride. An example that aid has to be IN CONTEXT with where it is applied.
That's a really good example of a solution that both empowers a community while also providing them with the resources, funding, and training to be successful!!! Both things are *so* important. What a cool dad lol
@@leagarner3675 He mentioned that the elder was responsible for the upkeep. That means they're in charge - it doesn't necessarily mean the more ridiculous possibility you're suggesting, which is that they're literally doing the work themselves. I understand your point, but you have to admit that was an assumption.
I HAD ONE OF THOSE LAPTOPS AS A KID! There was a promotion on one of the cereal boxes we ate - I think it was cocoa puffs or lucky charms. I begged my mom to fill out a paper inside the box, then she put it in the mail. I have no idea what their selection process was like, but seeing the package show up ~2 months later, it definitely felt like we won something. It was definitely uhh... interesting. It had a ton of different educational apps, including Scratch. I remember trying its typing course, but even my 8-year-old hands were too large for the dinky silicone keyboard. I remember trying to connect it to our Wi-Fi, but it didn't really work lmao. IIRC, it felt like the browser was super out-of-date so it loaded super super slowly if at all. The most it could reasonably do was image search pictures of cats. The ONE thing my brothers and I DID use it for was its maze game. Using the arrow controls on the left or right side of the monitor, or on the keyboard; we each got to control our own shape (circle, square, triangle) through randomly generated mazes. The mazes got more and more complex the longer we played, and the next maze would generate 5-10 seconds after one of us made it to the end. Because of that, it was a race for us! Man. Its startup sound will be forever ingrained in my mind. Good times :')
a bunch of my relatives got them at a big christmas thing and i got the only one that didnt work. i was sour about that for years until i got gifted a laptop that was actually good, like 5 years later.
I also had one of these! Through the same exact program you mentioned. While very neat, even as like- a 4th grader I could see how it was just not a great product for the American market OR for kids in developing countries. I'll say this though, it was my first experience with Linux as you could dual boot into either Linux or the kid friendly OS. For that, it will be a forever lasting memory for me.
The laptop is an example I remember from my first year of college in product design. That’s such a good example it is really burned into my memory. I will never forget that point. My little sister was playing with her friend once and they were pretend playing. My sister was sitting at a table with a toy laptop and said she was working and doing her job. My dad has a desk job and my stepmom is a teacher who also works a lot at home behind a screen doing paperwork for teaching. Now her friend was laughing hysterically because she thought my sister was joking. She thought it was funny because a computer is for playing games not working. Now, her friends mom works as a cashier and she doesn’t see any adults ‘working’ with a laptop or computer. For her a computer is for games and playing, working is selling things or doing things. It was fun to see this happening. How 2 children have such a different view of working. I did explain this to both of them because my sister got extremely confused and started asking me if working is also on a computer. Ofc it didn’t help that the pandemic caused my dad to work from home for a large part of my sisters childhood so for her the natural idea of pretend play working was typing on a toy laptop. It was really cute to see but also a healthy confrontation with how we can all see things completely differently because of certain circumstances.
I don't have any kids, but I can only imagine how much confusion they would add to the conversation if I did... I'm a game developer, so for me working is playing (to stay current with trends) and making games on my computer. 😂
My little niece does that too. She pointed to laptops for a while and just said "work?" playing the name it game. I got her a cheap laptop (as in almost ewaste she's just a little kid after all) with KDE's GCompris built to be the only things launched for her, and now she started calling it a computer. She thought it could only do what she adualts did on it, but now it's also games
Once I asked my mom if there are any people who make a million dollars a year just pushing buttons and she said yes in wall street, on computers. I was like woahhhh and she was 100% right and it took 20 years to fully understand how that really works and how you can push buttons to make money buying and selling
Okay, guess the situation: I am a millionaire who makes a living playing video games and I give an interview to an anime girl. Which btw none of us sees as a joke. (Well of course we know how hilarious that looks and that if we had to describe that to our parents 25[or even 15] years ago, they would have checked our rooms for shrooms and tested the water.) The anime girl also makes good money with that. Who am I? And what situation did I describe?
My father was a power engineer, he designed power distribution systems. He told me about a man he met at a conference who had helped install power infrastructure in a developing country (I can't remember where). The team built the system, trained some local electricians in how to use it safely, etc and left. Six months later, after receiving request for help because of widespread power failures, some of the team went back to check it out and see if they could help. They found the rural portions of the infrastructure and saw the poles had been chopped down with axes and repurposed into building houses because the poles were superior materials to anything available locally. The cables had been repurposed similarly, the material was so strong and flexible they turned it into fencing, building materials, etc. This was mid 1990s.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs in action. People will prioritize shelter and safety over electricity always. Why would I need lamps if I don't even have a roof?
@@Ihavenothingtodo2they didn’t directly say that, just that people prioritise certain things over certain things. Either way, clearly, given they used it as a building material, there are certain things people felt needed to be built. I’m sure at least some of those poles were used to build houses, or to structurally improve existing houses.
As a person with a masters degree in design, I can tell you most designers are arrogant and self absorbed (Negroponte is the poster child of this). They should read Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. It came out in 1971, and the design community ostracized him. He was spot on in the book though. Design education is loaded with a BS curriculum of saving the world and noblesse oblige. Leave your politics at the door and focus on context and needs, not a virtue signaling, self important solutions. I mean, they don’t have water, so let’s give them laptops.
I read this book in preparation for this video. I forgot to put it in the works cited because I didn't explicitly use any of the material from it. While I didn't cite the book explicitly, it was useful for adding some color/clarity to the ideas I mention throughout the video. I will cite it now.
"Leaving politics at the door" sounds a lot like the "Call of Duty isn't pollitical" crowd that we have in gaming: A slogan to discredit changes to the status quo by claiming that only the disruptor is pollitical but not those upholding the status quo. Obviously, that doesn't mean using foreign aid funds for virtue signalling and ego building isn't horrible behaviour tho, just that focusing on needs is also loaded with politics. Which needs do you focus on? Whose needs do you focus on? How much do you trust various groups of people to accurately describe their or other people's needs? (In the field of foreign aid: Do you trust national politicians? County or equivalent level polliticians? Local (village or negbourhood) leaders? Or do you need a comprehensive survey?) Do you strictly focus on whatever need is stated to be most pressing, even if you think it's short sighted or unethical? In a corporate setting, do you only focus on user needs as long as it benefits the bottom line or do you push back against corporate interests and risk being replaced?
the most frustrating thing is the lack of using local workforce for charitable purposes, like, say you want to electrify a village? just pay the locals to install the power poles and equipment, you will provide them with much needed money and new skills in the process as well!
There's a big amount of articles about how the endless donations of (low quality) clothes and food hurts the textile and agricultural industries in some African countries. Both industries that are extremely important to the base economy of any nation, and could employ a large fraction of the population
@@DogKacique And some sources show that some clothes are so low-quality that *no one* can use them, so they're just burned as waste. (e.g. "The Ugly Truth of Fast Fashion," Patriot Act with Hasan Minha, Season 5, Episode 3) "
a lot of these people who make the orgs/donations do not see these people as human, it's the same as detesting the homeless while also wanting to help them for personal ego, they see them as lesser beings who if given money, would spend it in foolish ways unlike a cultured/educated (civilized) westerner, it's really insidious and the charity industry is filled with characters like this
@@DogKacique One of the main reasons I never really liked charities. Give a man a fish you feed him for a day etc. And most of the time most of it just get pocketed by corrupt individuals anyway. I think what they need is education and education only.
@kagashimin I mean, I think we should consider stopping foreign megacorps from destroying their access to water and maybe ask what kind of infrastructure help they'd like to regain their access to water, but I agree that education should be at least half the battle
the biggest problem with the playpump is the design itself, regardless of culture. merry-go-rounds take a little bit of energy to get going and then spin by themselves for a while, which is why kids can and do play on them. playpumps require constant power because that energy goes to pumping water instead of spinning... (no wonder kids got tired of them so quickly) this guy took a look a water handpumps and decided to replace something where you stand and move your arm with something where you walk in a circle...
A push wheel is certainly more practical. Not sure about for water pumping in this situation but depending on the circumstances it could be. Say for more large scale operations like irrigation.
@@brainstormsurge154 not quite sure what you specifically mean by a 'push wheel' but sure, handpumps aren't very useful at scale but these were designed to be like merry-go-rounds, so you have to stand sort of sideways to push them, too--all around less convenient. they also weren't developed for use at scale (even if they came with water towers that were supposed to mitigate the 'intermittent playing' problem), given that they were meant to replace handpumps for normal water use (the real value of a pump is that it gets to water that is less likely to be polluted and can't be contaminated by buckets or whatnot. less clean water can be used to water crops in most circumstances)
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa well, the water tower is probably also meant to mitigate this, since children playing fills the tower rather than fetching the water---it is just pumped to a place where it can be fetched more easily later (this is not how it worked out, of course; instead women both spin the playpump and get the water from the tower, as children don't play on the playpumps for the reason i mentioned above). as for electric pumps, while they might be convenient in some places, the limiting factor on hand pump use in rural areas is the difficultly of repairs and a lack of replacement parts, which would only be more of an issue with a more complex and fiddly electric pump, regardless of the power source used.
HUMANS have a tendency to do that, I think, whenever they come from a place of sufficient privilege that they're not forced to pursue practicality for their everyday sustenance the way people- richer or poorer- do when they're in rough situations. But yes you're right and I Thumb up your Comment.
This is 200% true. I was a disabled specialist who was asked to be part of a panel to judge smart home technologies for a new housing project for those with a mental disability. One person came in who had lots of experience, who showed you could do more with less, who was respectful of the target demographic's privacy, who was easy to scale. A representative of local government rejected their bid because "it is not ambitious enough" and lacked "wow factor". In other words, "it isn't hype, so no funding for you". The biggest obstacle to improving lives around the world, is convincing politicians that the technology to help their people already exists and just needs to be implemented. They always want to be able to say they were a first.
People typically don't know their blindspots and biases. Lots of these people mean well, but have trouble overcoming themselves. Also, there's the damned of you do, damned if you don't scenario, like the case of the mosquito nets. Some people will use the nets for their intended purpose, so denying nets to the entire population will cause harm.
The first time a child actually touched an XO machine was when kids from one of the researchers were asked to take one apart and put it together (which they did, but I don't know with how much supervision) so they could claim to journalists that the children would be able to maintain the laptops themselves. I had previously done some experiments with kids and found, to my surprise, that for pointing devices they preferred trackballs (the larger the better) by a huge margin, then joysticks, then mice, then the IBM trackpoint and dead last was the trackpad (which is what I liked the most myself). Without such testing the OLPC machine adopted the trackpad with a capacitive middle and resistive extensions to allow drawing with a pen (this never worked well). One of their first deployments was in Nepal and it turned out that the climate conditions made the children's hands sweat in a way that made the trackpads unusable.
This seems to be in order of fine motor control needed. Suggesting the ideal machine varies a lot by age. Just like toys, obvious in retrospect. This also shows we have not truly solved input, we only have compromises.
That’s hilarious. The absolutely abysmal contextual thinking, I mean. People do not seem to think past a design perfect for their own environment. Like Tesla cars being unable to be opened in freezing areas, because nobody considered the door handle flush with the car might get frozen shut
Probably the best option for the pointer device would have been a joystick relative that uses a 2-d sliding device: you can seal them as well as you care about, stick a hole in the middle to stick a normal pen in, etc., and they're more compact than a trackball.
If they had used a trackball, people would just say "Look, it's a moving part, it breaks, why didn't they use a trackpad instead?" Or "the ball comes out and rolls away, ha ha ha, those arrogant designers."
I worked for OLPC. Negroponte once chartered a plane for like $300k to avoid waiting a day. The person who had to do this for him was an Administrative Assistant who, like every other employee, was working for less than half market salary. She resigned the same day.
@@majormojo yes this one. Administrative Assistant. I've never heard AA being used to mean African American in corporate America, but I have also been out of that world for a decade .
I actually personally know Negroponte; I was friends with his grandson. Used to think he was super cool until I actually met him; he had this weird dichotomy where he assumed that everyone around him was super smart and knowledgeable about everything, but also that he was the most smart and knowledgeable about everything, and would still talk down to everyone he talked to.
The "super smart and knowledgeable" people are the ones who learn from others. One will still have to deal with the weird position of being asked "how do I do [whatever they need to do]" and yet be disliked for being a know it all for answering their questions... About the Condescending Type: The condescending type usually isn't as bright as they want to believe. Super Condescending Mr. Epstein wasn't a brilliant investor, but rather extorted money from people who also enjoyed the underage guests at his parties. He wasn't brilliant, but he was a smart extortionist up until taking his own life was the only option card left to avoid spending the rest of his life in a cage... The followers of Mr. Musk believe that he is the brightest man in the world. But this is a cult as the only thing he designed himself was an EV Charging Plug so it would be incomparable with all other EV technology. Everything else that he claims to have invented is actually the work of smart people who he uses until he has no use for them. And a non-disclosure agreement keeps them from even describing what they invented or designed with future employers. Or in short, Mr. Musk is probably the smartest Confidence Man in the country. But for his design work, well his CyberGarbageTruck is an example of his design work and it will be banned from public roads by the US DOT soon enough...
I read his book "Being digital" when at uni. I guess the message was "information is more useful with meta-information" (well, it was before SGML/XML became big). I can't remember anything else.
I received an OLPC machine when I was a kid. My grandparents did this two-for-one deal where I got one laptop, and a kid in a developing country got one. They quite literally handed me the laptop and walked away. My parents didn’t know how to use it, so I had to learn myself. But I never did-I couldn’t figure out the cryptic, textless interface. All I could do was hit buttons and sometimes make colors and sounds appear on the screen. I don’t think it was an issue of intelligence-I am now an aerospace engineer. The claim that a child could pick up and use this device is completely wrong. I WAS the type of child who loved to tinker, and who had the context of computers.
I remember that I had a Software Design and an Agricultural Design class in the same semester. Both has us making a design for a local group. One thing that stayed with me was that in the Software Design class, our teacher told us that it was important to limit what the client could ask for beyond their initial request. Never ask open-ended questions, only give them a choice of pre-defined options, otherwise they would ask for more than you could manage. While, my Agricultural Design course recommended basically opposite, that a meeting with the client should be more of a conversation. Let them go on about whatever they want and, from that, extract what they need and want and refine your design off that. I get why both would say what they did, and over time, I've found both to be true, but I've found that an interesting contrast.
Both are right, imo. Clients often don’t know how much is reasonable, or even sometimes don’t know exactly what they want. Which is sort of where the second advice comes in. You make it a conversation and you gleen more about them as a person, and can infer what they want even if they can’t put it into words.
You have to start with letting the end user tell you what they need. And the general parameters for it. After that, you're correct that you do need to limit the options to not become overwhelmed. But that's more about limiting scope creep than it is about telling the customer what you think they need.
@@Green__one: Yeah, the Ag advice was very much for an earlier step in the process than the Software stuff. The Software advice is what you follow when formalizing a contract, the Ag advice is what you do to gather info before writing the contract.
I think coming up with an idea then saying "will this work for you?" is a perfectly acceptable way of opperating. If you accept when they say "no this won't help us".
@@morgantrias3103 actually, that often doesn't work when dealing with other cultures. In many cultures it is impolite to refuse someone's offer, or rude to contradict someone. As a result many people will agree that something will work for them, even when they know full well that it will not. You need to approach discussions like that very carefully, so that you get honest input. It's always better to spend a lot more time listening than talking.
19:44 “ we weren’t taught how to talk or walk” This man did not parent his own children. You absolutely have to teach kids how to talk and walk. If he spent even five minutes in the real world instead of Delulu land he’d know that.
That's total bullshit. Parents do not teach their children how to talk. They don't know how they talk themselves. You have absolutely no clue what your tongue does. Nor do you know the grammar of your own language in any detail. Children aquire language simply by listening to it and then trying to speak. No one involved knows how talking actually works or how the language is structured. Similarly you also do not know what you do when you walk.
In the 19th. Century, a philanthropist called Moses Montefiore funded a windmill in Jerusalem for early settlers to grind their grain. It's still there, but still not grinding much grain; Jerusalem rarely gets significant wind.
Just give money to people to start businesses. that's the best way by far to suply desired products and further the economy. then again, it really seems like most africans are cultural rooted not to be very materialist... or interested in capitalism. i can't explain why else all other nations developed a working economy.
@@Infotainment-cb6cy also bad idea, because then you make them dependent on they receiving money.... Also if AI develops capitalism will get either destroyed or we will live in extreme hellhole since robots will do everything for the person that owns all the robots
"Nevertheless, the mill operated for nearly two decades until the first steam-powered mill was completed in Jerusalem in 1878" Still something, I guess
It's the one thing people forget to do. It's just one simple thing that they can ask: "How can I help you?" At an engineering conference I heard the testimony of one of the engineers and how a company they volunteered for tried to help a community. They installed latrines and toilets around the village for sanitation. A year later, they came back to check on how the community was doing but noticed that all the latrines were gone, some even had walls removed. When they asked why they would destroy them, members of the community just said that they had always been going outdoors and that was natural and something that was part of their culture. It connected them back to the land. The charity organizers still tried to explain that they had worked hard to bring them the materials and that it was done for their own health. But the community leaders explained that they never asked for toilets. They didn't want them. Their homes needed new roofs. When the rains come, it rains inside their homes and that's what they needed. So as soon as the organizers had left, the villagers tore down the latrines and used the materials for what they really needed, sound homes.
That does often bring up a dilemma, how do you approach a cultural practice that is clearly harmful to the population (open latrines or worse, human waste all over the place is an awful vector for all kinds of disease, no matter how natural it may seem). Do you ignore it, knowing that you are perpetuating harm, try and work around it even if it's nowhere near as effective as the ideal solution, or try to get them to change their practices, and risk being seen as the arrogant westerner imposing their culture on the developing world. Of course a combined effort to get in roofing materials at the same time as building the toilets would have helped, but that still leaves the issue above.
@@Croz89 Good point, but again, that's viewing the situation with clouded eyes. In my example, they weren't just leaving droppings like deer. As I understood, they would go into the woods and bury it there. They were a very small population. - After countless generations of doing it, they already knew how to do it safely because they hadn't gotten sick from the practice. Regardless, the point is to ask what they need help with. Help with their most urgent need, then you can educate people and prevent dangerous or harmful behaviour. It's just wasted effort if you "help" by providing something they don't need or want. Education is maybe the most important thing for both parties. Long story short, help them with their basic needs, then you can teach. I friend told me once: You can't learn on an empty stomach or a full bladder!
@@peluso4oso Even so, "safely" is a relative term here. Burying human waste in the woods is better than leaving it out on the ground or in an open pit, but it's not ideal, there's a risk of contaminating water sources (which is why you have to be careful doing it when hiking). A small population might be able to get away with it, but it would certainly be more of an issue if the population grows. Some might argue that while leaky roofs are a problem, sanitation is more important than comfort, even if the community values it the other way around. It's a tricky balance between giving a community agency and preventing it from harming itself through bad decisions (even in the developed world we often have to deal with this!). This is compounded in the developing world with the usual accusations of westerners being paternalistic and "knowing what's best" for developing world communities. Of course the best thing is to do both at the same time, and in this case it seems like those who constructed the toilets could have left some roofing materials behind if they'd asked and known about the issue. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and budgets don't always stretch as far as we'd want them to.
@@Croz89 You cannot change a culture practices by visiting them once a year. No more than you can stop the obesity epidemic in the US by telling Americans that they should eat less sugar and exercise more.
I have travelled around the world and extensively in rural developing areas. What Negroponti wanted to do with the laptop has now been achieved with smartphones. Almost every family has a smartphone. Even if they do not have a toilet, refrigerator or stove. Mostly they buy used refurbished models. iPhones are extremely coveted. Android is accepted as it cost less. Cell service is almost universally available. Many places got optical fiber internet at 50 to 265 MBps. Paid WiFi by the minute is widespread.
Negroponte nauively wanted to educate people through the OLPC project. Smartphones have spread everywhere, but what they have achieved is enabling communication, not education.
Agreed - except Negroponti thought everyone wanted to 'learn to code' when the actual prize from widespread adoption of electronic devices is 'real time data about places I can't walk to today'
That story about the laptops for African kids reminds me of when politicians were telling coal miners losing their jobs to learn to code. These people aren’t dumb, but asking them to do a complete jump from what they knew how to do was obnoxious.
What's worse: firing every Kodak employee who works on film or retraining them to work on digital imagining technology? Good intentions, coupled with funding and support should be lauded, IMO.
@@SayAhh I don’t believe there were good intentions nor funding in this instance. “Learn to code” was just a set of buzz words journalists and politicians were using in response to the situation. Then a few years later when a bunch of journalists were getting laid off social media would automatically delete your posts if you made that statement.
@tjlastname5192 it all was virtue signaling and smugness of the journalists who consider themselves superior to the "unwashed uneducated masses doing hard labor". THAT is the reason they pushed so hard to learn to code, they saw them as ignorant people and the journos were coming to save them. When the AI craze happened and it applied to them, they seethe since they believe they're cultured and educated, this shouldn't be happening to them!
The idea that "every child should learn to code" is ridicuous, no matter African child or Western child. I remember me learning Pascal at University when I was 20: what an ordeal (okay, maybe the professor was shitty and we used these fuuking block diagrams everybody has forgotten now) . Negroponte must have been a guy who never did any coding himself, probably he got famous so early that he could hand that over to his students
Another huge issue is there's almost no motivation for rural areas. The children might take interest in it and have fun, but there's probably more important things they could be doing. Whether that's because their family needs them or because things like programming have no motivation in their culture. To them, it might just be a novelty. Like they could instead be practicing whatever skills they use to get food/money on the table, or improve their homes, etc. Presumably there's not that many programming jobs in these countries or even infrastructure for these "abstract/modern" skills (math, programming, etc). While these are great skills for any country to eventually have, I have to wonder if they're really benefiting anything at this moment. I can teach a kid how to use circuit design software to make a solar panel, but they don't have the materials, the tools, or other specialists to know how to put that to good use. I could be wrong with everything I said, but even if first world philanthropists had the money, effort, labor, and ideas, it still would take a lot of time for developing countries to build up. If you want them to explore more modern/abstract opportunities, they first need to develop the more "materialistic" skills they need to thrive. Until then it's just fun facts and novelties.
Yep. They want kids to code while there's zero infrastructure to use any of it in their area. I remember computers being put in schools during my primary school days, and no teacher knew how to use them, so they became the thing you typed on and played tetris on. They broke super quick, too, and were too expensive to fix for a village fae away from the capital. And this is in the Caribbean. There is a gap, but it's not that wide to jump. I actually went the Computer Science route after realising I hated accounting except for the computing part. But that's after learning how to use them and moving closer to the city where its an actual career option.
It's interesting given that Seymour Papert himself was introduced to computing in the 1960s under fairly similar circumstances. To the general public computers were something you only used if you were going to the moon, and that might just as well be the attitude of the OLPC target audience. Not to mention as an African-American he had first hand knowledge of African culture. I think they would have had much greater success trying to replicate their own formation in the MIT AI Lab in third world countries. Forget $100 laptops, a $1000 one can outperform all the PDP-6 and PDP-10 machines they had combined for millions. Cost of the machine was never the issue. Human capital always is. Instead they should have gone to these countries and find young Paperts, Minskies, Stallmen, Sussmen, etc. and hook them up with their own labs with regular hardware at a negligible cost compared to their hand cranked fisher price shitshow.
Exactly. Programming is not useful in Africa because the infrastructure is not even there, and they have to cover other bases a lot. Programming will only be useful to them if they want to work in developed countries. And even at that, programming is dying largely due to AI, which is taking away jobs in that sector, and of course, between a programmer with a large experience and a programmer with little experience, it is merit that wins.
@@salvatoreshiggerino6810 Except that "Paperts, Minskies, Stallmen, Sussmen" not only thrive in certain environments, they are only found in certain environments. Probably you will have more luck finding a Mozart in Africa.
Funny story about netbooks: Our school also bought netbooks (I guess in some "modern teaching" initiative) but they/the teachers didn't have much of a plan how to use them. So what happened in the end was that we basically used it maybe 20-30 times, and then everyone ran out of ideas on how to use them. So this "just give kids computers" thinking didn't only fail in the developing world.
I've got a masters in education studies and people often times don't realize just how hard it is to design work that benefits from a computer for use in classrooms. I'm not really surprised that these didn't work so well in parts of the developing world as one of those computers is a massive amount of money. In some areas a single laptops is nearly the country's per capita GDP. So, for just a couple of those notebooks you could pay for another teacher or somebody to help design curriculum for the school that could more effectively make use of the resources available in the community. Or, you could buy more supplies for the school to use in testing and evaluation. Or any number of other things that could reduce barriers to education. Computers are great, but they don't contribute that much to education if you aren't already at a level of development where you have a reasonably stable internet connection and already have your bases covered in other areas. Much of the benefits that come from computers come from being able to connect to the internet and do research and actually see what various areas look like.
I remember 7 years ago, back in high school, my school obtained a bunch of Chromebooks which teachers could book to use in our computer lab. But after going there multiple times, we just took the time we spent in the lab to goof off like a bunch of 16 year olds wouldve, as the teachers themselves couldn't really think of a way to integrate the laptops into our classes beyond having us do Kahoot or make powerpoints
Same here. Our school district started buying Chromebooks as I was just getting out of high school in 2013-2014. They were terrible. Cheap and slow laptops that basically no one actually wanted to use. The wifi they were attached to was also shitty and slow, and in some spots, non-existent. Even the 3G hotspots on our phones worked better than the wifi most of the time. And I went to a high school in a middle-upper class area only an hour from Silicon Valley. But the district did what they always did: Go with the cheapest and worst bidder for short term savings instead of spending slightly more money for something that'll last longer.
yea, every time some tech gadget was introduced into classroom, the teacher was totaly clueless how to use it, the only thing that really worked well was a projector hooked up to a pc, but despite its success we still were getting weird gardgets that dont work while some projectors were so old they had a lot of "dead stars" (white dots, kinda like dead pixels on a screen)
I'm from Uruguay. The OLPC project was a success there. I'm surprised you didn't talk about it. Your points are all valid, but it would be interesting to analyze how they were addressed here.
@@tatianavilla5037 in spite of all the problems mentioned here, it was designed for children. They dropped the OLPC now in favor of just a windows laptop and it's a nightmare for parents. Children install video games that parents don't know about and are exposed to sexual predators through the chat. And this is all through a government-provided device that parents cannot opt-out of (and imagine the conflict with the kids if you did). We might as well give them smartphones with TikTok pre-installed at this point.
@@alvaromoe what are you taking about? the computers Uruguay use in schools and highschool use linux and most of them have a website blocker And instaling games is reduced to a few games comatible with them. The laptop was replaced with a horrible tablet that didnt allow to install anything in it Whats happening now is that parents give kids smartphones too early
Yo tuve clases de programación con la XO (básicas, solo hacíamos juegos) y varios de mis compañeros se interesaron lo suficiente como para estudiar carreras relacionadas.
I am really shocked about the idea "12-year-olds without any instruction can maintain and repair a laptop". I doubt many 12-year-olds from America/Europe/Asia could do that even with instructions from the internet - even a really great part of adults all over the world struggles with that!
Yeah, I am 25 now but I would say I became really tech competent by 21, even living in a modern and first world environment. You NEED experience, wich Is not something you can learn fastee.
The guy's level of delusion is mind-blowing... I've seen similar initiatives and I'm shocked at the utter stupidity --if successful, the kids will be hooked to games. The guy hasn't raised children smh
I worked at an org that had some responsibility to a (like, very) rural community. They still hunt and fish for sustenance, and have only minimal contact with the outside world. (They have phones and TV, but it requires chartered travel to go anywhere else.) I was once tasked with bringing office IT equipment to the community. Someone decided they needed a fancy multi-function copier and a Buffalo NAS. Why did they decide this? I'm not really sure. So I traveled there, set it up, installed printer drivers, formatted the NAS and got a file share working, and my job was done. At one point, someone there asked me what I was doing. So I told them, "setting up a copier and a networked file share." "Oh." They pointed to the NAS. "What does that do?" "It gives you a place to store data." "Ohhh." That last "ohh" was in the sort of way when someone is thinking, "Well, I'm sure that means something to somebody." It was abundantly clear that they had absolutely no idea what this stuff did, much less what to do with it, much less _how._ I didn't feel good about it, because I knew it wasn't going to do anything for them. It was just going to sit there until it broke, and nobody would even notice when it had. When I got back, a friend of mine asked what I was doing out there. "Throwing money into a hole and creating e-waste for them to deal with later." It was a powerful lesson in how not to philanthropy.
As someone from an African country living in another African country, I see some positives with some of the things that some of these people tried to do, in the first case they tought about it right but they didn't consider the pride that people often have, and how goverments would feel paying for the device, I think maybe should have marketed it bettter, for instance, instead it is built with car parts, focus on it has technology close to ones found in cars and therefore easy to maintain. When it comes from the playpump idea, a lot of people here are talking about child labor, child slavary ect, but that is actually one of the assumption that the creators got right, the fact that in a lot of African villages, children (especially girls) are the ones that go fetch water, and tried to make the exercise fun, but children and most people for that matter fetch water early in the morning, so I don't they would be interested to play a little bit at 5am. On the mosquito nest idea, mosquito nest are some of the most important thing we had around growing up and they still are, and I am sure a lot of lives have been saved because of them, so they have not failed. When it comes to the laptop idea, I thing the idea was to early, back then we didn't just care that much about the internet or computer, yes they were cool, but people lived just fine without them so we didn't think computers were changing the world, but today even in rural areas, people value IT skills, and thanks to a kind of revolution around solor power, I think that idea would have worked around 2018, if with the technology of then, they could have provided 80 or 100$ laptops to schools.
It is good to hear from someone actually in Africa. I wonder why more people are not listening to your point of view, which happens to be different than the story they want to tell.
The "failure" of the mosquito netting, isnt that it didnt work. It's that distributing them had an unintended negative affect on local ecosystems. One possible solution would be to distribute fishing nets and mosquito netting so families didn't have to choose one or the other.
@@marshray6228 Yeah, there's a certain irony about privileged people complaining about other privileged people being out of touch....and here we have testimony from one of the people who we're supposed to be listening to and it has a fraction of the likes the complaining comments have.....
Well no, because the comment brings up the same points of the video. These are fascinating technologies marketed, and more importantly, taught to people poorly. The cure to cancer means nothing to an uneducatedperson if it's locked behind complicated (or expensive) puzzles @@marshray6228
not the most important aspect, but i can't imagine the play pump would even be very fun as a merry go round. a merry go round is supposed to coast, allowing you to build up speed and keep spinning after you stop pushing. if all your kinetic energy is being used to pump water, it's gonna grind to a halt really fast. you've basically converted it into a steel frame for you to run in circles around.
I'm from Paraguay and the reason my school couldn't get the one laptop per child was because a politician stole all the money for the computers to bet it on horse racing
In Mexico a few years back the government wanted each kid to get tablet. They picked some cities to test it out, and sadly within 2 weeks the majority of the tablets ended up at local pawnshops.
From my understanding, Mr. Beast just recently made a video giving people housing in Mexico, and many of those donated houses are already up for sale. Gotta wonder where people perceived priorities really are.
sadly, the problem of not reaching out and asking people what they ACTUALLY need is extremely common. you even see it in the way government aid programs are designed and run. for a certain time, i was accepting help from my town's municipality due to a lack of resources (money). while they did help a lot with groceries ... they mainly handed me boxes of pre-selected items (basics as well as extra things i didn't really want). this felt very patronizing, because what i REALLY needed was to pay the bills! if they had instead helped me with my bills for the duration of the time i was struggling, THAT would've genuinely changed my life for the better. they didn't even ask me what grocery items i needed! so i still had to purchase certain cleaning supplies, and that's not even getting into the redundancies. but that's the problem, they don't think poor people have any actual agency. even worse, they usually assume those living in poverty ended up there because of their own decisions, and not because of generational wealth disparity or class struggles ... or hell, even just a personal crisis (the death of a family member in my case).
This is why I believe in a national guaranteed income. Because all this money spent on choosing what's best for others would be better spent on just forking over the cash. But most people internally hate poor people so much they think they're too stupid to know what they need.
You knew what you really needed for years ahead. Most people in poor third words would ask for endless food, alcohol, drugs, many wives... Sometimes you need to make a change that people don't know they want.
@@DarkGT this is also you making an assumption. You're ASSUMING people from the 3rd world would buy pointless things and ENDLESS food? Why would endless food be a bad thing?
@@ereristark425 @ereristark425 We literally saw example in the video about the mosquito nests. If those people had the motivation and the unity to think and work towards better tomorrow, then there won't be endless conflict, rapes, killings, hunger. People would share resources with each other and work together. In Palestine they get food help, rather than getting distributed, it gets stolen and sold on the black market. It's the human nature that you can't trust, it's not assumptions. It's hard not to cause harm while helping. Endless food right? Utopia, why working? Food comes from the developed world every week. I won't bother growing food anymore... Rather help them with agriculture practices. The overproduction could be sold for profit, then you buy fishing nests.
In college I took a physics class that used the same thought process, of access being the barrier to knowledge/performance. We were in groups of 3 with a shared computer and were to teach each other the chapter, there was no lecture, but at the end of every class session we were expected to write a Vpython script demonstrating the concepts of that chapter. We were not taught how to use or code in Vpython, nor was it a prerequisite for the physics class, nor was it discussed in the physics book. This was 2012. I think everyone in the class failed. I couldn't withdraw because the terms of my lease in affiliated housing was that I had to have a minimum number of credit hours or be evicted and withdrawing would put me below that threshold and I assume everyone else was in a similar situation. It also didn't help that I ordered my book on the first day but the bookstore didn't get it in until after midterms. I was checking 3 times a week.
A recipe for disaster, basically. That is not the proper way of learning, unless someone is super interested by the subject, and even at that. What you are reporting is nothing short of an extortion scheme. "Learn, or else get evicted.". That's crazy.
I still remember one of the exam questions: what kind of material should a solar sail for use in space be made of? Just open ended like that. Not multiple choice or any hints or anything. So I start thinking about the extremes in temperature and radiation exposure embrittlement, tensile strength and micrometer impact resiliency; how it can't outgas, chip or flake even in these extremes. How it must be lightweight but flexible and strong. How it must be stable in these extremes, I wrote a paragraph listing every design requirement for the harsh environment of continuous direct solar exposure in the vacuum of space I could think of except the one they were looking for: The correct answer was shiny/reflective.
@@Zanthumthis kind of sounds like the course I took in 2021. My impression was the teachers had been reading about creativity, and how creativity requires freedom and no limits. But they just failed to understand what that actually means.
@@elainelouve yeah from what I remember it was supposed to be a new teaching technique that was developed I believe at North Carolina State and tested on grade schoolers but my professor completely missed the point. It was supposed to be instructor led group learning but they omitted the instructor entirely in the version they used on us. Edit: typo: I-> it
When someone is using mosquito nets to fish, is suffering from water scarcity, I highly doubt they'd be worried about a laptop. It sounds like people are ignoring what these people need, and not paying attention of what they are using these things for. Mosquito net fishing nets? It'd help more to send actual nets that can be repaired easily designed for fishing.
Watching the play pump was effing frustrating, because what we had back in the US for pumping water were windmills, and those things work really well for that. Getting enough water to let cattle drink.
@@groundbanshee Probably wasn't needed at some point or the climate conditions didn't allow for it. Like the cultures that didn't invent the wheel because their areas were extremely mountainous. My country never had water mills because we never had a big enough river, only wadis.
@@tesso.6193: In the case of Africa, I'd point more at bad luck. First the Congo comes along every few decades and decides to murder anything successful with disease because the rainforest biome thinks human pain is delicious; then Europeans come in with some zero-sum-game economic philosophies (which we don't buy into anymore, because a 50 pound dresser is clearly more valuable than a 50 pound log of the same wood), then they have a bunch of other maladapted philosophies in local hands jerking them around by the throat. It's only the last few decades that most have been making direct progress, and at this point most other folks have been working through things for so long that we've mostly forgotten what we did as interim steps. The "wind charger", for example, basically _has to be_ reinvented everywhere because people have forgotten that they were a thing.
In Australia we used to have windpumps everywhere, then we realised that climbing a metal frame tower on a 40+C day to fix a broken mechanism at the top while a hundred thirsty cows stare at you just isn't fun. Also people who fainted from the heat while at the top of the tower tended to die. So now we have solar panels and electric pumps and if it breaks down, you replace it with a spare and take the broken pump back to the shed to fix. The old windpumps still dot the landscape, but very few of them still pump water.
That's why when designing for any market or customer, you must first ask for their needs, come up with a basic idea, and ask them for feedback and not just blindly provide a solution.
Yes but other cultures have bias, history, and motivations that leads these types of initiatives. I would argue that if the infrastructure, and educational budget was there then ultimately it would have worked. Part of the trouble with free/stolen stuff is that it cost the reciever nothing, not everyone sees an alumium cessna engine as valuable aside from raw materials.
> Would you trust a medical device made of spare car parts? My dad is an ER doctor in Canada and I remember a time when I was a teenager and he told me that, when they were running low on certain medical supplies, since their budgets were so limited and the bureaucracy was so frustrating, they would just to go to the local hardware store to buy stuff to jury-rig things at a fraction of the price of 'real' medical equipment.
There was a medical case from Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary where a baby needed emergency dialysis but there was no existing machine that was compatible with infants. Dr. Malcolm Coulthard and Head Nurse Jean Crosier basically scrounged together a working dialysis machine *in a garage* and it *worked,* saving the baby's life. In fact, it worked so well that the hospital continued to use it. -From Cracked article "6 Insane DIY Surgeries You Won't Believe Actually Worked," Pauli Poisuo (2011)
Yeah the doctors and nurses themselves are absolutely willing, issue is the patients and the admin side. If someone dies connected to a machine it better be a very fancy looking machine.
In 2010 I spent a week in a rural town in El Salvador. The first thing I saw, looking out the bus window as it came to town, was a bunch of wells with broken hand pumps. The second thing I saw was a single line of a very modern-looking, strong fence that didn't enclose anything - nothing was anywhere near it - it looked completely pointless. It turned out that the wells were broken because they were killing people. The people used to drink from the river and get sick, so some charity put in wells. But the area was agricultural with heavy pesticide use, and the groundwater was contaminated. Within a few years, half the people in the town got kidney failure. Once they discovered the cause, they got a chlorination system for the river water. Oh, and the fence? It was a work in progress, to surround a graveyard so wild pigs couldn't dig up the bodies anymore.
IT-guy here with 30 years of experience. The OLPC-project perhaps flunked, but it helped to set the bar, and I believe it helped to act as a catalyst for cheap computers. This was at a time when a laptop costed like 10 times the price of a OLPC. OLPC was the start of the race to the price-bottom. "price anchoring" is the technical term I believe. And today we have stuff like Raspberry PI that gives you excellent computing performance for a few bucks.
@@Design.Theory Yeah, we guys in the IT-field are often plagued by "pre-understanding", as Nicholas Negroponte (I liked his book 'Beeing digital' btw) in this case. There is even a meme we use to make fun of ourselves: "IT is the solution - what's the problem?" :-D Thanks for your video.
i remember in the early 2000s or late 90s if you complained about high system requirements for certain programs the designer would be like wait so you are still using a 2 year old pc ?
but was that due to OLPC or other advancements? Saw an article about a 128 TB SSD the other day. I could have sworn we were still dealing with stuff in the 2 or 3 TB range, I don't even know when it jumped all the way to triple digits.
@@MorbidEelI know what you mean. My laptop Ram is 4gb and I thought those were enough (use for normal ms office and play 2000s game). Last week my office upgrade mine and they have 16gb of Ram!!
Very good video. The incubator program is a classic, but I am surprised that "the good alternative design" is not mentioned here. The solution to avoid the death of thousands of preterm infants was the old Kangaroo mother care program, sponsored by the WHO, which involves infants being carried, usually by the mother, with skin-to-skin contact. Uses the most universal source of heat for infants: their mothers. This is a true example of design out of the box. Still, an excellent video. I have been designing products for more than 25 years. I was aware of some of the ideas mentioned here, but I have learned several things anyway.
I can't count how many times I said some version of "let's find out" to my kid when they were 2-4 years old. Ask me a question, I teach them how to figure it out. Over and over and over, leading them through the process to get the answer... and then they started doing it themselves. Doing the math. Checking if there were snacks left in the basket by themself. Eventually, using a dictionary or a search bar. To hear someone so casually disregard all the work I put in to reinforce my kid's curiosity and give them the confidence to figure things out is infuriating. Just say you think moms and kindergarten teachers do nothing. Yuck.
The point is you did not just leave them find it all out on their own as that ... mislead person suggested. You lead them, you encouraged them, you provided a hint when they hit a roadblock ... and the thing is that once things get complicated, we all need more and more hints to get anywhere. Even just the stuff we teach kids on basic and middle schools is the work of tens of thousands of the most inquisitive minds over thousands of years. You can't expect every kid to repeat that process in eight or nine years without help.
Exactly. These rich men don’t even raise their own children. They left that work to the women in their lives. Then they go out and tell other people how to teach children. Hubris.
@@jendakrynicky5218 This is one problem I found with these parenting techniques, especially when it's taken to the extreme. Not saying the commenter did something bad, I'm just talking about a related problem. Parents become so obsessed with the idea of an independent child that they neglect the crucial relationship between them and their own children. At the end of the day, the parent must be the guide and the child the learner, with the parent playing an active, encouraging role in their child's development. Instead, these parents ignore parenting completely in hopes that it would create a strong, independent child - this does not happen, only resulting in broken relationships and emotional issues.
OLPC worked amazing in Uruguay. Olpc was adopted as full program in the public school system. It was kinda integrated into schooling, better models given to professors.
Despite Negroponte's plans, the first few hundred machines off the production line went to two pilot programs in Brazil (in São Paulo and in Porto Alegre). One of the included applications was eToys written in Squeak Smalltalk. This was not mentioned anywhere and the teachers in the pilot programs were not aware of it, but the children like the mouse icon (looks more like a cat) and played around with it on their own. They ended up teaching the teachers and this got enough traction that Porto Alegre hosted one of the two 2009 SqueakFest events (the other was in the USA).
That's why Windows 3.0 shipped with solitaire. It was a way of helping new computer users learn to use a mouse effectively as many people already knew how to play solitaire, so the added element was the mouse. You had to click things, double click things click and drag, basically all the basic mouse moves in one app.
It's like one of colleagues once said "if you want to do an ad for a tractor, you have to go to the field. Sitting in an A/C room and dreaming about it aint going to cut it."
@@BrunodeSouzaLino Don't forget the threats, legal battles, and mudslinging they'll do if you find a way to fix it yourself anyway! Hell, apparently learning the technology yourself all the way down to the coding level doesn't make you an experienced mechanic, it makes you a "hacker". It's also honestly ironic as hell that a baby-boomer flagship brand ended up operating a rug pull type situation for the most dedicated customer base out there.
In "Design for the Real World", Victor Papanek wrote that the best designers within a given culture are those who are from that culture. Though written in 1971, I find his observations and conclusions to be quite rational.
@@AntoshaPushkin That's clearly not the implication? In any field there are advancements leading earlier works into obsolescence. Take, for instance, Gibbon's *Decline and Fall;* A truly outstanding work of scholarship in its time, many of its claims are refuted by later scholarship. It is still widely respected for what it did to the field of history, though none would take it over more contemporary work. It does, though, still hold historiographical importance. I believe that is the point derphyn made.
To answer the question "would you trust a medical device made of spare car parts?", I put my life in the hands of car parts everytime I drive a car, so yes.
18:20 I was able to do that when I was 12 years old, that's because I started reading books about computers when I was 8, and I was taught by my father the basics of using DOS to play games, then I decided I wanted to know how to make games, that's when I was set on this path. But a lot of things had to happen, I had to be of middle class, to have a computer, which is expensive and was only possible because my father was an engineer, I had to have access to books and be autistic to the point of being able to learn on my own from just books, I was an avid book reader. I also spent a lot of time watching cable TV and getting immersed in that hacker culture. Expecting a kid to just be able to do that, like if it was "natural" is ridiculous without the cultural context. Its insanity.
We had such similar childhoods that it's wild. But I was lower class and my dad worked on security systems. So, yeah. I completely agree. I remember when that laptop was announced and I was so upset because I wasn't able to buy one. You know who would have loved an open source pc for $100? My poor American self. I was playing Zork on an old laptop my mom had gotten from work that ran Windows 3.1. Zork is great and all, but it was really the only thing that laptop could do. I wanted one so badly, but they didn't sell them. At least, not that I ever saw.
Most adults wouldn't be able to/wouldn't feel comfortable repairing a laptop without being guided. So yeah, it's not even that they're too young to be able to do it, it's that they aren't being provided with guidance from someone with more knowledge.
@@technophobian2962 yea I tried to repair electronics and I thought I had the skills to do it because I watched a lot of tutorials. but then I tried it and I ran into many absurd unexpected issues. so now I am just asking experts
I often help organizations select software for their business. The first lesson is "know the requirements!" It takes humility and experience to realize you don't know every damn thing.
And usually the customer either doesn't know what he wants. That's why for many projects the most successful software processes so far are iterative, where the customer and the producer of the software iteratively meet and make small changes to the software. The developer creates something as a solution of the customers needs, to show what is possible, and the customer gives their feedback, and the iteration starts again.
OLPC worked wonders in Uruguay. The project evolved into something even better. And some brilliant minds where discovered thanks to those OLPCs, some kids hired by Google, some others winning robots competitions. Worth mentioning that we had the infrastructure and government’s involvement to support the project.
I consider Uruguay very modern but not super wealthy country (that has both poor and rich people ... thus that initiative helps getting more population access to it + government program hopefully understood to explain these concepts someone never used internet or laptop did.... I feel we are now lacking in this department as companies are assumed to do that work.. and they only do for latest greatest things, not basics)
Exactly, it was meant for the type of people who can teach themselves. That means the laptops wouldn't be of much value to most people but they would be life changing for the few that "got it". The people who designed the laptop probably never learned anything about computers at school, they genuinely were self taught as well. For a literate child who has the potential, just giving them the laptop and a few pointers is like teaching a baby his first steps. He can go from there. For the kids who were never going to get it, it's like standing a dog on it's hind legs and expecting it to stick. Forcing that education through belabored schooling only creates circus animals performing a trick. They had to spread the laptops far and wide to find the babies and I don't think they'd be too worried that the dogs are still on their four paws.
It's such a misguided idea that you can just give a room full of kids laptops and education will magically happen. Having worked as a teacher in one of the richest and most digitally connected countries in the world, at schools where every kid *does* have a laptop, I can say that it gets in the way just as often as it helps.
Well, the idea of simply throwing tech equipment into classrooms and expecting everybody to become an expert over night is not limited to development aid. Industrialized countries do the exact same thing as well, expecting the _teachers_ of those schools to miraculously acquire IT skills that magically multiply classroom productivity. In other words, teachers are supposed to be coders, web designers, IT repairpersons, system admins and much more, completely free of charge and without any additional investment of time or other resources by the state. Can you guess how well _that_ is going right now??
I'll never forget my 4th grade introduction to the computer. Teacher introduced the first student to an art/coloring program and they got to play around with it. Then they showed the next student who got to play around with it. My turn came and I don't know if I wasn't shown well or if I just didn't learn quickly, but I was unable to pass the learning along. Humiliation. Not even being in a Western country allowed me to miraculously know my way around a computer, even with one whole (maybe?) lesson from a fellow 4th grader! So, the idea of a rural child in a '3ed world' country knowing what to do....
Computers do not belong in education, unless in support roles in some very narrow applications. The idea that the presence of computers magically makes education work better is pure lunacy. It doesn't matter if a bad essay was written by hand or typed on a computer, its content is still equally bad. PowerPoint is not a replacement for a teaching concept. Don't even get me started on the most abused to the point of rpae piece of software ever conceived, Excel.
@@lucemiserlohn i agree. it also has been proven that spell check just makes kids never bother to properly spell things out. so it some ways it can be more harmful then good. same goes for the over use of calculators.
Children learn how to be productive by themselves. This is how I learned PCs when I was little. Just the machine and manuals. No "grown ups" to really help. And teachers are most often failures. They should be at the forefront of development, but they aren't. It was funny to see online schooling spectacularly fail during the pandemic, when academia, industry and private organisations have figured it out decades ago. For example in Germany they are employed by the state and can't be fired, so naturally they won't lift a finger to learn new things and actually bother to teach the students anything.
It's not just developing countries, as evidenced by US kids tossing their free iPads around like Frisbees. Introduction of any novel tech requires more effort than, "Here you go, have fun."
That computer hit me with serious nostalgia. I remember when they implemented thw project here in Iraq. It was around 2010 and it failed for the reasons you mentioned and more. Firstly, we didn't know english so had no idea how to operate it. Most of the time we only used it to draw or play around with the sound composing app. I remember playing with a coding app think it's just a block building game. Back then the internet wasn't widespread yet so we had no idea about all the fewtures requiring network connection.
@@cyan_oxy6734: And failing to properly document is also very much a modern-computing (as opposed to e.g. 80s and earlier computing) defect, in addition to falling dangerously close to some of the ideas they were pushing.
I once worked in a university/museum complex in Finnish Lapland as a tech helper (a month long internship). Their boss had ordered few of the class rooms some kind of interactive touch monitor/whiteboard devices that probably at the time cost thousands of euros. The problem was that they didn't have any kind of manual and no one knew how to use them. I spent a good portion of that month finding the proper manual for them, translating that English manual to multiple languages (Sami, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish) due to the international nature of that work environment, learning how to use them myself and then teaching a full class multiple times on their use. I was just an introverted nerd whose worst fear was to perform in front of people, especially in English, but luckily they seemed to understand me well enough and everything ended up working out. I've only seen boards like that in use in one place since then and even there they didn't know how to use them.
I wonder if these were the ones used in Mexico around 12 years ago. They put these digital white boards in public school which were super expensive and not a lot of teachers knew how to use
I had one of those in a classroom once. I used it once because there were so few ways to use it with the students I had. And other teachers often fouled them up by trying to use dry-erase markers on them.
@@el-maikiI’m Ecuadorian-American, lived in the states my whole life. Smart boards, which is what I think you’re talking about, had a learning curve even here, but to a community who isn’t exposed to this tech, I wouldn’t blame them for not using this kind of device.
oh my god you're talking about smart boards right. i live in Canada (have my whole life) and my classmates and i had to help my teachers use them when i was 8 and they were 10 or 11. it was really fun but please bring back the projectors.
My country also got interactive boards and we almost never used them, idk when I stopped seeing them again but we used projectors quite often and the change from chalk boards to white boards was also successful, I don’t remember the date but mid to late 2000s?
This is such a great video! Thank you for making this. I am a designer in Ghana, and even up till now there is a huge dissonance what people think we need because we see the appeal in Western media and what the people actually need. When I was doing my bachelor degree in Multimedia, one particular thing my lecturer used to hit home a lot on was how we should actually pay attention to what the people actually need. It can be very easy to project what you have seen before (being exposed to western media as a graphic designer etc.) onto the work you are doing to received by the people you are actually designing it for, it is very important to differentiate your taste from the country's taste.
Its alway funny when normal people have more commnon sense than experts in a field. Like when economists thought China was gonna grow forever when most people were like wtf. These are people who should know better but they refused to for narcissistic reasons.
I work for a translation company. A HUGE bias of machine translation is that there just isn't enough data for developing countries. Even really big groups like Swahili lack the subtle traslations available to english or spanish.
@tammyleung7578 Cantonese isn't used at ALL in Singapore, and Hong Kong isn't independent. There's more users of it in Guangdong, than in both of the other cities combined.
@@GWT1m0 it's very much used, just more of a family thing. Most dialects in SG is endangered. (at least for Chinese ones) Most younger generations, unless they have great-grandparents, they don't get to speak much of the dialects due to government policy of Chinese being _Lingua Franca_ , along with the other 3 as mother tongue, but it's not in the zero range like you have suggested.
@@Hifuutorian Well by calling them countries it basically means it adds onto the implied meaning of an independent nation. That isn’t always the case but it usually is. Which is why the guy called out on Hong Kong being called that since it is classified as a special administrative region of China.
when I was a 12y old I did in fact repair a laptop, made a desktop from random parts ,and messed around with electronics In general but A. I'm from a first world country, B. I was fortunate enough to have access to these things and C. I started messing around with electricity In general when I was 6y old. - 18:30
Montréal has flaws but I would not call it a fail. I work with a team there where a question in English or French might be answered in other. But I suppose the point is that you need to understand people when they speak in their own tongues.
Yep. Those kids probably were having fun, though: getting to push around an adult stranger from a distant country is a novelty, right? I've seen lots of kids enjoy that sort of thing. But all the same, guys, have you heard of "bad optics?"
It feels like the epitome of this entire issue - it's Western paternalism in assuming that developing nations and their people will be delighted to accept their help, no matter the form, and that they know better because they're more advanced. Who *cares* about optics because clearly those kids are delighted to have been graced with the presence of a Westerner? It's so frustrating.
@@trioptimum9027that's part of what makes it funny, I would bet just about anything everyone involved was having a blast and will remember it fondly in future... But good god it's a bad look!
I also feel that, things that are given to people for free are also perceived as worthless, so by this logic why would you treat it with care? But in Africa anything that is worth something is also worth stealing and selling, it's an unfortunate cultural reality of the continent.
the problems of the continent are like 90% economic, not cultural. implying that something is "culturally" wrong with the continent is a slippery slope that leads to blatant racism and eugenics. don't be that guy.
The merry-go round pump assumed that African children would be free to play for many hours per day and effectively do work. A simple pump would be easier to use. But telling donors you can give poor kids a toy AND get them water sounds good, and they want to buy into it and think they're helping.
@@Aeroliten I think the price includes drilling into the ground to find water as well as looking for a suitable place that actually has any. It's not just for the wheel unless they wanted to replace existing pumps, which would be a massive waste of money.
My cousin was telling us about being posted by the State Department to a nation in West Africa. This was many years ago. There was a rebellion or some other trouble. The US had a communications station there that had to be abandoned due to the fighting. He said that when they recovered it, the building had been ransacked. The radio equipment was still there, but furniture, office supplies and everything else was gone. He understood. These were items that the locals could actually make use of.
This video gave me flashbacks to my undergrad marketing classes. I remember examples like a canned meat product being introduced to Brazil, which sold fantastically for a month, and then dropped off a cliff: Brazilians were sold on the idea of having emergency meat in the house in case they needed it, but it was seen as a "last resort" food, so they'd buy one can and keep it forever. Or a five-liter water bottle that didn't fit well into most people's refrigerators. We looked at American ads for the (then-relevant) Yellow Pages phone book, and compared them to international ads for the same product: in the US the ads were all about *which version* of the Yellow Pages was best, while internationally it was more about convincing people that it was a necessary product in the first place. Cultural blind spots are so fascinating to me.
Here in Germany yellow pages were and still are the pages in the phonebook where companies are listed. I don't even understand "whcih version". There is a new phone book every year, and of course the best version is the latest one for very obvious reasons.
@@steemlenn8797 Back when they were relevant in the US, multiple companies produced yellow pages. Most people just used whatever the phone company gave them, but there was still somehow a market for others.
I don't feel like you made the right deduction about the incubator. If the people who made it had an appropriately bleak view about their own government, they would have realized that CYA - cover your ass - and caring more about appearance than functionality are universal. Nothing to do with "cultural context".
16:05 they don't need to use the internet, how about we start with toilets. I'm dead serious. Access to water systems and treatment is the base of civilization, its foundational, you have to solve that first, then you solve electricity, then you can thing about leisure like computers. That should be common sense, and its still a huge problem.
I think the idea of information tech taking center stage is that in theory they can help people figure out their own solutions to problems. The ol teach a man to fish kind of thing
As some other commentator said that isn't even a universal thing. There was once a foundation that built latrines and toilets for sanitation in this one village and after two years returned to said village to find out the facilities were dismantled. They asked the villagers why and they answered they don't really need the latrines since they can do what they traditionally do fine and use them to fix their leaking roofs...
A church group goes to the Philippines and built a playground. Just like the ones you see at elementary schools in America. Two years later the playground was dismantled and was now being used to patch buildings and homes. If a person is living in a shack, their priorities don’t include “going to the playground.”
But then how will I run Senegalese Coding Sweat Shops? How will I export their misery in the form of databases and spreadsheets? Won't someone please think of the Western Women that won't feel superior to other Western Women?!?!?!
Here in the Philippines, my 1st time using a computer or even learned what a computer was is in 1993 on our high school computer class. It's not even windows but DOS system and we were learning Wordstar, Lotus123 and Basic programming. Believe me none of us students inside the room felt interested in what we are doing. The only time we felt interested was when one of our classmates started bringing in floppy disc games that can be played in the computer. So it's true that even if you're excited on the technology, you should not assume the students have that same excitment that you have. So believe me if that laptop was introduced to my batch at the time it will mostly end up not being used.
In 1993 DOS was very much still state of the art. Even in much of the western world DOS computers where still mainstream until the 2000s but admittedly then they where heavily outdated, but nonetheless very mainstream. Although admittedly again mostly in old registers etc. But 1993 they where still pretty hot. in terms of recent tech. Lots of people not heavily invested in recent tech still used systems that did not make it into current year.
DOS was a great way to learn about computers. Did it like that. Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece: By 93 DOS was very "state of the industry", but it largely wasn't any kind of "state of the art" unless you studied the actual API additions (and even then, it's unprotected roots held it back). Memory protection and GUIs were very much the state-of-the-art at the time, and while you could build such things on top of DOS, they weren't an actual DOS thing.
@@svr5423 "Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity." "children", or you mean the children where you live? Don't assume all cultures have the same priorities. If kids have no tech in their lives and don't see a utility for it, they won't care. Playing kickball in the streets is real and tangible. A computer isn't if it's in isolation.
@@jasondashney I mean children. Not sure why you think other "races" are so genetically different that this wouldn't apply. Also why would you play kickball in the streets when you have access to a computer? That doesn't make sense. Sounds like you haven't much experience with children at all.
One of the biggest things that was hammered into me during engineering school was to figure out the culture, resources, anything that could affect the functionality of what im designing for the audience im designing it for. Even stuff like looks are important to consider
A counter-example of a (fictional) good design for developing countries is Homer Atkins' bicycle pump in "The Ugly American"; not only does it use locally-available materials in its construction, but Atkins also hires local Sarkhanese mechanics and salesmen to help design and build it (notably, one of the mechanics designs a treadmill so that a bicycle can be used to power the pump and then can be removed from the treadmill and still used as a bicycle). Furthermore, he hires Sarkhanese sales staff and has them on commission, so they have "skin in the game" to make sure the design gets distributed. Atkins: "Whenever you give a man something for nothing[,] the first person he comes to dislike is you. If the pump is going to work at all, it has to be their pump, not mine."
In my country the OLPC plan back in 2005 was thought to equal public school students to those in private schools with computer lab classes. Many of the public schools students knew what they were confronted with, but didn't have access to a PC to practice at home. The plan had ups and downs since a lot of kids would use the laptops to play videogames or listen to music, but many others got to programming and robotic Olympiads. It also pushed the electricity company and the telecommunications company to strengthen the net to those rural areas far away from cities to allow kids to access the web with their laptops. It also brought a public library for every citizen with a civic ID from this country. So, it´s an interesting program, it can be very good for the population and bring a lot of progress but outside western culture we have to watch and learn before apply whatever we think it's needed.
I did some consulting for a charter school back around 2002/03. They bought every student one of those new white Macbook laptops. The kids treated the computers like toys, tossed them. Essentially the laptops where a replacement for pencil and paper and the teacher had no guidance on how they could incorporate into lesson plans. For the students the computer was not really important for their school work.
Honestly I grew up in the 2000’s and I’d also have been baffled. Pencil and paper worked just fine, especially because you could write in margins and doodle. Don’t get me wrong I love computers and they help a lot with some schoolwork, but I get why kids just ignored them
@@DeathnoteBB The problem is a lot of schools use way too many online resources and it wastes class time. Why take a test online that takes 30 minutes to set up when you could just pass out a paper test in less than 5 minutes
@@JamesThomas-kx5sjin defense of online work it’s far easier for teachers to manage and a lot of kids like it more because it’s easier to make up from home. When I was in high school and was home sick I could keep up almost completely from home
15:14 Okay, can we just pause for a second and think about how wild it is that there was ever a point where a news story felt comfortable openly publishing the personal email addresses of Rush Limbaugh and Billy Idol?!
I remember listening to a similar lecture back in architecture school. It was by a car designer who worked on projects in Africa, and he said one thing: "Those people don't want cars made out of straw. They've seen our cars and that's what they want." Human dignity plays a huge part in this, and despite good intentions, many of these products scream "I'm for the poor people." Nobody wants that.
You'll see things like this everywhere. Companies fail to design for the end user because they design around their perception of end users. You see canned food drives for the homeless, but homeless people don't want canned food. They want regular food, like the stuff we eat. Humans eat. They are Humans too. Not to say I wont eat out of a can, but I'd hate my life more if it was only canned goods. That and "Altruism" being inherently selfish, for the purpose of making you feel better, rather than actually helping. The people doing most of the helping are doing it for their own ego and failing to consider what the people being helped want or need.
but... but.... then why would I help someone if I don't get to feel better and superior to them! I mean it's pointless if I don't get the rush of feelings of superiority of my culture, wealth and knowledge compared to those who are of lesser stock!
@@EmL-kg5gn to be fair, cans were military rations because all of that is taken care of. As long as i have a lighter and a (much harder to come by!) place, its easy to heat. But looking at US news.... i can see how a homeless person might not start a fire to eat a can of ravioli. And on another note, i think its ridiculous that you can get apartments in the US that just have no kitchen, after all, one of the easiest ways of saving money and improving your own life quality is cooking from scratch...
IT specialist in secondary education from a rural reservation community. Once Hybrid learning came into effect and 1:1 Chromebook distribution was implemented in school districts, we ALL saw a rise in school technology destruction. Giving our students their own devices was well intended to give access to learning tools, however they don't know proper care or even care about the intended purpose, and instead only see it as a play device to access gaming sites. Basic computer literacy is no longer taught in schools, so when you use tech terminology it's unclear if the user comprehends what you are referring to or how the component functions in the overall system. Teachers expect their students to know technology, but they don't understand HOW it works. They only care about what they want it to do.
It's also more difficult to teach certain computer skills on a chromebook, from a non-IT perspective they're just a browser + tablet combo. Useless without internet and locked down within an inch of its life
@@mintgreenghost correct, as a tech with a visual impatient I always use short keys to navigate Windows settings and menus. Those basic command inputs fly out the door on Chromebook devices. Additionally, my admin access to them is extremely limited compared to windows desktops. It's basically the same as using any android device with your chrome account.
@@freethebirds3578 not all. Care is learned. If a child has no boundaries or moderate supervision of using tech at home, they will disregard proper care measures.
@@samivayajd if they know there is no consequence to disregarding the care of something, why would they bother? I'm speaking from a society that is far more affluent than developing nations, and children are given so much free stuff at school that they know they will just get a free replacement if they break something. Computers, food, supplies, uniforms. There's always more available.
19:13 I do agree children are incredibly creative naturally. I think everyone starts out that way tbh and kids also have vivid imaginations. But I have no idea how that translates into computer building 😭
22:50 saying "screw you" to people in the 3rd world who are concerned with the wasting of resources and want to make sure it friggen works before devoting all that time/effort it might be the most condescending thing I've ever heard. He's assuming that ALL of his major assumptions were correct. This was clearly and ego project for him.
Remember all the well-intentioned engineers making intubation machines in the first months of Covid? Some were later tested and they would have ruptured a patient's lungs. Because the engineers didn't understand the question, they jumped straight to a "solution".
What I remember was that a well-known respirator manufacturer open-sourced an already FDA-approved machine design, and people were collaborating to put it into production.
That piqued my interest, so I tried to google it for more info, but I can’t find anything that sounds like what you’re describing. I could just be searching with the wrong keywords, but could you provide any links for me?
I don't remember that at all. I remember Elon Musk promising that one of his companies would make a bunch and then totally underdelivering but nothing about exploding people's lungs.
This reminds me a great deal of something that happens a lot in software in general. Sometimes companies have a problem to solve, and the solution offered is basically just trying to get people to use some piece of software. But the problem is often in the processes and procedures (or culture) of the company, and just throwing software at the problem doesn't solve it. Not to mention "developer brain", where you design stuff that you think would be useful (or is useful to you while you develop the software) but completely useless to your actual users, who work in a field you're not proficient in and have completely different needs and priorities to you. And that's all within the same country!
Apart from the fact that a lot of the time people are being people and would rather promote their own or their friends idea than the one of another colleague, even if the other idea might work better for the users. It's not about what works best, it's about power play and who gets the promotion.
THIS part 17:44 (that you nearly throw away as an aside, but it's the main point): Western coders unaware of even what % of THEIR OWN CULTURE actually codes or modifies their own computers. A tiny tiny %.
It’s funny. This whole video is about our cultural and educational differences, which are important. I’ve had a rough life but it’s been comparatively easy to someone having to worry about getting fresh water every day. I had least had a creek near me and after some boiling I had drinkable water. The struggle for survival takes a lot of time and energy and supersedes anything else, including learning about things that don’t have a direct impact on immediate survival. Can’t work for an easier life if you’ve starved to death. But that fan art of Katara also shows how connect we all actually are too. Survival is the number one important thing to us all, some of us are just able to (barely) ensure that survival working in a slightly air conditioned Wendy’s and some have to hunt down water and forage for food. And we all love ATLA 😂
2:50 In architecure we call this symptom a 'student's project' - in uni you will play around with a cool idea but not for long enough to have to work out all the real problems and consequences.
The issue is much, much, more fundamental. The vast majority of foreign aid, in any form, is more about ego boosting of donors or diplomacy. One of the common examples of this is clothing and textiles industry in Nigeria, back in the 80's it was a major industry with 30+ plants but in the modern day more than 80% of textile products are second hand from developing countries. You see the same issue with food aid, why farm when a large portion of your nation food supply is given for free by rich nations? You can't compete against structurally free products as a business. This is a similar issue you have with "designing" for developing nations, it skips loads of economic realities to "aid" these people. A far more effective form of aid is investing local business' but also allowing them to fail and recognize when a business doesn't work, rather than giving free shit or giving money. Instead of setting up a water pump thats expensive and nobody knows how to fix or otherwise get parts for, set up a company that sells waterpumps. Yes, that means some communities might need to leave where they live because where they live isn't hospitable with their current standard of living that's no different in the west. We don't fund would be ghost towns in the west and have a community reliant on foreign handouts to continue existing, why do that in Africa? Reliance of foreign aid isn't aiding the people. You can perfectly develop products for different cultures, most products are developed at least partially with different cultures in mind. It's them wanting or needing it that's the real issue with the product you designed.
Food aid isn't given for free anymore hasn't since the 70s where it wrecked havock on local economies. The only time free food aid is offered is in cases of emergencies.
We don't keep ghost towns open but we do keep other kinds of towns going. In my opinion, to the detriment of everyone. So your point stands. Also don't forget to mention the greed and corruption of a small percentage of the population in these countries.
Or we could recognise that capitalism is unsuitable for everyone except the wealthy, and that so long as the west continues to impose capitalism upon the global south and snuff out anyone who dares to oppose western interests none of these nations will ever reach a point of prosperity. Also telling people to 'just move' is crazy privileged and imperialist. The locations are usually suitable, it's the systems that are flawed.
That's why I like Kiva so much. It's a charity that crowdsources interest free loans to developing world businesses. These people need anywhere between a couple hundred to a $3 or $4 thousand type deal. A mill for peanuts to make peanut butter type of business. Or inventory for a general store. The vast majority of loans get paid back, and 100% of the donations go to the business. They ask for extra on top to cover expenses.
@@jasondashneyIntrest free? That's the opposite of the situation when I looked into Kiva a lot of the loans were over 1000pc interest... Zidisha had better rates but not as much verification infrastructure.
Here is why these chariity organizations keep doing this: 4:36 it doesn't cost 14k USD infact its not more than a 1000$. material and labour cost is lot less in these developing countries, so you can guess where the rest of the money is going.
Saying "designing for different cultures is impossible" implies that it's possible to design for a culture period. These people would have ended up with the same results if they were designing for their culture. How do I know? Simple, the real world is infinitely complex. No one is capable of capturing that complexity in their design process. Successful products are the result of iteration. Oh the pump carousel failed? Yah. It was a stupid idea. It would have also failed if it was a standard pump. Perhaps the handle was the wrong shape, perhaps it was stripped of parts because it served another function, maybe the gaskets would have corroded due to minerals in the water. Who knows. There are quite literally infinite unknowable failures There is a reason charity frequently produces these results: Very few people actually want to do charity. Charity is solely about giving, you get nothing in return. Not very appealing for most people. When you care more about feeling good, doing good takes a back seat
Children learn at different rates. My 5 year old just recently managed to teach himself to read and he hasn't even started school yet. Whereas I struggled to read and write even with help. I was the last person to learn to read in my classroom at school. I was even made fun of. I was repeatedly held back. I'm sure there will be some children who can teach themselves to be engineers and tech support but it's definitely not a universal ability like this man is saying.
@@Billybloop Even if every kid could become self taught engineers... it would fail. Do engineers produce value? Definitely. They produce value on top of the value produced by: farmers, trades people, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, financiers, etc. The economy is the result of infinite conditions interacting in a way that produces increased value production. Economic development is an iterative process. There is no "solution" to increasing standards of living. There are simply frameworks to allow iterative development to occur
Here in Uruguay, OLPC has worked quite fine. And it is still running. Certainly, we have a good IT infraestructure, and public and free education system, including college.
Hey, I just want to say that in Uruguay the OLPC was very successful under the name "plan ceibal". Our country has really good rates of digital literacy and we have been exporting a lot of software. However, as you showed in the video, the devil is in the details and the implementation. It is also worth saying that at this point the laptops are just standard laptops, rather than the green "marcianitas" showed in the video. Which once again enhances your point.
I don't quite buy that the incubator was a bad idea. There are lots of instances where the people in the actual hospitals would be sure to like the idea. Now if you make the design of a do-it-yourself incubator open source, it will be hard to check how much is it used. As for the National Health Institutions that were cold about it, you may have overlooked something. It is certainly an issue that Health Ministries typically want the most advanced option from the most expensive provider - because that's the only way you can fit in a hefty dose of grift.
Yeah, when he said "this time they actually _listened_ to what the people wanted and made a better product" it was weirdly condescending for the context. It's definitely a great thing that they made _another_ cheap medical device design, and that this time it ended up being put in use and saved baby lives. But at the end of the day, hospitals still need incubators, it's not meant to be a trade-off of which baby's are saved depending on their medical needs. If some higher ups decided their simple incubator design of easy construction (which unlike OLPC benefitted from the existence of a sizable population of knowledgable individuals who can fix and repair them) was not good looking enough to save babies then that's not on the designers for cultural ignorance. It's a select few people who made a decision which affects millions. It seemed weirdly contradictory to make a video showing how these charitable "entepreneurs" neglect the agency of the people they're designing for, then also act like those major institutes had no agency in turning it down and it was all on the designers for thinking they knew better. "They've seen Grey's Anatomy and the Good Doctor, they know what it's supposed to look like" is a weird criticism for a product solely designed by people attempting to remedy the unavailability of the official device and who had no ability to solve the cost or distribution or maintenance problems of the high tech versions to begin with.
Give to them crappy looking yet functional device - meh it looks too crappy don't want it Give to them a professional device - they sell it or chop into pieces Conclusion: don't even try
@@Adam-oq2lq "They" is who, exactly? The locals or the functionaries? There are a lot of different issues lumped together in your statement. The Malaria Net story showed one issue where the donors are the problem. Somebody in the rich West overfocuses on one single issue, and does not take into account that the locals have other much more basic and urgent needs. Slightly different issue: Give locals a professional, expensive device, and dismantling and selling it may be worth a year's income. Not hard to guess what choices will be made there. At the other end you have third world government officials that are as least as absolutely isolated from the locals as Westerners are, and care only about their own pockets.
@@HarunRaffael It doesn't matter. The government is just a reflection of the society usually. They just dumb period end of story. Why should we even care?
The first example infuriates me. As a person from a very nice developed country I'd rather our hospitals have that jank-ass looking thing if it functions just fine compared to what we have now cuz I'd know when an immature kid comes they got the best chance of getting an incubator to save their life since the hospital isn't waiting for the totally-not-a-scam technician to come by to fix a machine made on the same principles as the McDonald's ice cream machine. Never mind when the alternative is likely nothing at all.
You have to be quite the dimwit to completely miss the MULTIPLE reasons it failed. The idea that the machine was ugly the least of their worries. The government agencies responsible couldnt gamble on something that they KNOW is cheaply made and fairly novel...
If you're a government official in a poor country with limited budget , it's totally understandable since you're gambling with children lives and limited budget
If your developed country has a hospital that can't keep an incubator running due to some nonsense with a technician, then you DON"T live in a developed country. Fix your system, don't blame it on a device.
You didn't mention Sugata Mitra's successful Hole in the Wall education project. Also Dr. Montessori, who worked directly with children in an insane asylum, then with poor children in government housing. She was a medical doctor, volunteering her time. Also, I've been both a college level educator (programming) and elementary age educator, and they're vastly different. Adults can be taught without movement, but children must have movement to learn well. I asked my mom why she put me in Montessori and not Waldorf, and her words are the words of good design: "well, Steiner made theories about childhood and applied them. Dr. Montessori _observed children_ and supplied their needs for learning."
@@TENNSUMITSUMA Mitra's hole in the wall project is a key counter-point to his arguement about the problems of "just handing people a laptop". However that is to say nothing about many of the problems with OLPC
We opted for Montessori because Waldorf is anti-technology, especially at primary level. I will say that Waldorf is still superior to typical schooling. Especially the acceptance of children as individuals and the importance of working with the hands (woodwork, metalwork, sculpting, painting and so).
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Why do you think aliens slowed down their helping to people
I would like to know if a water tap can be conected to a garden or something like that?
a very interesting video, thanks for the info
What sort of child fondler edits video like that?
One not smart enough to speak consecutive sentences without screwing up.
Please do more videos about failed products. It's very intriguing to find out why products fail so we don't make the same mistakes
I will def do more videos like this. Unrelated: If you've never heard of the song "Ocean Man" by Ween you should check it out
@@Design.Theory"ocean man, take me by the hand and design me a laptop a child can understand" I think that's how it goes? 😂
@@Design.Theory +1 total crackup. I went to create a software incubator and found people wouldn't live there, even for free, because it doesn't reduce their parents bills.
Here's an example, the lucky iron fish that add iron to the diet to supposedly treat anaemia in Cambodia. The story goes that they observed local culture and redesigned the iron block to a fish shape to convince the locals to use it. What is not told is that in follow up studies it seem like the locals didn't need iron supplement in the first place.
Have you ever heared about the
"Museum of failure"?
It's a collection from failed products from all around the world.
They have a Segway there, a Virtual Boy, Lasagne made by Colgate and an entire section just for Trump products.
As a designer from a developing country, I see this problem even when designers from those countries try to design for rural communities or less developed communities in the same country. Designers are more likely to come from developed cities, and higher income households. So they rarely have the knowledge or the understanding of the needs of other communities.
This was another thing that's very important that I didn't get a chance to cover in the video. Within any given country, there can be massively different communities and subculture.
i think it's not a question of "culture", it's just rich people don't understanding what poor people need.
@@Design.Theory Goodness, the amount of trouble I had at work trying to get people to understand that there was an inherent problem with “the address of your business”. Even _outside our own building_ in Silicon Valley we had food trucks!
Unfortunately, the issue is not exclusive to developing countries. It is not exclusive to being rich or educated, it is just context, and it is actually a huge problem with politics. City-people simply do not understand the needs of rural people and probably vice versa. It would not be much of a problem if the majority of voters did not live in cities and assumes that their solution's applicability might stop a mere afternoon bike ride away from where they live.
@@pflasterstrips7254 It's dumb people not being competent to accomplish the task at hand. Money doesn't matter. Rich people donate to these NGO's but it is the organization itself that is unable to fulfill their mission. Incompetence is a waste of money and charity.
Read this during my MBA days. Coke deviced an advt
Picture of a Sad Child > He drinks Coke> A pic of a happy child.
Then They launched this Advt in Arabian countries where people read from right left :)
Accidentally based. That stuff is toxic.
@@keithlarsen7557 it's not. It's literally just full of sugar.
@@ForOne814 Yes, Toxic
@@keithlarsen7557 I don't think you understand what the word toxic means.
@@ForOne814 LOL reminds me of those people who call everything out in extremes. If Coke would be toxic it wouldn't have been a legal beverage for over a 100 years SMH
A water pump that requires spinning a fuckin merry go round to get water? Are you fucking kidding me? What's next, a bicycle powered stove? Seesh
It's literally a massively more expensive Persian Well, but replacing the ox with child labor.
It's genuinely bad.
Don't give them ideas😂
A bicycle powered stove would actually make sense, since you can generate a lot of energy with pedals easily.
@@MrCmon113 No.
Try to do some maths, please! You would have a haaaaard time fixing yourself a small cup of coffee, much less bake a cake.
Modern day philanthropy is primarily self-serving and ego-driven more than it is actual altruism. A bunch of very wealthy people, largely divorced from reality, seeking accolades and affirmations that they are good. Some may have their heart in the right place, but time and time again, the results show a disconnect, and that being in such a privileged position does not automatically qualify someone of "knowing what's best" or that their ideal "greater good" is, well, actually good.
Agree. There are plenty of very effective foreign aid/international policy programs. But a surprising percentage of them are insanely wasteful and self-serving.
I think philanthropy should have the same oath as medicine, first do no harm. You're harming people by forcing things top down because you feel good about them. You can't force help on people, they have to ask for help first, they're still humans and have their own volition. I hate when people go creating policy and trying to force things top-down on others.
It is either that or given whoever in power resource to siphon the fund away from their people.
Nations have enough fund to develop their own infrastructure. They just don't want to allocate those money.
Truth bet told, should western nations stop doing charity and give out aides... the world wouldn't fall a part.
That's why it's better not to do it. You won't catch me doing that
that kind of "charity" is just a tax write-off and a way to placate the masses at this point. it would only take like .75 of one elon musk to eliminate world hunger. yet here we are, the weath gap widening like never before. really wish our governments would actually tax billionaires like they used to... maybe we could do some good in the world, rather than waiting for billionaires to get around to funding the projects we actually need, you know?
The OLPC project worked quite well in Uruguay. In my opinion, it was largely due to two main factors that were addressed by the local government and NOT by the international program itself. First, by the time the XOs came to Uruguay, there was a robust electrical grid and internet was everywhere (and where there wasn't, schools were hooked up to it), and secondly, the program was widely supported, both for repairs as well as for teaching the technology at schools. Ah, and third, we are a small country both in extension as well as in population, which I think makes it easier for country-wide schemes to work.
These conditions, good technological background and support was what made it a success, (as well as its continuation in the long term) and are exactly what the video addresses as thougthless thinking from the OLPC part, and why it didn't work as well in other countries.
Yeah, there seems to be this huge gap in what people think the developing world is and what large parts of the developing work actually is, and this video just lumps them all together and says things not designed uncontacted african tribes is bad design.
@@Carewolf
And where is the lie in that statement?
@@jasdanvm3845 that a huge part of the developing countries is a lot more developed than most African countries, so you can't put it all in the same bag
OLPC was perfectly capable in areas that desperately needed MORE laptops, not areas that had no laptops.
@@grantflippin7808 that's it, it was perfect for areas where the internet and computers were a known thing but only accessible to the upper classes. In this video he takes every developing country for an indigenous tribe without proper access to education or electricity.
I rarely comment , but had to. My father Lars (RIP) worked for SIDA to develope road construction in developing countries. What he saw was that western aid in Africa always failed by bringing european engineers and their ordinary road construction techniques to their world. It failed because it was dependant on the workers from europe, their machinery breaking down waiting for spare parts for months, and most importantly - that the road built was not the "property" or the work done by the locals themeselves - which resulted in the roads never being used or being poorly maintained after the aidworkers had left. My dad changed that completely with what he called "labour intensive road construction"... which was; doing away with all the machinery, employing the locals with shovels and wheelbarrows building the road going past their village. Then an elder in each village was appointed "Road Chief" to be responsible for the upkeeping and maintenance of their designated stretch with salary from the aid-program.
This proved to be a very successful model, gaining roads in good quality that the locals considered their road (since they'd built it) and would use and maintain with pride.
An example that aid has to be IN CONTEXT with where it is applied.
That's a really good example of a solution that both empowers a community while also providing them with the resources, funding, and training to be successful!!! Both things are *so* important.
What a cool dad lol
That was an excellent solution! Truly, solutions don't exist in a vacuum; they work within the context of their environment.
Really? An elder doing road repair? Seems unlikely. Where is this exactly?
@@leagarner3675 He mentioned that the elder was responsible for the upkeep. That means they're in charge - it doesn't necessarily mean the more ridiculous possibility you're suggesting, which is that they're literally doing the work themselves. I understand your point, but you have to admit that was an assumption.
Big problem with the car part incubator is Fire. Home made and modified auto parts with heat and combustible material. 1:30
I HAD ONE OF THOSE LAPTOPS AS A KID! There was a promotion on one of the cereal boxes we ate - I think it was cocoa puffs or lucky charms. I begged my mom to fill out a paper inside the box, then she put it in the mail. I have no idea what their selection process was like, but seeing the package show up ~2 months later, it definitely felt like we won something.
It was definitely uhh... interesting. It had a ton of different educational apps, including Scratch. I remember trying its typing course, but even my 8-year-old hands were too large for the dinky silicone keyboard. I remember trying to connect it to our Wi-Fi, but it didn't really work lmao. IIRC, it felt like the browser was super out-of-date so it loaded super super slowly if at all. The most it could reasonably do was image search pictures of cats.
The ONE thing my brothers and I DID use it for was its maze game. Using the arrow controls on the left or right side of the monitor, or on the keyboard; we each got to control our own shape (circle, square, triangle) through randomly generated mazes. The mazes got more and more complex the longer we played, and the next maze would generate 5-10 seconds after one of us made it to the end. Because of that, it was a race for us!
Man. Its startup sound will be forever ingrained in my mind. Good times :')
a bunch of my relatives got them at a big christmas thing and i got the only one that didnt work.
i was sour about that for years until i got gifted a laptop that was actually good, like 5 years later.
I also had one of these! Through the same exact program you mentioned. While very neat, even as like- a 4th grader I could see how it was just not a great product for the American market OR for kids in developing countries. I'll say this though, it was my first experience with Linux as you could dual boot into either Linux or the kid friendly OS. For that, it will be a forever lasting memory for me.
So did many of the kids who got one learn to code or work with computers? I guess it definitely helped some, despite all its failings.
The laptop is an example I remember from my first year of college in product design. That’s such a good example it is really burned into my memory. I will never forget that point.
My little sister was playing with her friend once and they were pretend playing. My sister was sitting at a table with a toy laptop and said she was working and doing her job. My dad has a desk job and my stepmom is a teacher who also works a lot at home behind a screen doing paperwork for teaching. Now her friend was laughing hysterically because she thought my sister was joking. She thought it was funny because a computer is for playing games not working. Now, her friends mom works as a cashier and she doesn’t see any adults ‘working’ with a laptop or computer. For her a computer is for games and playing, working is selling things or doing things. It was fun to see this happening. How 2 children have such a different view of working. I did explain this to both of them because my sister got extremely confused and started asking me if working is also on a computer. Ofc it didn’t help that the pandemic caused my dad to work from home for a large part of my sisters childhood so for her the natural idea of pretend play working was typing on a toy laptop. It was really cute to see but also a healthy confrontation with how we can all see things completely differently because of certain circumstances.
I don't have any kids, but I can only imagine how much confusion they would add to the conversation if I did... I'm a game developer, so for me working is playing (to stay current with trends) and making games on my computer. 😂
My little niece does that too. She pointed to laptops for a while and just said "work?" playing the name it game.
I got her a cheap laptop (as in almost ewaste she's just a little kid after all) with KDE's GCompris built to be the only things launched for her, and now she started calling it a computer. She thought it could only do what she adualts did on it, but now it's also games
Once I asked my mom if there are any people who make a million dollars a year just pushing buttons and she said yes in wall street, on computers. I was like woahhhh and she was 100% right and it took 20 years to fully understand how that really works and how you can push buttons to make money buying and selling
That's a really good case study.
Okay, guess the situation:
I am a millionaire who makes a living playing video games and I give an interview to an anime girl. Which btw none of us sees as a joke. (Well of course we know how hilarious that looks and that if we had to describe that to our parents 25[or even 15] years ago, they would have checked our rooms for shrooms and tested the water.) The anime girl also makes good money with that.
Who am I? And what situation did I describe?
My father was a power engineer, he designed power distribution systems. He told me about a man he met at a conference who had helped install power infrastructure in a developing country (I can't remember where). The team built the system, trained some local electricians in how to use it safely, etc and left.
Six months later, after receiving request for help because of widespread power failures, some of the team went back to check it out and see if they could help. They found the rural portions of the infrastructure and saw the poles had been chopped down with axes and repurposed into building houses because the poles were superior materials to anything available locally. The cables had been repurposed similarly, the material was so strong and flexible they turned it into fencing, building materials, etc. This was mid 1990s.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs in action. People will prioritize shelter and safety over electricity always. Why would I need lamps if I don't even have a roof?
@@M-Soares well said. If they were hungry they would sell it too just to get money for food
@@M-Soares Where do you get the information that people there didn't have houses?
@@Ihavenothingtodo2they didn’t directly say that, just that people prioritise certain things over certain things. Either way, clearly, given they used it as a building material, there are certain things people felt needed to be built. I’m sure at least some of those poles were used to build houses, or to structurally improve existing houses.
@@Ihavenothingtodo2 your mom told me in bed
As a person with a masters degree in design, I can tell you most designers are arrogant and self absorbed (Negroponte is the poster child of this). They should read Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. It came out in 1971, and the design community ostracized him. He was spot on in the book though. Design education is loaded with a BS curriculum of saving the world and noblesse oblige. Leave your politics at the door and focus on context and needs, not a virtue signaling, self important solutions. I mean, they don’t have water, so let’s give them laptops.
I read this book in preparation for this video. I forgot to put it in the works cited because I didn't explicitly use any of the material from it. While I didn't cite the book explicitly, it was useful for adding some color/clarity to the ideas I mention throughout the video. I will cite it now.
+
The olde “let them eat cake” story really, in another guise.
"Leaving politics at the door" sounds a lot like the "Call of Duty isn't pollitical" crowd that we have in gaming: A slogan to discredit changes to the status quo by claiming that only the disruptor is pollitical but not those upholding the status quo.
Obviously, that doesn't mean using foreign aid funds for virtue signalling and ego building isn't horrible behaviour tho, just that focusing on needs is also loaded with politics. Which needs do you focus on? Whose needs do you focus on? How much do you trust various groups of people to accurately describe their or other people's needs? (In the field of foreign aid: Do you trust national politicians? County or equivalent level polliticians? Local (village or negbourhood) leaders? Or do you need a comprehensive survey?) Do you strictly focus on whatever need is stated to be most pressing, even if you think it's short sighted or unethical? In a corporate setting, do you only focus on user needs as long as it benefits the bottom line or do you push back against corporate interests and risk being replaced?
.
the most frustrating thing is the lack of using local workforce for charitable purposes, like, say you want to electrify a village? just pay the locals to install the power poles and equipment, you will provide them with much needed money and new skills in the process as well!
There's a big amount of articles about how the endless donations of (low quality) clothes and food hurts the textile and agricultural industries in some African countries. Both industries that are extremely important to the base economy of any nation, and could employ a large fraction of the population
@@DogKacique And some sources show that some clothes are so low-quality that *no one* can use them, so they're just burned as waste. (e.g. "The Ugly Truth of Fast Fashion," Patriot Act with Hasan Minha, Season 5, Episode 3)
"
a lot of these people who make the orgs/donations do not see these people as human, it's the same as detesting the homeless while also wanting to help them for personal ego, they see them as lesser beings who if given money, would spend it in foolish ways unlike a cultured/educated (civilized) westerner, it's really insidious and the charity industry is filled with characters like this
@@DogKacique One of the main reasons I never really liked charities. Give a man a fish you feed him for a day etc. And most of the time most of it just get pocketed by corrupt individuals anyway. I think what they need is education and education only.
@kagashimin I mean, I think we should consider stopping foreign megacorps from destroying their access to water and maybe ask what kind of infrastructure help they'd like to regain their access to water, but I agree that education should be at least half the battle
the biggest problem with the playpump is the design itself, regardless of culture. merry-go-rounds take a little bit of energy to get going and then spin by themselves for a while, which is why kids can and do play on them. playpumps require constant power because that energy goes to pumping water instead of spinning... (no wonder kids got tired of them so quickly)
this guy took a look a water handpumps and decided to replace something where you stand and move your arm with something where you walk in a circle...
A push wheel is certainly more practical. Not sure about for water pumping in this situation but depending on the circumstances it could be. Say for more large scale operations like irrigation.
@@brainstormsurge154 not quite sure what you specifically mean by a 'push wheel' but sure, handpumps aren't very useful at scale but these were designed to be like merry-go-rounds, so you have to stand sort of sideways to push them, too--all around less convenient. they also weren't developed for use at scale (even if they came with water towers that were supposed to mitigate the 'intermittent playing' problem), given that they were meant to replace handpumps for normal water use (the real value of a pump is that it gets to water that is less likely to be polluted and can't be contaminated by buckets or whatnot. less clean water can be used to water crops in most circumstances)
The problem is that the task of fetching water is carried out by mothers, not children .
Electric water pumps are the best😊
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa well, the water tower is probably also meant to mitigate this, since children playing fills the tower rather than fetching the water---it is just pumped to a place where it can be fetched more easily later (this is not how it worked out, of course; instead women both spin the playpump and get the water from the tower, as children don't play on the playpumps for the reason i mentioned above).
as for electric pumps, while they might be convenient in some places, the limiting factor on hand pump use in rural areas is the difficultly of repairs and a lack of replacement parts, which would only be more of an issue with a more complex and fiddly electric pump, regardless of the power source used.
If the playpumps cost $14000 (see 4:38 ) a solar panel and electric pump for half that cost could do the job all day.
I think its because investors like to look at compelling things that look nice on paper instead of thinking about its practicalities. Amazing video!
Yes, exactly right
Imagine the synergy if both appearances and actual value were combined.
HUMANS have a tendency to do that, I think, whenever they come from a place of sufficient privilege that they're not forced to pursue practicality for their everyday sustenance the way people- richer or poorer- do when they're in rough situations. But yes you're right and I Thumb up your Comment.
This is 200% true. I was a disabled specialist who was asked to be part of a panel to judge smart home technologies for a new housing project for those with a mental disability.
One person came in who had lots of experience, who showed you could do more with less, who was respectful of the target demographic's privacy, who was easy to scale.
A representative of local government rejected their bid because "it is not ambitious enough" and lacked "wow factor". In other words, "it isn't hype, so no funding for you".
The biggest obstacle to improving lives around the world, is convincing politicians that the technology to help their people already exists and just needs to be implemented. They always want to be able to say they were a first.
People typically don't know their blindspots and biases. Lots of these people mean well, but have trouble overcoming themselves.
Also, there's the damned of you do, damned if you don't scenario, like the case of the mosquito nets. Some people will use the nets for their intended purpose, so denying nets to the entire population will cause harm.
The first time a child actually touched an XO machine was when kids from one of the researchers were asked to take one apart and put it together (which they did, but I don't know with how much supervision) so they could claim to journalists that the children would be able to maintain the laptops themselves. I had previously done some experiments with kids and found, to my surprise, that for pointing devices they preferred trackballs (the larger the better) by a huge margin, then joysticks, then mice, then the IBM trackpoint and dead last was the trackpad (which is what I liked the most myself). Without such testing the OLPC machine adopted the trackpad with a capacitive middle and resistive extensions to allow drawing with a pen (this never worked well). One of their first deployments was in Nepal and it turned out that the climate conditions made the children's hands sweat in a way that made the trackpads unusable.
This seems to be in order of fine motor control needed.
Suggesting the ideal machine varies a lot by age. Just like toys, obvious in retrospect.
This also shows we have not truly solved input, we only have compromises.
That’s hilarious. The absolutely abysmal contextual thinking, I mean. People do not seem to think past a design perfect for their own environment. Like Tesla cars being unable to be opened in freezing areas, because nobody considered the door handle flush with the car might get frozen shut
@@DeathnoteBBexactly!
Reminds me of Walmart installing expensive roofs that handle snow in Brazil 😅
They failed miserably here
Probably the best option for the pointer device would have been a joystick relative that uses a 2-d sliding device: you can seal them as well as you care about, stick a hole in the middle to stick a normal pen in, etc., and they're more compact than a trackball.
If they had used a trackball, people would just say "Look, it's a moving part, it breaks, why didn't they use a trackpad instead?" Or "the ball comes out and rolls away, ha ha ha, those arrogant designers."
I worked for OLPC. Negroponte once chartered a plane for like $300k to avoid waiting a day. The person who had to do this for him was an Administrative Assistant who, like every other employee, was working for less than half market salary. She resigned the same day.
What does AA mean here?
@@columbus8myhw administrative assistant
@@columbus8myhwI believe they are abbreviating "African American" as AA.
Admin Assistant
@@majormojo yes this one. Administrative Assistant. I've never heard AA being used to mean African American in corporate America, but I have also been out of that world for a decade .
I actually personally know Negroponte; I was friends with his grandson. Used to think he was super cool until I actually met him; he had this weird dichotomy where he assumed that everyone around him was super smart and knowledgeable about everything, but also that he was the most smart and knowledgeable about everything, and would still talk down to everyone he talked to.
Basically Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory sitcom
The "super smart and knowledgeable" people are the ones who learn from others. One will still have to deal with the weird position of being asked "how do I do [whatever they need to do]" and yet be disliked for being a know it all for answering their questions...
About the Condescending Type:
The condescending type usually isn't as bright as they want to believe. Super Condescending Mr. Epstein wasn't a brilliant investor, but rather extorted money from people who also enjoyed the underage guests at his parties. He wasn't brilliant, but he was a smart extortionist up until taking his own life was the only option card left to avoid spending the rest of his life in a cage...
The followers of Mr. Musk believe that he is the brightest man in the world. But this is a cult as the only thing he designed himself was an EV Charging Plug so it would be incomparable with all other EV technology. Everything else that he claims to have invented is actually the work of smart people who he uses until he has no use for them. And a non-disclosure agreement keeps them from even describing what they invented or designed with future employers. Or in short, Mr. Musk is probably the smartest Confidence Man in the country. But for his design work, well his CyberGarbageTruck is an example of his design work and it will be banned from public roads by the US DOT soon enough...
I read his book "Being digital" when at uni. I guess the message was "information is more useful with meta-information" (well, it was before SGML/XML became big). I can't remember anything else.
Interested in hearing more, that sounds like a unique contradiction.
I'm the same except I expect everyone to be ignorant.
I received an OLPC machine when I was a kid. My grandparents did this two-for-one deal where I got one laptop, and a kid in a developing country got one. They quite literally handed me the laptop and walked away. My parents didn’t know how to use it, so I had to learn myself. But I never did-I couldn’t figure out the cryptic, textless interface. All I could do was hit buttons and sometimes make colors and sounds appear on the screen. I don’t think it was an issue of intelligence-I am now an aerospace engineer. The claim that a child could pick up and use this device is completely wrong.
I WAS the type of child who loved to tinker, and who had the context of computers.
@ng0cl0ng2k5haha, normal Windows laptop, ok Bill Gates 😅
You just described me with any Windows version after XP.
You are an aerospace engineer? Maybe it was a issue of intelligene after all ;-)
I remember that I had a Software Design and an Agricultural Design class in the same semester. Both has us making a design for a local group.
One thing that stayed with me was that in the Software Design class, our teacher told us that it was important to limit what the client could ask for beyond their initial request. Never ask open-ended questions, only give them a choice of pre-defined options, otherwise they would ask for more than you could manage. While, my Agricultural Design course recommended basically opposite, that a meeting with the client should be more of a conversation. Let them go on about whatever they want and, from that, extract what they need and want and refine your design off that.
I get why both would say what they did, and over time, I've found both to be true, but I've found that an interesting contrast.
Both are right, imo. Clients often don’t know how much is reasonable, or even sometimes don’t know exactly what they want. Which is sort of where the second advice comes in. You make it a conversation and you gleen more about them as a person, and can infer what they want even if they can’t put it into words.
You have to start with letting the end user tell you what they need. And the general parameters for it. After that, you're correct that you do need to limit the options to not become overwhelmed. But that's more about limiting scope creep than it is about telling the customer what you think they need.
@@Green__one: Yeah, the Ag advice was very much for an earlier step in the process than the Software stuff. The Software advice is what you follow when formalizing a contract, the Ag advice is what you do to gather info before writing the contract.
I think coming up with an idea then saying "will this work for you?" is a perfectly acceptable way of opperating. If you accept when they say "no this won't help us".
@@morgantrias3103 actually, that often doesn't work when dealing with other cultures. In many cultures it is impolite to refuse someone's offer, or rude to contradict someone. As a result many people will agree that something will work for them, even when they know full well that it will not. You need to approach discussions like that very carefully, so that you get honest input. It's always better to spend a lot more time listening than talking.
19:44 “ we weren’t taught how to talk or walk”
This man did not parent his own children. You absolutely have to teach kids how to talk and walk. If he spent even five minutes in the real world instead of Delulu land he’d know that.
That's total bullshit. Parents do not teach their children how to talk. They don't know how they talk themselves. You have absolutely no clue what your tongue does. Nor do you know the grammar of your own language in any detail. Children aquire language simply by listening to it and then trying to speak. No one involved knows how talking actually works or how the language is structured.
Similarly you also do not know what you do when you walk.
In the 19th. Century, a philanthropist called Moses Montefiore funded a windmill in Jerusalem for early settlers to grind their grain. It's still there, but still not grinding much grain; Jerusalem rarely gets significant wind.
Just give money to people to start businesses. that's the best way by far to suply desired products and further the economy.
then again, it really seems like most africans are cultural rooted not to be very materialist... or interested in capitalism. i can't explain why else all other nations developed a working economy.
@@Infotainment-cb6cy also bad idea, because then you make them dependent on they receiving money....
Also if AI develops capitalism will get either destroyed or we will live in extreme hellhole since robots will do everything for the person that owns all the robots
"Nevertheless, the mill operated for nearly two decades until the first steam-powered mill was completed in Jerusalem in 1878"
Still something, I guess
@@Infotainment-cb6cy africans are very much capitalist-driven. Capitalism just isn't AFRICAN driven.
@@Infotainment-cb6cy to understand that you gotta understand the Industrial Revolution and why it happened and why the african countries didnt join.
It's the one thing people forget to do. It's just one simple thing that they can ask: "How can I help you?"
At an engineering conference I heard the testimony of one of the engineers and how a company they volunteered for tried to help a community. They installed latrines and toilets around the village for sanitation. A year later, they came back to check on how the community was doing but noticed that all the latrines were gone, some even had walls removed. When they asked why they would destroy them, members of the community just said that they had always been going outdoors and that was natural and something that was part of their culture. It connected them back to the land. The charity organizers still tried to explain that they had worked hard to bring them the materials and that it was done for their own health. But the community leaders explained that they never asked for toilets. They didn't want them. Their homes needed new roofs. When the rains come, it rains inside their homes and that's what they needed. So as soon as the organizers had left, the villagers tore down the latrines and used the materials for what they really needed, sound homes.
That does often bring up a dilemma, how do you approach a cultural practice that is clearly harmful to the population (open latrines or worse, human waste all over the place is an awful vector for all kinds of disease, no matter how natural it may seem). Do you ignore it, knowing that you are perpetuating harm, try and work around it even if it's nowhere near as effective as the ideal solution, or try to get them to change their practices, and risk being seen as the arrogant westerner imposing their culture on the developing world.
Of course a combined effort to get in roofing materials at the same time as building the toilets would have helped, but that still leaves the issue above.
@@Croz89 Good point, but again, that's viewing the situation with clouded eyes. In my example, they weren't just leaving droppings like deer. As I understood, they would go into the woods and bury it there. They were a very small population. - After countless generations of doing it, they already knew how to do it safely because they hadn't gotten sick from the practice. Regardless, the point is to ask what they need help with. Help with their most urgent need, then you can educate people and prevent dangerous or harmful behaviour. It's just wasted effort if you "help" by providing something they don't need or want.
Education is maybe the most important thing for both parties. Long story short, help them with their basic needs, then you can teach. I friend told me once: You can't learn on an empty stomach or a full bladder!
@@peluso4oso Even so, "safely" is a relative term here. Burying human waste in the woods is better than leaving it out on the ground or in an open pit, but it's not ideal, there's a risk of contaminating water sources (which is why you have to be careful doing it when hiking). A small population might be able to get away with it, but it would certainly be more of an issue if the population grows. Some might argue that while leaky roofs are a problem, sanitation is more important than comfort, even if the community values it the other way around. It's a tricky balance between giving a community agency and preventing it from harming itself through bad decisions (even in the developed world we often have to deal with this!). This is compounded in the developing world with the usual accusations of westerners being paternalistic and "knowing what's best" for developing world communities.
Of course the best thing is to do both at the same time, and in this case it seems like those who constructed the toilets could have left some roofing materials behind if they'd asked and known about the issue. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and budgets don't always stretch as far as we'd want them to.
Rain is natural too.
@@Croz89 You cannot change a culture practices by visiting them once a year. No more than you can stop the obesity epidemic in the US by telling Americans that they should eat less sugar and exercise more.
I have travelled around the world and extensively in rural developing areas. What Negroponti wanted to do with the laptop has now been achieved with smartphones. Almost every family has a smartphone. Even if they do not have a toilet, refrigerator or stove. Mostly they buy used refurbished models. iPhones are extremely coveted. Android is accepted as it cost less. Cell service is almost universally available. Many places got optical fiber internet at 50 to 265 MBps. Paid WiFi by the minute is widespread.
Today the smartphone they are buying are in the $50 to $100 range because they are used. New are $300 to $600 in the Philipines.
Your final point is very good. Designers should go and live in the culture, for a minimum of a month but probably longer to get the inner view.
Negroponte nauively wanted to educate people through the OLPC project. Smartphones have spread everywhere, but what they have achieved is enabling communication, not education.
@@ELmeinz
And also payment/commerce, interestingly. And probably gambling too, lol.
Agreed - except Negroponti thought everyone wanted to 'learn to code' when the actual prize from widespread adoption of electronic devices is 'real time data about places I can't walk to today'
That story about the laptops for African kids reminds me of when politicians were telling coal miners losing their jobs to learn to code. These people aren’t dumb, but asking them to do a complete jump from what they knew how to do was obnoxious.
What's worse: firing every Kodak employee who works on film or retraining them to work on digital imagining technology? Good intentions, coupled with funding and support should be lauded, IMO.
@@SayAhh I don’t believe there were good intentions nor funding in this instance. “Learn to code” was just a set of buzz words journalists and politicians were using in response to the situation. Then a few years later when a bunch of journalists were getting laid off social media would automatically delete your posts if you made that statement.
@tjlastname5192 it all was virtue signaling and smugness of the journalists who consider themselves superior to the "unwashed uneducated masses doing hard labor". THAT is the reason they pushed so hard to learn to code, they saw them as ignorant people and the journos were coming to save them. When the AI craze happened and it applied to them, they seethe since they believe they're cultured and educated, this shouldn't be happening to them!
With AI, we'll ALL become the coalminers.
The pace of technology was already wiping out many jobs even prior to the insane pace that is now happening
The idea that "every child should learn to code" is ridicuous, no matter African child or Western child.
I remember me learning Pascal at University when I was 20: what an ordeal (okay, maybe the professor
was shitty and we used these fuuking block diagrams everybody has forgotten now) .
Negroponte must have been a guy who never did any coding himself, probably he got
famous so early that he could hand that over to his students
Another huge issue is there's almost no motivation for rural areas. The children might take interest in it and have fun, but there's probably more important things they could be doing. Whether that's because their family needs them or because things like programming have no motivation in their culture. To them, it might just be a novelty. Like they could instead be practicing whatever skills they use to get food/money on the table, or improve their homes, etc. Presumably there's not that many programming jobs in these countries or even infrastructure for these "abstract/modern" skills (math, programming, etc). While these are great skills for any country to eventually have, I have to wonder if they're really benefiting anything at this moment. I can teach a kid how to use circuit design software to make a solar panel, but they don't have the materials, the tools, or other specialists to know how to put that to good use.
I could be wrong with everything I said, but even if first world philanthropists had the money, effort, labor, and ideas, it still would take a lot of time for developing countries to build up. If you want them to explore more modern/abstract opportunities, they first need to develop the more "materialistic" skills they need to thrive. Until then it's just fun facts and novelties.
Yep. They want kids to code while there's zero infrastructure to use any of it in their area. I remember computers being put in schools during my primary school days, and no teacher knew how to use them, so they became the thing you typed on and played tetris on. They broke super quick, too, and were too expensive to fix for a village fae away from the capital. And this is in the Caribbean. There is a gap, but it's not that wide to jump.
I actually went the Computer Science route after realising I hated accounting except for the computing part. But that's after learning how to use them and moving closer to the city where its an actual career option.
Yeah I think they forgot those kids are probably not playing, they’re doing chores and helping their families
It's interesting given that Seymour Papert himself was introduced to computing in the 1960s under fairly similar circumstances. To the general public computers were something you only used if you were going to the moon, and that might just as well be the attitude of the OLPC target audience. Not to mention as an African-American he had first hand knowledge of African culture.
I think they would have had much greater success trying to replicate their own formation in the MIT AI Lab in third world countries. Forget $100 laptops, a $1000 one can outperform all the PDP-6 and PDP-10 machines they had combined for millions. Cost of the machine was never the issue. Human capital always is. Instead they should have gone to these countries and find young Paperts, Minskies, Stallmen, Sussmen, etc. and hook them up with their own labs with regular hardware at a negligible cost compared to their hand cranked fisher price shitshow.
Exactly. Programming is not useful in Africa because the infrastructure is not even there, and they have to cover other bases a lot. Programming will only be useful to them if they want to work in developed countries. And even at that, programming is dying largely due to AI, which is taking away jobs in that sector, and of course, between a programmer with a large experience and a programmer with little experience, it is merit that wins.
@@salvatoreshiggerino6810 Except that "Paperts, Minskies, Stallmen, Sussmen" not only thrive in certain environments, they are only found in certain environments. Probably you will have more luck finding a Mozart in Africa.
Funny story about netbooks:
Our school also bought netbooks (I guess in some "modern teaching" initiative) but they/the teachers didn't have much of a plan how to use them.
So what happened in the end was that we basically used it maybe 20-30 times, and then everyone ran out of ideas on how to use them.
So this "just give kids computers" thinking didn't only fail in the developing world.
I've got a masters in education studies and people often times don't realize just how hard it is to design work that benefits from a computer for use in classrooms. I'm not really surprised that these didn't work so well in parts of the developing world as one of those computers is a massive amount of money. In some areas a single laptops is nearly the country's per capita GDP. So, for just a couple of those notebooks you could pay for another teacher or somebody to help design curriculum for the school that could more effectively make use of the resources available in the community. Or, you could buy more supplies for the school to use in testing and evaluation. Or any number of other things that could reduce barriers to education.
Computers are great, but they don't contribute that much to education if you aren't already at a level of development where you have a reasonably stable internet connection and already have your bases covered in other areas. Much of the benefits that come from computers come from being able to connect to the internet and do research and actually see what various areas look like.
I remember 7 years ago, back in high school, my school obtained a bunch of Chromebooks which teachers could book to use in our computer lab. But after going there multiple times, we just took the time we spent in the lab to goof off like a bunch of 16 year olds wouldve, as the teachers themselves couldn't really think of a way to integrate the laptops into our classes beyond having us do Kahoot or make powerpoints
Same here. Our school district started buying Chromebooks as I was just getting out of high school in 2013-2014. They were terrible. Cheap and slow laptops that basically no one actually wanted to use. The wifi they were attached to was also shitty and slow, and in some spots, non-existent. Even the 3G hotspots on our phones worked better than the wifi most of the time. And I went to a high school in a middle-upper class area only an hour from Silicon Valley. But the district did what they always did: Go with the cheapest and worst bidder for short term savings instead of spending slightly more money for something that'll last longer.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade i took online classes there is nothing wrong with them imo.
yea, every time some tech gadget was introduced into classroom, the teacher was totaly clueless how to use it, the only thing that really worked well was a projector hooked up to a pc, but despite its success we still were getting weird gardgets that dont work while some projectors were so old they had a lot of "dead stars" (white dots, kinda like dead pixels on a screen)
I'm from Uruguay. The OLPC project was a success there. I'm surprised you didn't talk about it. Your points are all valid, but it would be interesting to analyze how they were addressed here.
la ceibalita! Estaba buscando algun comentario sobre Uruguay
@@tatianavilla5037 in spite of all the problems mentioned here, it was designed for children. They dropped the OLPC now in favor of just a windows laptop and it's a nightmare for parents. Children install video games that parents don't know about and are exposed to sexual predators through the chat. And this is all through a government-provided device that parents cannot opt-out of (and imagine the conflict with the kids if you did). We might as well give them smartphones with TikTok pre-installed at this point.
@@alvaromoe what are you taking about? the computers Uruguay use in schools and highschool use linux and most of them have a website blocker
And instaling games is reduced to a few games comatible with them.
The laptop was replaced with a horrible tablet that didnt allow to install anything in it
Whats happening now is that parents give kids smartphones too early
Yo tuve clases de programación con la XO (básicas, solo hacíamos juegos) y varios de mis compañeros se interesaron lo suficiente como para estudiar carreras relacionadas.
probablemente porque Uruguay ya tenía un buen internet en 2006
I am really shocked about the idea "12-year-olds without any instruction can maintain and repair a laptop". I doubt many 12-year-olds from America/Europe/Asia could do that even with instructions from the internet - even a really great part of adults all over the world struggles with that!
It was also in 2010, youtube just launched years before....
Yeah, I am 25 now but I would say I became really tech competent by 21, even living in a modern and first world environment. You NEED experience, wich Is not something you can learn fastee.
Shocked?
you're plain wrong stop underestimating kids ingenuity and passion!
The guy's level of delusion is mind-blowing... I've seen similar initiatives and I'm shocked at the utter stupidity --if successful, the kids will be hooked to games. The guy hasn't raised children smh
I worked at an org that had some responsibility to a (like, very) rural community. They still hunt and fish for sustenance, and have only minimal contact with the outside world. (They have phones and TV, but it requires chartered travel to go anywhere else.)
I was once tasked with bringing office IT equipment to the community. Someone decided they needed a fancy multi-function copier and a Buffalo NAS. Why did they decide this? I'm not really sure. So I traveled there, set it up, installed printer drivers, formatted the NAS and got a file share working, and my job was done.
At one point, someone there asked me what I was doing. So I told them, "setting up a copier and a networked file share." "Oh." They pointed to the NAS. "What does that do?" "It gives you a place to store data." "Ohhh." That last "ohh" was in the sort of way when someone is thinking, "Well, I'm sure that means something to somebody."
It was abundantly clear that they had absolutely no idea what this stuff did, much less what to do with it, much less _how._ I didn't feel good about it, because I knew it wasn't going to do anything for them. It was just going to sit there until it broke, and nobody would even notice when it had.
When I got back, a friend of mine asked what I was doing out there. "Throwing money into a hole and creating e-waste for them to deal with later." It was a powerful lesson in how not to philanthropy.
To be honest, once I realized there was no one there who knew how to use the equipment it would just pack my stuff and leave.
Some of these devices failed not because they were bad, but because there's no hope for Africa.
Traditional Industrial equipment could be much better. Like Solar panels, Table fans, LED Lights, Hand powered generators, mobile electric pumps, etc.
@@chandrakant1479 Minion-brained take
@@chandrakant1479
Smooth brained animal
As someone from an African country living in another African country, I see some positives with some of the things that some of these people tried to do, in the first case they tought about it right but they didn't consider the pride that people often have, and how goverments would feel paying for the device, I think maybe should have marketed it bettter, for instance, instead it is built with car parts, focus on it has technology close to ones found in cars and therefore easy to maintain. When it comes from the playpump idea, a lot of people here are talking about child labor, child slavary ect, but that is actually one of the assumption that the creators got right, the fact that in a lot of African villages, children (especially girls) are the ones that go fetch water, and tried to make the exercise fun, but children and most people for that matter fetch water early in the morning, so I don't they would be interested to play a little bit at 5am. On the mosquito nest idea, mosquito nest are some of the most important thing we had around growing up and they still are, and I am sure a lot of lives have been saved because of them, so they have not failed. When it comes to the laptop idea, I thing the idea was to early, back then we didn't just care that much about the internet or computer, yes they were cool, but people lived just fine without them so we didn't think computers were changing the world, but today even in rural areas, people value IT skills, and thanks to a kind of revolution around solor power, I think that idea would have worked around 2018, if with the technology of then, they could have provided 80 or 100$ laptops to schools.
It is good to hear from someone actually in Africa. I wonder why more people are not listening to your point of view, which happens to be different than the story they want to tell.
The "failure" of the mosquito netting, isnt that it didnt work. It's that distributing them had an unintended negative affect on local ecosystems. One possible solution would be to distribute fishing nets and mosquito netting so families didn't have to choose one or the other.
@@marshray6228
Yeah, there's a certain irony about privileged people complaining about other privileged people being out of touch....and here we have testimony from one of the people who we're supposed to be listening to and it has a fraction of the likes the complaining comments have.....
Well no, because the comment brings up the same points of the video. These are fascinating technologies marketed, and more importantly, taught to people poorly. The cure to cancer means nothing to an uneducatedperson if it's locked behind complicated (or expensive) puzzles @@marshray6228
@@marshray6228 The story that is being told is "Western culture bad". The reality is far more nuanced than that.
not the most important aspect, but i can't imagine the play pump would even be very fun as a merry go round. a merry go round is supposed to coast, allowing you to build up speed and keep spinning after you stop pushing. if all your kinetic energy is being used to pump water, it's gonna grind to a halt really fast. you've basically converted it into a steel frame for you to run in circles around.
I'm from Paraguay and the reason my school couldn't get the one laptop per child was because a politician stole all the money for the computers to bet it on horse racing
Then the schools need to ask the owners of the horse racing track for the money as they now have the money gambled away by the politician.😄
In Mexico a few years back the government wanted each kid to get tablet. They picked some cities to test it out, and sadly within 2 weeks the majority of the tablets ended up at local pawnshops.
From my understanding, Mr. Beast just recently made a video giving people housing in Mexico, and many of those donated houses are already up for sale. Gotta wonder where people perceived priorities really are.
@@jasdanvm3845 Do you have any source on that?
@@jasdanvm3845I wonder if they were pressured by local cartels to force the sale at subpower pricing.
@@jasdanvm3845 It was in El Salvador, in Mexico its rare that these projects are carried out due to the problem of insecurity
Some post here and there, legallly they cant sell them since they are ok federal land and under a 20 year no sell contract@@jasdanvm3845
sadly, the problem of not reaching out and asking people what they ACTUALLY need is extremely common. you even see it in the way government aid programs are designed and run. for a certain time, i was accepting help from my town's municipality due to a lack of resources (money). while they did help a lot with groceries ... they mainly handed me boxes of pre-selected items (basics as well as extra things i didn't really want). this felt very patronizing, because what i REALLY needed was to pay the bills! if they had instead helped me with my bills for the duration of the time i was struggling, THAT would've genuinely changed my life for the better.
they didn't even ask me what grocery items i needed! so i still had to purchase certain cleaning supplies, and that's not even getting into the redundancies. but that's the problem, they don't think poor people have any actual agency. even worse, they usually assume those living in poverty ended up there because of their own decisions, and not because of generational wealth disparity or class struggles ... or hell, even just a personal crisis (the death of a family member in my case).
Philippines, right? Yeah, so many government programs exist as propaganda and backpatting here, and barely target the root causes of poverty.
This is why I believe in a national guaranteed income. Because all this money spent on choosing what's best for others would be better spent on just forking over the cash. But most people internally hate poor people so much they think they're too stupid to know what they need.
You knew what you really needed for years ahead. Most people in poor third words would ask for endless food, alcohol, drugs, many wives... Sometimes you need to make a change that people don't know they want.
@@DarkGT this is also you making an assumption. You're ASSUMING people from the 3rd world would buy pointless things and ENDLESS food? Why would endless food be a bad thing?
@@ereristark425 @ereristark425 We literally saw example in the video about the mosquito nests. If those people had the motivation and the unity to think and work towards better tomorrow, then there won't be endless conflict, rapes, killings, hunger. People would share resources with each other and work together. In Palestine they get food help, rather than getting distributed, it gets stolen and sold on the black market.
It's the human nature that you can't trust, it's not assumptions. It's hard not to cause harm while helping.
Endless food right? Utopia, why working? Food comes from the developed world every week. I won't bother growing food anymore...
Rather help them with agriculture practices. The overproduction could be sold for profit, then you buy fishing nests.
In college I took a physics class that used the same thought process, of access being the barrier to knowledge/performance.
We were in groups of 3 with a shared computer and were to teach each other the chapter, there was no lecture, but at the end of every class session we were expected to write a Vpython script demonstrating the concepts of that chapter.
We were not taught how to use or code in Vpython, nor was it a prerequisite for the physics class, nor was it discussed in the physics book.
This was 2012.
I think everyone in the class failed. I couldn't withdraw because the terms of my lease in affiliated housing was that I had to have a minimum number of credit hours or be evicted and withdrawing would put me below that threshold and I assume everyone else was in a similar situation.
It also didn't help that I ordered my book on the first day but the bookstore didn't get it in until after midterms.
I was checking 3 times a week.
A recipe for disaster, basically. That is not the proper way of learning, unless someone is super interested by the subject, and even at that. What you are reporting is nothing short of an extortion scheme. "Learn, or else get evicted.". That's crazy.
So strange, the language of physics is math, not python.
I still remember one of the exam questions: what kind of material should a solar sail for use in space be made of?
Just open ended like that. Not multiple choice or any hints or anything. So I start thinking about the extremes in temperature and radiation exposure embrittlement, tensile strength and micrometer impact resiliency; how it can't outgas, chip or flake even in these extremes. How it must be lightweight but flexible and strong. How it must be stable in these extremes, I wrote a paragraph listing every design requirement for the harsh environment of continuous direct solar exposure in the vacuum of space I could think of except the one they were looking for:
The correct answer was shiny/reflective.
@@Zanthumthis kind of sounds like the course I took in 2021. My impression was the teachers had been reading about creativity, and how creativity requires freedom and no limits. But they just failed to understand what that actually means.
@@elainelouve yeah from what I remember it was supposed to be a new teaching technique that was developed I believe at North Carolina State and tested on grade schoolers but my professor completely missed the point. It was supposed to be instructor led group learning but they omitted the instructor entirely in the version they used on us.
Edit: typo: I-> it
When someone is using mosquito nets to fish, is suffering from water scarcity, I highly doubt they'd be worried about a laptop. It sounds like people are ignoring what these people need, and not paying attention of what they are using these things for. Mosquito net fishing nets? It'd help more to send actual nets that can be repaired easily designed for fishing.
They never said the laptops were going to the same areas that people were fishing with mosquito nets.
Watching the play pump was effing frustrating, because what we had back in the US for pumping water were windmills, and those things work really well for that. Getting enough water to let cattle drink.
@@groundbanshee Probably wasn't needed at some point or the climate conditions didn't allow for it. Like the cultures that didn't invent the wheel because their areas were extremely mountainous. My country never had water mills because we never had a big enough river, only wadis.
@@groundbansheeBecause Europe ransacked Africa
@@tesso.6193: In the case of Africa, I'd point more at bad luck. First the Congo comes along every few decades and decides to murder anything successful with disease because the rainforest biome thinks human pain is delicious; then Europeans come in with some zero-sum-game economic philosophies (which we don't buy into anymore, because a 50 pound dresser is clearly more valuable than a 50 pound log of the same wood), then they have a bunch of other maladapted philosophies in local hands jerking them around by the throat. It's only the last few decades that most have been making direct progress, and at this point most other folks have been working through things for so long that we've mostly forgotten what we did as interim steps. The "wind charger", for example, basically _has to be_ reinvented everywhere because people have forgotten that they were a thing.
In Australia we used to have windpumps everywhere, then we realised that climbing a metal frame tower on a 40+C day to fix a broken mechanism at the top while a hundred thirsty cows stare at you just isn't fun. Also people who fainted from the heat while at the top of the tower tended to die. So now we have solar panels and electric pumps and if it breaks down, you replace it with a spare and take the broken pump back to the shed to fix.
The old windpumps still dot the landscape, but very few of them still pump water.
Rather negative of you there. But if God had not in his wisdom made me a Texan, then I suppose I would be rather negative.
That's why when designing for any market or customer, you must first ask for their needs, come up with a basic idea, and ask them for feedback and not just blindly provide a solution.
They knew, it was just a money making scheme.
Right, that's like the first thing you're taught when studying design
Has nothing to do with design, they knew what they were doing and certainly profit from it.
Yes but other cultures have bias, history, and motivations that leads these types of initiatives. I would argue that if the infrastructure, and educational budget was there then ultimately it would have worked.
Part of the trouble with free/stolen stuff is that it cost the reciever nothing, not everyone sees an alumium cessna engine as valuable aside from raw materials.
@@proyectoseducativoslz341vapid cynic answering to captain obvious.
> Would you trust a medical device made of spare car parts?
My dad is an ER doctor in Canada and I remember a time when I was a teenager and he told me that, when they were running low on certain medical supplies, since their budgets were so limited and the bureaucracy was so frustrating, they would just to go to the local hardware store to buy stuff to jury-rig things at a fraction of the price of 'real' medical equipment.
Yep! Necessity is the mother of invention, alight, as they say.
@@chelebelle2223 He specifically called out rubber tubing, as apparently medical grade tubing is exactly the same but 10x the price.
There was a medical case from Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary where a baby needed emergency dialysis but there was no existing machine that was compatible with infants.
Dr. Malcolm Coulthard and Head Nurse Jean Crosier basically scrounged together a working dialysis machine *in a garage* and it *worked,* saving the baby's life. In fact, it worked so well that the hospital continued to use it.
-From Cracked article "6 Insane DIY Surgeries You Won't Believe Actually Worked," Pauli Poisuo (2011)
Yeah the doctors and nurses themselves are absolutely willing, issue is the patients and the admin side. If someone dies connected to a machine it better be a very fancy looking machine.
If it works, who cares. This sounds like an argument an overpriced medical device manufacturer would make.
In 2010 I spent a week in a rural town in El Salvador. The first thing I saw, looking out the bus window as it came to town, was a bunch of wells with broken hand pumps. The second thing I saw was a single line of a very modern-looking, strong fence that didn't enclose anything - nothing was anywhere near it - it looked completely pointless.
It turned out that the wells were broken because they were killing people. The people used to drink from the river and get sick, so some charity put in wells. But the area was agricultural with heavy pesticide use, and the groundwater was contaminated. Within a few years, half the people in the town got kidney failure. Once they discovered the cause, they got a chlorination system for the river water.
Oh, and the fence? It was a work in progress, to surround a graveyard so wild pigs couldn't dig up the bodies anymore.
IT-guy here with 30 years of experience. The OLPC-project perhaps flunked, but it helped to set the bar, and I believe it helped to act as a catalyst for cheap computers. This was at a time when a laptop costed like 10 times the price of a OLPC. OLPC was the start of the race to the price-bottom. "price anchoring" is the technical term I believe. And today we have stuff like Raspberry PI that gives you excellent computing performance for a few bucks.
Yes absolutely agree. There were some really clever ideas in that laptop. It's just that they were designing for the wrong context.
@@Design.Theory Yeah, we guys in the IT-field are often plagued by "pre-understanding", as Nicholas Negroponte (I liked his book 'Beeing digital' btw) in this case. There is even a meme we use to make fun of ourselves: "IT is the solution - what's the problem?" :-D Thanks for your video.
i remember in the early 2000s or late 90s if you complained about high system requirements for certain programs the designer would be like wait so you are still using a 2 year old pc ?
but was that due to OLPC or other advancements?
Saw an article about a 128 TB SSD the other day. I could have sworn we were still dealing with stuff in the 2 or 3 TB range, I don't even know when it jumped all the way to triple digits.
@@MorbidEelI know what you mean. My laptop Ram is 4gb and I thought those were enough (use for normal ms office and play 2000s game). Last week my office upgrade mine and they have 16gb of Ram!!
Very good video. The incubator program is a classic, but I am surprised that "the good alternative design" is not mentioned here. The solution to avoid the death of thousands of preterm infants was the old Kangaroo mother care program, sponsored by the WHO, which involves infants being carried, usually by the mother, with skin-to-skin contact. Uses the most universal source of heat for infants: their mothers. This is a true example of design out of the box.
Still, an excellent video. I have been designing products for more than 25 years. I was aware of some of the ideas mentioned here, but I have learned several things anyway.
I can't count how many times I said some version of "let's find out" to my kid when they were 2-4 years old. Ask me a question, I teach them how to figure it out. Over and over and over, leading them through the process to get the answer... and then they started doing it themselves. Doing the math. Checking if there were snacks left in the basket by themself. Eventually, using a dictionary or a search bar. To hear someone so casually disregard all the work I put in to reinforce my kid's curiosity and give them the confidence to figure things out is infuriating. Just say you think moms and kindergarten teachers do nothing. Yuck.
so they to remove children from their parents since they are not parenting right. -t western designer
This is such a great method of educating your child and I'm jelly.
My parents never put so much effort to teach us how to figure something out.
The point is you did not just leave them find it all out on their own as that ... mislead person suggested. You lead them, you encouraged them, you provided a hint when they hit a roadblock ... and the thing is that once things get complicated, we all need more and more hints to get anywhere. Even just the stuff we teach kids on basic and middle schools is the work of tens of thousands of the most inquisitive minds over thousands of years. You can't expect every kid to repeat that process in eight or nine years without help.
Exactly. These rich men don’t even raise their own children. They left that work to the women in their lives. Then they go out and tell other people how to teach children. Hubris.
@@jendakrynicky5218 This is one problem I found with these parenting techniques, especially when it's taken to the extreme. Not saying the commenter did something bad, I'm just talking about a related problem.
Parents become so obsessed with the idea of an independent child that they neglect the crucial relationship between them and their own children. At the end of the day, the parent must be the guide and the child the learner, with the parent playing an active, encouraging role in their child's development. Instead, these parents ignore parenting completely in hopes that it would create a strong, independent child - this does not happen, only resulting in broken relationships and emotional issues.
OLPC worked amazing in Uruguay.
Olpc was adopted as full program in the public school system. It was kinda integrated into schooling, better models given to professors.
Despite Negroponte's plans, the first few hundred machines off the production line went to two pilot programs in Brazil (in São Paulo and in Porto Alegre). One of the included applications was eToys written in Squeak Smalltalk. This was not mentioned anywhere and the teachers in the pilot programs were not aware of it, but the children like the mouse icon (looks more like a cat) and played around with it on their own. They ended up teaching the teachers and this got enough traction that Porto Alegre hosted one of the two 2009 SqueakFest events (the other was in the USA).
That's why Windows 3.0 shipped with solitaire. It was a way of helping new computer users learn to use a mouse effectively as many people already knew how to play solitaire, so the added element was the mouse. You had to click things, double click things click and drag, basically all the basic mouse moves in one app.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I used Paintbrush to teach my kids how to use a computer. It taught them how to use the mouse and they enjoyed drawing.
Now kids know how to use a mouse but not solitaire
It's like one of colleagues once said "if you want to do an ad for a tractor, you have to go to the field. Sitting in an A/C room and dreaming about it aint going to cut it."
Isn't that how John Deere designs their stuff nowadays whilst completely ignoring farmers who want vehicles they can repair themselves?
@@BrunodeSouzaLino Don't forget the threats, legal battles, and mudslinging they'll do if you find a way to fix it yourself anyway! Hell, apparently learning the technology yourself all the way down to the coding level doesn't make you an experienced mechanic, it makes you a "hacker". It's also honestly ironic as hell that a baby-boomer flagship brand ended up operating a rug pull type situation for the most dedicated customer base out there.
@@MayorZach Can somebody explain 'Liter of Light' to Me so i can
build them myself?
I mean, what kind of Water and what Kind of Bleach?
In "Design for the Real World", Victor Papanek wrote that the best designers within a given culture are those who are from that culture. Though written in 1971, I find his observations and conclusions to be quite rational.
How is being written in 1971 a downside? Do you think anything said in the past is wrong?
@@AntoshaPushkin That's clearly not the implication? In any field there are advancements leading earlier works into obsolescence. Take, for instance, Gibbon's *Decline and Fall;* A truly outstanding work of scholarship in its time, many of its claims are refuted by later scholarship. It is still widely respected for what it did to the field of history, though none would take it over more contemporary work. It does, though, still hold historiographical importance. I believe that is the point derphyn made.
To answer the question "would you trust a medical device made of spare car parts?", I put my life in the hands of car parts everytime I drive a car, so yes.
yeah but imagine signing off on that only for the opposite party to say "THEY ARE USING JUNKYARD PARTS FOR OUR BABIES!!!"
@@potatosalad9085 looking at many US cars, this incubator is surely safer for the baby than their parent's cars...
18:20 I was able to do that when I was 12 years old, that's because I started reading books about computers when I was 8, and I was taught by my father the basics of using DOS to play games, then I decided I wanted to know how to make games, that's when I was set on this path. But a lot of things had to happen, I had to be of middle class, to have a computer, which is expensive and was only possible because my father was an engineer, I had to have access to books and be autistic to the point of being able to learn on my own from just books, I was an avid book reader. I also spent a lot of time watching cable TV and getting immersed in that hacker culture.
Expecting a kid to just be able to do that, like if it was "natural" is ridiculous without the cultural context. Its insanity.
We had such similar childhoods that it's wild. But I was lower class and my dad worked on security systems.
So, yeah. I completely agree.
I remember when that laptop was announced and I was so upset because I wasn't able to buy one. You know who would have loved an open source pc for $100? My poor American self. I was playing Zork on an old laptop my mom had gotten from work that ran Windows 3.1. Zork is great and all, but it was really the only thing that laptop could do. I wanted one so badly, but they didn't sell them. At least, not that I ever saw.
nowadays computers are cheaper but you are not encouraged to program anymore .
Exactly. I had a similar experience. Despite all of that I wasn't interested in coding then, and I still don't care about it now.
Most adults wouldn't be able to/wouldn't feel comfortable repairing a laptop without being guided. So yeah, it's not even that they're too young to be able to do it, it's that they aren't being provided with guidance from someone with more knowledge.
@@technophobian2962 yea I tried to repair electronics and I thought I had the skills to do it because I watched a lot of tutorials. but then I tried it and I ran into many absurd unexpected issues. so now I am just asking experts
I often help organizations select software for their business. The first lesson is "know the requirements!" It takes humility and experience to realize you don't know every damn thing.
And usually the customer either doesn't know what he wants. That's why for many projects the most successful software processes so far are iterative, where the customer and the producer of the software iteratively meet and make small changes to the software. The developer creates something as a solution of the customers needs, to show what is possible, and the customer gives their feedback, and the iteration starts again.
OLPC worked wonders in Uruguay. The project evolved into something even better. And some brilliant minds where discovered thanks to those OLPCs, some kids hired by Google, some others winning robots competitions. Worth mentioning that we had the infrastructure and government’s involvement to support the project.
I consider Uruguay very modern but not super wealthy country (that has both poor and rich people ... thus that initiative helps getting more population access to it + government program hopefully understood to explain these concepts someone never used internet or laptop did.... I feel we are now lacking in this department as companies are assumed to do that work.. and they only do for latest greatest things, not basics)
Uruguay is also not that poor of a country, and it's pretty small in terms of both land area and population.
Mentioning Uruguay is cheating
Exactly, it was meant for the type of people who can teach themselves. That means the laptops wouldn't be of much value to most people but they would be life changing for the few that "got it". The people who designed the laptop probably never learned anything about computers at school, they genuinely were self taught as well. For a literate child who has the potential, just giving them the laptop and a few pointers is like teaching a baby his first steps. He can go from there. For the kids who were never going to get it, it's like standing a dog on it's hind legs and expecting it to stick. Forcing that education through belabored schooling only creates circus animals performing a trick. They had to spread the laptops far and wide to find the babies and I don't think they'd be too worried that the dogs are still on their four paws.
Uruguay is a Western country tho. It's born from European colonialism and shares a cultural context with all of Latin America.
It's such a misguided idea that you can just give a room full of kids laptops and education will magically happen. Having worked as a teacher in one of the richest and most digitally connected countries in the world, at schools where every kid *does* have a laptop, I can say that it gets in the way just as often as it helps.
Well, the idea of simply throwing tech equipment into classrooms and expecting everybody to become an expert over night is not limited to development aid. Industrialized countries do the exact same thing as well, expecting the _teachers_ of those schools to miraculously acquire IT skills that magically multiply classroom productivity.
In other words, teachers are supposed to be coders, web designers, IT repairpersons, system admins and much more, completely free of charge and without any additional investment of time or other resources by the state. Can you guess how well _that_ is going right now??
I'll never forget my 4th grade introduction to the computer. Teacher introduced the first student to an art/coloring program and they got to play around with it. Then they showed the next student who got to play around with it. My turn came and I don't know if I wasn't shown well or if I just didn't learn quickly, but I was unable to pass the learning along. Humiliation. Not even being in a Western country allowed me to miraculously know my way around a computer, even with one whole (maybe?) lesson from a fellow 4th grader!
So, the idea of a rural child in a '3ed world' country knowing what to do....
Computers do not belong in education, unless in support roles in some very narrow applications.
The idea that the presence of computers magically makes education work better is pure lunacy.
It doesn't matter if a bad essay was written by hand or typed on a computer, its content is still equally bad.
PowerPoint is not a replacement for a teaching concept. Don't even get me started on the most abused to the point of rpae piece of software ever conceived, Excel.
@@lucemiserlohn i agree. it also has been proven that spell check just makes kids never bother to properly spell things out. so it some ways it can be more harmful then good. same goes for the over use of calculators.
@@lucemiserlohn Well said. Thank you.
Children learn how to be productive by themselves. This is how I learned PCs when I was little. Just the machine and manuals. No "grown ups" to really help.
And teachers are most often failures. They should be at the forefront of development, but they aren't. It was funny to see online schooling spectacularly fail during the pandemic, when academia, industry and private organisations have figured it out decades ago.
For example in Germany they are employed by the state and can't be fired, so naturally they won't lift a finger to learn new things and actually bother to teach the students anything.
It's not just developing countries, as evidenced by US kids tossing their free iPads around like Frisbees. Introduction of any novel tech requires more effort than, "Here you go, have fun."
That computer hit me with serious nostalgia. I remember when they implemented thw project here in Iraq. It was around 2010 and it failed for the reasons you mentioned and more. Firstly, we didn't know english so had no idea how to operate it. Most of the time we only used it to draw or play around with the sound composing app. I remember playing with a coding app think it's just a block building game. Back then the internet wasn't widespread yet so we had no idea about all the fewtures requiring network connection.
Wait, they didn't even translate it?
@@LordVarkson from what I remember, yes.
@@LordVarksonThis is like the worst aspect. But assuming everyone speaks English is also really American.
Jfc, that IS bad design. And I say this as a Graphic Designer. Usability is like the most important factor in design
@@cyan_oxy6734: And failing to properly document is also very much a modern-computing (as opposed to e.g. 80s and earlier computing) defect, in addition to falling dangerously close to some of the ideas they were pushing.
"He dosn't know how to use the 3 seashells"
I once worked in a university/museum complex in Finnish Lapland as a tech helper (a month long internship). Their boss had ordered few of the class rooms some kind of interactive touch monitor/whiteboard devices that probably at the time cost thousands of euros. The problem was that they didn't have any kind of manual and no one knew how to use them. I spent a good portion of that month finding the proper manual for them, translating that English manual to multiple languages (Sami, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish) due to the international nature of that work environment, learning how to use them myself and then teaching a full class multiple times on their use.
I was just an introverted nerd whose worst fear was to perform in front of people, especially in English, but luckily they seemed to understand me well enough and everything ended up working out. I've only seen boards like that in use in one place since then and even there they didn't know how to use them.
I wonder if these were the ones used in Mexico around 12 years ago. They put these digital white boards in public school which were super expensive and not a lot of teachers knew how to use
I had one of those in a classroom once. I used it once because there were so few ways to use it with the students I had. And other teachers often fouled them up by trying to use dry-erase markers on them.
@@el-maikiI’m Ecuadorian-American, lived in the states my whole life. Smart boards, which is what I think you’re talking about, had a learning curve even here, but to a community who isn’t exposed to this tech, I wouldn’t blame them for not using this kind of device.
oh my god you're talking about smart boards right. i live in Canada (have my whole life) and my classmates and i had to help my teachers use them when i was 8 and they were 10 or 11. it was really fun but please bring back the projectors.
My country also got interactive boards and we almost never used them, idk when I stopped seeing them again but we used projectors quite often and the change from chalk boards to white boards was also successful, I don’t remember the date but mid to late 2000s?
This is such a great video! Thank you for making this. I am a designer in Ghana, and even up till now there is a huge dissonance what people think we need because we see the appeal in Western media and what the people actually need. When I was doing my bachelor degree in Multimedia, one particular thing my lecturer used to hit home a lot on was how we should actually pay attention to what the people actually need. It can be very easy to project what you have seen before (being exposed to western media as a graphic designer etc.) onto the work you are doing to received by the people you are actually designing it for, it is very important to differentiate your taste from the country's taste.
Its alway funny when normal people have more commnon sense than experts in a field. Like when economists thought China was gonna grow forever when most people were like wtf. These are people who should know better but they refused to for narcissistic reasons.
I work for a translation company. A HUGE bias of machine translation is that there just isn't enough data for developing countries. Even really big groups like Swahili lack the subtle traslations available to english or spanish.
There isn’t enough data for Cantonese as well, a language spoken in developed countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.
@tammyleung7578 Cantonese isn't used at ALL in Singapore,
and Hong Kong isn't independent.
There's more users of it in Guangdong, than in both of the other cities combined.
@@GWT1m0 it's very much used, just more of a family thing. Most dialects in SG is endangered. (at least for Chinese ones)
Most younger generations, unless they have great-grandparents, they don't get to speak much of the dialects due to government policy of Chinese being _Lingua Franca_ , along with the other 3 as mother tongue, but it's not in the zero range like you have suggested.
@@GWT1m0 They didn't say Hong Kong was independent.
@@Hifuutorian Well by calling them countries it basically means it adds onto the implied meaning of an independent nation. That isn’t always the case but it usually is. Which is why the guy called out on Hong Kong being called that since it is classified as a special administrative region of China.
when I was a 12y old I did in fact repair a laptop, made a desktop from random parts ,and messed around with electronics In general but A. I'm from a first world country, B. I was fortunate enough to have access to these things and C. I started messing around with electricity In general when I was 6y old. - 18:30
In short, you're going to fail if you're trying answer a question in English when the question was asked in French.
That's actually quite the saying. i hope this gets printed.
You assume people don't speak both languages here.
Montréal has flaws but I would not call it a fail. I work with a team there where a question in English or French might be answered in other. But I suppose the point is that you need to understand people when they speak in their own tongues.
Unless you're in Montréal lmao
@@piggletimpact People in Montreal don't speak French either.
The clip of a white woman chilling on the merry go round being pushed by black kids, while mentioning the word child sweatshop is a MASTERPIECE! 😂
Yep. Those kids probably were having fun, though: getting to push around an adult stranger from a distant country is a novelty, right? I've seen lots of kids enjoy that sort of thing. But all the same, guys, have you heard of "bad optics?"
It feels like the epitome of this entire issue - it's Western paternalism in assuming that developing nations and their people will be delighted to accept their help, no matter the form, and that they know better because they're more advanced. Who *cares* about optics because clearly those kids are delighted to have been graced with the presence of a Westerner? It's so frustrating.
@@trioptimum9027that's part of what makes it funny, I would bet just about anything everyone involved was having a blast and will remember it fondly in future... But good god it's a bad look!
@@trioptimum9027 Yeah. It's novelty. Once.
They got tripped up by the simple problems of assuming you know what the end user needs and that the end user knows what they're doing.
I also feel that, things that are given to people for free are also perceived as worthless, so by this logic why would you treat it with care? But in Africa anything that is worth something is also worth stealing and selling, it's an unfortunate cultural reality of the continent.
the problems of the continent are like 90% economic, not cultural. implying that something is "culturally" wrong with the continent is a slippery slope that leads to blatant racism and eugenics. don't be that guy.
The merry-go round pump assumed that African children would be free to play for many hours per day and effectively do work. A simple pump would be easier to use. But telling donors you can give poor kids a toy AND get them water sounds good, and they want to buy into it and think they're helping.
Crazy that it cost 14k, someone was literally capitalizing on poor children by extracting wealth from donations.
@@Aeroliten I think the price includes drilling into the ground to find water as well as looking for a suitable place that actually has any.
It's not just for the wheel unless they wanted to replace existing pumps, which would be a massive waste of money.
tbh i saw it for one second and directly thought that this idea was stupid, didn't even need an explanation
I honestly don't understand what they thought.
The entire point of a merry-go-round is that it spins freely.
My cousin was telling us about being posted by the State Department to a nation in West Africa. This was many years ago. There was a rebellion or some other trouble. The US had a communications station there that had to be abandoned due to the fighting. He said that when they recovered it, the building had been ransacked. The radio equipment was still there, but furniture, office supplies and everything else was gone. He understood. These were items that the locals could actually make use of.
This video gave me flashbacks to my undergrad marketing classes. I remember examples like a canned meat product being introduced to Brazil, which sold fantastically for a month, and then dropped off a cliff: Brazilians were sold on the idea of having emergency meat in the house in case they needed it, but it was seen as a "last resort" food, so they'd buy one can and keep it forever. Or a five-liter water bottle that didn't fit well into most people's refrigerators. We looked at American ads for the (then-relevant) Yellow Pages phone book, and compared them to international ads for the same product: in the US the ads were all about *which version* of the Yellow Pages was best, while internationally it was more about convincing people that it was a necessary product in the first place.
Cultural blind spots are so fascinating to me.
Here in Germany yellow pages were and still are the pages in the phonebook where companies are listed. I don't even understand "whcih version". There is a new phone book every year, and of course the best version is the latest one for very obvious reasons.
@@steemlenn8797 Back when they were relevant in the US, multiple companies produced yellow pages. Most people just used whatever the phone company gave them, but there was still somehow a market for others.
I don't feel like you made the right deduction about the incubator. If the people who made it had an appropriately bleak view about their own government, they would have realized that CYA - cover your ass - and caring more about appearance than functionality are universal. Nothing to do with "cultural context".
16:05 they don't need to use the internet, how about we start with toilets. I'm dead serious.
Access to water systems and treatment is the base of civilization, its foundational, you have to solve that first, then you solve electricity, then you can thing about leisure like computers. That should be common sense, and its still a huge problem.
I think the idea of information tech taking center stage is that in theory they can help people figure out their own solutions to problems. The ol teach a man to fish kind of thing
As some other commentator said that isn't even a universal thing. There was once a foundation that built latrines and toilets for sanitation in this one village and after two years returned to said village to find out the facilities were dismantled. They asked the villagers why and they answered they don't really need the latrines since they can do what they traditionally do fine and use them to fix their leaking roofs...
A church group goes to the Philippines and built a playground. Just like the ones you see at elementary schools in America.
Two years later the playground was dismantled and was now being used to patch buildings and homes.
If a person is living in a shack, their priorities don’t include “going to the playground.”
But then how will I run Senegalese Coding Sweat Shops? How will I export their misery in the form of databases and spreadsheets?
Won't someone please think of the Western Women that won't feel superior to other Western Women?!?!?!
Exactly. Base level infrastructure is so life-changing we take it for granted and don't notice
Here in the Philippines, my 1st time using a computer or even learned what a computer was is in 1993 on our high school computer class. It's not even windows but DOS system and we were learning Wordstar, Lotus123 and Basic programming. Believe me none of us students inside the room felt interested in what we are doing. The only time we felt interested was when one of our classmates started bringing in floppy disc games that can be played in the computer. So it's true that even if you're excited on the technology, you should not assume the students have that same excitment that you have. So believe me if that laptop was introduced to my batch at the time it will mostly end up not being used.
In 1993 DOS was very much still state of the art. Even in much of the western world DOS computers where still mainstream until the 2000s but admittedly then they where heavily outdated, but nonetheless very mainstream. Although admittedly again mostly in old registers etc. But 1993 they where still pretty hot. in terms of recent tech. Lots of people not heavily invested in recent tech still used systems that did not make it into current year.
DOS was a great way to learn about computers. Did it like that.
Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece: By 93 DOS was very "state of the industry", but it largely wasn't any kind of "state of the art" unless you studied the actual API additions (and even then, it's unprotected roots held it back). Memory protection and GUIs were very much the state-of-the-art at the time, and while you could build such things on top of DOS, they weren't an actual DOS thing.
@@svr5423 "Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity."
"children", or you mean the children where you live? Don't assume all cultures have the same priorities. If kids have no tech in their lives and don't see a utility for it, they won't care. Playing kickball in the streets is real and tangible. A computer isn't if it's in isolation.
@@jasondashney I mean children.
Not sure why you think other "races" are so genetically different that this wouldn't apply.
Also why would you play kickball in the streets when you have access to a computer? That doesn't make sense. Sounds like you haven't much experience with children at all.
One of the biggest things that was hammered into me during engineering school was to figure out the culture, resources, anything that could affect the functionality of what im designing for the audience im designing it for. Even stuff like looks are important to consider
A counter-example of a (fictional) good design for developing countries is Homer Atkins' bicycle pump in "The Ugly American"; not only does it use locally-available materials in its construction, but Atkins also hires local Sarkhanese mechanics and salesmen to help design and build it (notably, one of the mechanics designs a treadmill so that a bicycle can be used to power the pump and then can be removed from the treadmill and still used as a bicycle). Furthermore, he hires Sarkhanese sales staff and has them on commission, so they have "skin in the game" to make sure the design gets distributed.
Atkins: "Whenever you give a man something for nothing[,] the first person he comes to dislike is you. If the pump is going to work at all, it has to be their pump, not mine."
In my country the OLPC plan back in 2005 was thought to equal public school students to those in private schools with computer lab classes. Many of the public schools students knew what they were confronted with, but didn't have access to a PC to practice at home. The plan had ups and downs since a lot of kids would use the laptops to play videogames or listen to music, but many others got to programming and robotic Olympiads. It also pushed the electricity company and the telecommunications company to strengthen the net to those rural areas far away from cities to allow kids to access the web with their laptops. It also brought a public library for every citizen with a civic ID from this country.
So, it´s an interesting program, it can be very good for the population and bring a lot of progress but outside western culture we have to watch and learn before apply whatever we think it's needed.
I did some consulting for a charter school back around 2002/03. They bought every student one of those new white Macbook laptops. The kids treated the computers like toys, tossed them. Essentially the laptops where a replacement for pencil and paper and the teacher had no guidance on how they could incorporate into lesson plans. For the students the computer was not really important for their school work.
To this day, it still happened with Chromebooks
@@bitelaserkhalifTBF Chrome Books are little more than toys. They take most of the class period to get working
Honestly I grew up in the 2000’s and I’d also have been baffled. Pencil and paper worked just fine, especially because you could write in margins and doodle. Don’t get me wrong I love computers and they help a lot with some schoolwork, but I get why kids just ignored them
@@DeathnoteBB The problem is a lot of schools use way too many online resources and it wastes class time. Why take a test online that takes 30 minutes to set up when you could just pass out a paper test in less than 5 minutes
@@JamesThomas-kx5sjin defense of online work it’s far easier for teachers to manage and a lot of kids like it more because it’s easier to make up from home. When I was in high school and was home sick I could keep up almost completely from home
15:14 Okay, can we just pause for a second and think about how wild it is that there was ever a point where a news story felt comfortable openly publishing the personal email addresses of Rush Limbaugh and Billy Idol?!
Surprised no one else mentioned this
It was a very different age. Even Usenet was actually still usable for an early part of it, back before AOL provided access to it.
@EndDims That's such an adorably heartwarming story 😊
I remember listening to a similar lecture back in architecture school. It was by a car designer who worked on projects in Africa, and he said one thing: "Those people don't want cars made out of straw. They've seen our cars and that's what they want." Human dignity plays a huge part in this, and despite good intentions, many of these products scream "I'm for the poor people." Nobody wants that.
Bro I freaking love hearing about failed designs. Please make more vids on them in the future. You learn the most from failure after all.
You'll see things like this everywhere. Companies fail to design for the end user because they design around their perception of end users. You see canned food drives for the homeless, but homeless people don't want canned food. They want regular food, like the stuff we eat. Humans eat. They are Humans too. Not to say I wont eat out of a can, but I'd hate my life more if it was only canned goods.
That and "Altruism" being inherently selfish, for the purpose of making you feel better, rather than actually helping. The people doing most of the helping are doing it for their own ego and failing to consider what the people being helped want or need.
For a long time in the US, big donations were made for tax deductions, too.
Yes!!! And canned food is usually only decent if you have a reliable way to heat it. Where are they supposed to heat it or cook with it??
but... but.... then why would I help someone if I don't get to feel better and superior to them!
I mean it's pointless if I don't get the rush of feelings of superiority of my culture, wealth and knowledge compared to those who are of lesser stock!
@@EmL-kg5gn to be fair, cans were military rations because all of that is taken care of. As long as i have a lighter and a (much harder to come by!) place, its easy to heat.
But looking at US news.... i can see how a homeless person might not start a fire to eat a can of ravioli.
And on another note, i think its ridiculous that you can get apartments in the US that just have no kitchen, after all, one of the easiest ways of saving money and improving your own life quality is cooking from scratch...
@@MannIchFindKeinName That makes sense. And yes, that last point!!! Drives me mad
IT specialist in secondary education from a rural reservation community. Once Hybrid learning came into effect and 1:1 Chromebook distribution was implemented in school districts, we ALL saw a rise in school technology destruction.
Giving our students their own devices was well intended to give access to learning tools, however they don't know proper care or even care about the intended purpose, and instead only see it as a play device to access gaming sites.
Basic computer literacy is no longer taught in schools, so when you use tech terminology it's unclear if the user comprehends what you are referring to or how the component functions in the overall system.
Teachers expect their students to know technology, but they don't understand HOW it works. They only care about what they want it to do.
It's also more difficult to teach certain computer skills on a chromebook, from a non-IT perspective they're just a browser + tablet combo. Useless without internet and locked down within an inch of its life
@@mintgreenghost correct, as a tech with a visual impatient I always use short keys to navigate Windows settings and menus. Those basic command inputs fly out the door on Chromebook devices.
Additionally, my admin access to them is extremely limited compared to windows desktops. It's basically the same as using any android device with your chrome account.
As long as the tech is free, kids are going to be careless with it.
@@freethebirds3578 not all. Care is learned. If a child has no boundaries or moderate supervision of using tech at home, they will disregard proper care measures.
@@samivayajd if they know there is no consequence to disregarding the care of something, why would they bother? I'm speaking from a society that is far more affluent than developing nations, and children are given so much free stuff at school that they know they will just get a free replacement if they break something. Computers, food, supplies, uniforms. There's always more available.
19:13 I do agree children are incredibly creative naturally. I think everyone starts out that way tbh and kids also have vivid imaginations. But I have no idea how that translates into computer building 😭
22:50 saying "screw you" to people in the 3rd world who are concerned with the wasting of resources and want to make sure it friggen works before devoting all that time/effort it might be the most condescending thing I've ever heard. He's assuming that ALL of his major assumptions were correct. This was clearly and ego project for him.
Remember all the well-intentioned engineers making intubation machines in the first months of Covid? Some were later tested and they would have ruptured a patient's lungs. Because the engineers didn't understand the question, they jumped straight to a "solution".
What I remember was that a well-known respirator manufacturer open-sourced an already FDA-approved machine design, and people were collaborating to put it into production.
That sounds like straight up just bad engineering...
@Thalanox are you just daft or did you suffer a lack of oxygen yourself?
That piqued my interest, so I tried to google it for more info, but I can’t find anything that sounds like what you’re describing. I could just be searching with the wrong keywords, but could you provide any links for me?
I don't remember that at all. I remember Elon Musk promising that one of his companies would make a bunch and then totally underdelivering but nothing about exploding people's lungs.
The "Laptops for Children in Africa" reminds me of the "Free Cigarettes for Soldiers" during WW2.
I would argue that the cigarettes at least made the soldiers' life slightly more bearable
@@robob4465Food and peace would have been a better help
@@DeathnoteBB They tried that. Turns out holding hand and hoping for peace doesn't ensure peace prevails.
Cigarettes were actually quite valuable for soldiers. Either being smoked directly or traded for some other goods abroad
@@billwilliamson1506 The cigarettes could be sold just like the playpump could be dismantled and sold for scrap.
4:30 A hand -pump costs $3,500? Where?
Deep well hand-pumps are $50 - $400 in the US.
This reminds me a great deal of something that happens a lot in software in general. Sometimes companies have a problem to solve, and the solution offered is basically just trying to get people to use some piece of software. But the problem is often in the processes and procedures (or culture) of the company, and just throwing software at the problem doesn't solve it.
Not to mention "developer brain", where you design stuff that you think would be useful (or is useful to you while you develop the software) but completely useless to your actual users, who work in a field you're not proficient in and have completely different needs and priorities to you. And that's all within the same country!
*cough* generative AI *cough*
Apart from the fact that a lot of the time people are being people and would rather promote their own or their friends idea than the one of another colleague, even if the other idea might work better for the users.
It's not about what works best, it's about power play and who gets the promotion.
THIS part 17:44 (that you nearly throw away as an aside, but it's the main point): Western coders unaware of even what % of THEIR OWN CULTURE actually codes or modifies their own computers. A tiny tiny %.
It’s funny. This whole video is about our cultural and educational differences, which are important. I’ve had a rough life but it’s been comparatively easy to someone having to worry about getting fresh water every day. I had least had a creek near me and after some boiling I had drinkable water. The struggle for survival takes a lot of time and energy and supersedes anything else, including learning about things that don’t have a direct impact on immediate survival. Can’t work for an easier life if you’ve starved to death.
But that fan art of Katara also shows how connect we all actually are too. Survival is the number one important thing to us all, some of us are just able to (barely) ensure that survival working in a slightly air conditioned Wendy’s and some have to hunt down water and forage for food.
And we all love ATLA 😂
The less you have, the more your priorities become crystal clear. This is even true in rich western countries.
16:19 You won this subscriber at “the plumbus”
2:50 In architecure we call this symptom a 'student's project' - in uni you will play around with a cool idea but not for long enough to have to work out all the real problems and consequences.
The issue is much, much, more fundamental. The vast majority of foreign aid, in any form, is more about ego boosting of donors or diplomacy. One of the common examples of this is clothing and textiles industry in Nigeria, back in the 80's it was a major industry with 30+ plants but in the modern day more than 80% of textile products are second hand from developing countries. You see the same issue with food aid, why farm when a large portion of your nation food supply is given for free by rich nations? You can't compete against structurally free products as a business.
This is a similar issue you have with "designing" for developing nations, it skips loads of economic realities to "aid" these people.
A far more effective form of aid is investing local business' but also allowing them to fail and recognize when a business doesn't work, rather than giving free shit or giving money. Instead of setting up a water pump thats expensive and nobody knows how to fix or otherwise get parts for, set up a company that sells waterpumps. Yes, that means some communities might need to leave where they live because where they live isn't hospitable with their current standard of living that's no different in the west. We don't fund would be ghost towns in the west and have a community reliant on foreign handouts to continue existing, why do that in Africa?
Reliance of foreign aid isn't aiding the people.
You can perfectly develop products for different cultures, most products are developed at least partially with different cultures in mind. It's them wanting or needing it that's the real issue with the product you designed.
Food aid isn't given for free anymore hasn't since the 70s where it wrecked havock on local economies. The only time free food aid is offered is in cases of emergencies.
We don't keep ghost towns open but we do keep other kinds of towns going. In my opinion, to the detriment of everyone. So your point stands.
Also don't forget to mention the greed and corruption of a small percentage of the population in these countries.
Or we could recognise that capitalism is unsuitable for everyone except the wealthy, and that so long as the west continues to impose capitalism upon the global south and snuff out anyone who dares to oppose western interests none of these nations will ever reach a point of prosperity. Also telling people to 'just move' is crazy privileged and imperialist. The locations are usually suitable, it's the systems that are flawed.
That's why I like Kiva so much. It's a charity that crowdsources interest free loans to developing world businesses. These people need anywhere between a couple hundred to a $3 or $4 thousand type deal. A mill for peanuts to make peanut butter type of business. Or inventory for a general store. The vast majority of loans get paid back, and 100% of the donations go to the business. They ask for extra on top to cover expenses.
@@jasondashneyIntrest free? That's the opposite of the situation when I looked into Kiva a lot of the loans were over 1000pc interest... Zidisha had better rates but not as much verification infrastructure.
$14,000 is four times the cost of a regular hand pump? I would think closer to forty times.
Here is why these chariity organizations keep doing this: 4:36 it doesn't cost 14k USD infact its not more than a 1000$. material and labour cost is lot less in these developing countries, so you can guess where the rest of the money is going.
Saying "designing for different cultures is impossible" implies that it's possible to design for a culture period. These people would have ended up with the same results if they were designing for their culture. How do I know? Simple, the real world is infinitely complex. No one is capable of capturing that complexity in their design process. Successful products are the result of iteration.
Oh the pump carousel failed? Yah. It was a stupid idea. It would have also failed if it was a standard pump. Perhaps the handle was the wrong shape, perhaps it was stripped of parts because it served another function, maybe the gaskets would have corroded due to minerals in the water. Who knows. There are quite literally infinite unknowable failures
There is a reason charity frequently produces these results: Very few people actually want to do charity. Charity is solely about giving, you get nothing in return. Not very appealing for most people. When you care more about feeling good, doing good takes a back seat
Children learn at different rates. My 5 year old just recently managed to teach himself to read and he hasn't even started school yet. Whereas I struggled to read and write even with help. I was the last person to learn to read in my classroom at school. I was even made fun of. I was repeatedly held back. I'm sure there will be some children who can teach themselves to be engineers and tech support but it's definitely not a universal ability like this man is saying.
@@Billybloop Even if every kid could become self taught engineers... it would fail. Do engineers produce value? Definitely. They produce value on top of the value produced by: farmers, trades people, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, financiers, etc. The economy is the result of infinite conditions interacting in a way that produces increased value production.
Economic development is an iterative process. There is no "solution" to increasing standards of living. There are simply frameworks to allow iterative development to occur
Here in Uruguay, OLPC has worked quite fine. And it is still running. Certainly, we have a good IT infraestructure, and public and free education system, including college.
Hey, I just want to say that in Uruguay the OLPC was very successful under the name "plan ceibal". Our country has really good rates of digital literacy and we have been exporting a lot of software. However, as you showed in the video, the devil is in the details and the implementation. It is also worth saying that at this point the laptops are just standard laptops, rather than the green "marcianitas" showed in the video. Which once again enhances your point.
That's awesome that it worked somewhere. Glad to hear it.
developed countries: lets save the premature baby
developing countries: THANK U, NEXT
I don't quite buy that the incubator was a bad idea. There are lots of instances where the people in the actual hospitals would be sure to like the idea. Now if you make the design of a do-it-yourself incubator open source, it will be hard to check how much is it used. As for the National Health Institutions that were cold about it, you may have overlooked something. It is certainly an issue that Health Ministries typically want the most advanced option from the most expensive provider - because that's the only way you can fit in a hefty dose of grift.
Yeah, when he said "this time they actually _listened_ to what the people wanted and made a better product" it was weirdly condescending for the context. It's definitely a great thing that they made _another_ cheap medical device design, and that this time it ended up being put in use and saved baby lives.
But at the end of the day, hospitals still need incubators, it's not meant to be a trade-off of which baby's are saved depending on their medical needs. If some higher ups decided their simple incubator design of easy construction (which unlike OLPC benefitted from the existence of a sizable population of knowledgable individuals who can fix and repair them) was not good looking enough to save babies then that's not on the designers for cultural ignorance. It's a select few people who made a decision which affects millions.
It seemed weirdly contradictory to make a video showing how these charitable "entepreneurs" neglect the agency of the people they're designing for, then also act like those major institutes had no agency in turning it down and it was all on the designers for thinking they knew better. "They've seen Grey's Anatomy and the Good Doctor, they know what it's supposed to look like" is a weird criticism for a product solely designed by people attempting to remedy the unavailability of the official device and who had no ability to solve the cost or distribution or maintenance problems of the high tech versions to begin with.
@@billbill6094shows like greys anatomy aren’t culturally relevant for many countries too so listing those shows is a bit uhh weird lol
Give to them crappy looking yet functional device - meh it looks too crappy don't want it
Give to them a professional device - they sell it or chop into pieces
Conclusion: don't even try
@@Adam-oq2lq "They" is who, exactly? The locals or the functionaries? There are a lot of different issues lumped together in your statement. The Malaria Net story showed one issue where the donors are the problem. Somebody in the rich West overfocuses on one single issue, and does not take into account that the locals have other much more basic and urgent needs. Slightly different issue: Give locals a professional, expensive device, and dismantling and selling it may be worth a year's income. Not hard to guess what choices will be made there. At the other end you have third world government officials that are as least as absolutely isolated from the locals as Westerners are, and care only about their own pockets.
@@HarunRaffael It doesn't matter. The government is just a reflection of the society usually. They just dumb period end of story. Why should we even care?
The first example infuriates me. As a person from a very nice developed country I'd rather our hospitals have that jank-ass looking thing if it functions just fine compared to what we have now cuz I'd know when an immature kid comes they got the best chance of getting an incubator to save their life since the hospital isn't waiting for the totally-not-a-scam technician to come by to fix a machine made on the same principles as the McDonald's ice cream machine. Never mind when the alternative is likely nothing at all.
"This device is keeping your baby alive."
EUGH It's the WRONG COLOR and it LOOKS CHEAP! TAKE IT OUT!
-No one, ever.
@@tim3172 Also the presenters assertion that people don't want to use ugly devices - have you seen the majority of medical devices.......
You have to be quite the dimwit to completely miss the MULTIPLE reasons it failed. The idea that the machine was ugly the least of their worries. The government agencies responsible couldnt gamble on something that they KNOW is cheaply made and fairly novel...
If you're a government official in a poor country with limited budget , it's totally understandable since you're gambling with children lives and limited budget
If your developed country has a hospital that can't keep an incubator running due to some nonsense with a technician, then you DON"T live in a developed country. Fix your system, don't blame it on a device.
You didn't mention Sugata Mitra's successful Hole in the Wall education project. Also Dr. Montessori, who worked directly with children in an insane asylum, then with poor children in government housing. She was a medical doctor, volunteering her time.
Also, I've been both a college level educator (programming) and elementary age educator, and they're vastly different. Adults can be taught without movement, but children must have movement to learn well.
I asked my mom why she put me in Montessori and not Waldorf, and her words are the words of good design: "well, Steiner made theories about childhood and applied them. Dr. Montessori _observed children_ and supplied their needs for learning."
he has to say each and every person?!
@@TENNSUMITSUMA Mitra's hole in the wall project is a key counter-point to his arguement about the problems of "just handing people a laptop". However that is to say nothing about many of the problems with OLPC
We opted for Montessori because Waldorf is anti-technology, especially at primary level. I will say that Waldorf is still superior to typical schooling. Especially the acceptance of children as individuals and the importance of working with the hands (woodwork, metalwork, sculpting, painting and so).
@@loganmedia4401 waldorf produces self-absorbed dependant people who are scared of efficiency, technology and science