Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Nomadic Entrepreneurs: A New Generation Fueled By the Sun

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

As a child, she tended yaks and goats on the mountainsides of rural Qinghai, China but things have changed since then. She still considers herself a nomad. Now, however, she is a nomad of business and it is solar panels and solar cookers she tends.

Dorma (卓玛) rose in the business world by migrating from trade to trade and from city to city; wherever opportunity presented itself. She is one of the few women of her ethnicity to run her own non-restaurant business.

One Earth Designs recently visited Dorma’s factory with local university students to negotiate solar technology prices. Seventy watt solar panels cost 2,000 RMB (293 USD) and 8 watt solar panels cost 400 RMB (58 USD).

As for solar cookers, China has a handful of standard designs that you can read about here. Dorma sells the two most popular designs:

(1) Concrete Butterfly Solar Cooker:

Butterfly solar cookers are asymmetric parabolas. In this solar cooker, the asymmetric parabolic dish is made from concrete. Small mirrors (usually 1”x 1”) are then pasted on the surface of the concrete parabola using tar or silicon adhesive. The base of the cooker is a circular concrete slab.

  • Cost: 150-200 RMB (22-29 USD) + tax + shipping
  • Weight: 95kg (209 lbs)
  • Long Distance Transportation: 20% breakage in route to the villages
  • Collection Area: 1.88 m2
  • Reflector: Both tar and silicon glue lose efficacy when exposed to weathering. If mirrors are not placed tightly together, these glues melt and the mirrors fall off within a few weeks to a few months.
  • Assembly Time: 20 minutes
  • Boil Time/5L water (summer): 10 minutes, sunny day (30 C ambient; 86 F)
  • Boil Time/5L water (winter): 2.5 hours, sunny day (-15 C ambient; 5 F)
  • Accidents:
    • Starts unwanted fires
    • Burns through pots
  • Cooking: Fast but cooks food unevenly

(2) Cast Iron Butterfly Solar Cooker

This is also an asymmetric parabolic solar cooker. The dish is made from two cast iron wings that unscrew for separate transportation. Mylar is pasted on the surface to boost specular reflectivity. Standard paper glue is used as the adhesive. The base is designed like a wheelbarrow in order to increase portability.

  • Cost: 420-500 RMB (62-74 USD) + tax + shipping
  • Collection Area: 1.62 m2 (0.81 per wing)
  • Weight: 70 kg
  • Long Distance Transportation: Mylar often tears during transport to villages.
  • Reflector: Pasting Mylar leaves many bubbles and insufficiently pasted edges which tear easily during transportation and weathering.
  • Assembly Time: 5-10 minutes
  • Boil Times: Slightly less than concrete cooker
  • Cooking: Fast but cooks food unevenly

Although Dorma sells these cookers, she does not manufacture them. We went to visit solar cooker factories in Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai in order to compare prices and profit margins. Here, we report these values for the concrete solar cooker (only the government manufactures metal cookers as the unsubsidized cost of purchasing them is prohibitively expensive for most households).

The total price of manufacturing a concrete solar cooker averaged 84 RMB (12 USD). Profit margins for the factory owner ranged from 36 to 116 RMB (5-17 USD).

Many factory workers had recently relocated to urban centers from the countryside. Workers laying mirrors were able to make 6 cookers per day, thus earning 36 RMB (5 USD). If they work 7 days per week every day of the year they can make slightly more than 2/3rds China’s average urban income. The workers we spoke with had bandages covering cuts on their fingers from the edges of the glass mirrors.

Workers laying concrete were able to make 13-15 cookers per day, thus earning 39-45 RMB (6-7 USD). If they work every day of the year, they earn a few hundred RMB short of China’s average urban income.

One Earth Designs is inspired by Dorma’s success and saddened by the low wages and poor working conditions faced by rural peoples relocating to urban areas (those few able to find city jobs). We are working with local development organizations, universities, and communities to nurture a new generation of nomadic entrepreneurs skilled at merging traditional design practices and materials with modern needs and urban capacities.

Stay tuned for an introduction to our novel solar cooker design, the SolSource 3-in-1, and its potential as a local income generator.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

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Posted in China, Clean Technology, Design, Environment, Fieldwork, Health, International Development, One Earth Designs, SolSource 3-in-1 | No Comments »

Small and Beautiful: The Engineer within Us All

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The innovations that gave birth to the world’s ancient civilizations are fading into dust.

Basillica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Tyler Durden

Basillica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Tyler Durden.

The Greater Tragedy: Not only are we losing the knowledge and inventions that first allowed humans to adapt to life in the world’s great deserts and on its snow-capped mountains, but the communities responsible for these innovations now feel ashamed of them.

In many regions, advertisements of foreign cities and technologies have generated a sense of inferiority that has discouraged even the most talented traditional craftspeople from continuing their trades.

Nowhere in the dialogue are these traditional lines of innovation labeled ‘science’ or ‘engineering’. Instead, they are called ‘history’, ‘art’, or ‘culture’, put in museums rather than studied in workshops. The great irrigation systems of the Incas that allowed them to flood the Ollantaytambo valley (Peru), drowning their conquistador rivals, have not made their way into contemporary texts on sustainable agriculture.

Valley beneath Ollantaytambo, Peru. Photo:Luke Redmond.

Valley beneath Ollantaytambo, Peru. Photo:Luke Redmond.

Our task is to inspire confidence within communities to recognize the contemporary usefulness and future potential of their design traditions. We do not want to preserve cultures, but rather to reinvigorate them.

Although all our efforts aim towards this goal, one is deserving of special attention, our engineering workshops run by One Earth Design’s (OED’s) Chief Engineer, Amy Qian.

Amy Qian holds up disassembled early SolSource 3-in-1 prototype in MITERS.

Amy Qian holds up disassembled early SolSource 3-in-1 prototype in MITERS.

The daughter of two computer scientists, Qian began her career as a mechanical engineer as an eight year old; by whittling pointy sticks in her backyard. She graduated to carpentry with power tools in her garage, then to the metal shops of her high school and the robot building laboratories of MIT (Media Lab).

Qian’s passion for practice and design has never waivered because “it has given [her] the power to build tangible solutions for the problems [she is] presented with”. Now, she is working to inspire that same passion in others and to empower those around her to engineer solutions for their own communities.

Last week, Qian held a series of design workshops that seemed to be destined for failure. A landslide blocked her way into the city for the workshop, forcing her to spend an extra hour crossing the nearby river and finding a car to take her the rest of the way. At the markets, none of the vendors wanted to sell a duffel-bag full of wood to a woman, and for various reasons the location of the workshop had to be changed three times just hours before the sessions began.

Finally, the group gathered. The son and daughter of a carpenter who had been sent away to school as young children, two women’s group leaders from farming families, and a nomadic man who started a rural education association huddled around Qian, listening attentively to her explanations of wood working tools and design principles. Then, they built.

This is what they had to say after completing the woodworking portion of the workshop:

This is a small start but, to us, it is a beautiful one.

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Posted in Applied Science & Engineering Reader Series, China, Clean Technology, Design, International Development, One Earth Designs, Workshops | 1 Comment »

One Earth Designs: Democratizing Science and Engineering

Monday, June 8th, 2009

In a recent meeting with Oxfam, one public health official summarized for me conclusions drawn from their 2005-2008 research program evaluating disaster aid operations in regions of India and Sri Lanka devastated by the 2004 Tsunami. The central finding, he said, was that communities wanted more ownership.

“From study after study, a theme emerged. It was like a drumbeat, faint and barely recognizable at first, and then louder and louder as the findings rolled in. It didn’t seem to matter what the topic of the research was. Its underlying message was nearly always the same: disaster-affected communities wanted a chance to guide their own recovery – and humanitarian programs (would) probably work better if they (did) so.” – Oxfam 2009 Report

Oxfam was speaking of a people impoverished by war and natural disaster, but the same is true of all communities. Readers may shrug this off as being an obvious and easy task, but it is not. For communities struggling to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances that they themselves have had no say in, reclaiming the self-confidence to decide how to proceed into the future can often be more daunting than simply continuing to live amidst life-threatening conditions. Our job as change-makers is not to make decisions on behalf of these communities once disasters have struck, but to maintain a steady effort to empower people with the self-confidence to make change themselves.

One Earth Designs aims to do this by democratizing science and engineering. This summer we are focusing our efforts on four programs:

The SolSource 3-in-1 (initiated in 2007) is a solar cooking, heating, and electricity-generating device developed in conjunction with Himalayan villagers who were interested in designing a more portable solar cooker that would still be wind-sturdy and capable of stir-frying. This summer we will be working with recently urbanized communities to refine the manufacture of this device for local income generation. Find out more on WorldChanging, Discovery Channel, and the SolSource website. You can also follow updates on twitter. [Funders: St. Andrews Prize for the Environment, Clinton Global Initiative, MIT IDEAS, Muhammad Yunus Innovation Challenge, Pamela Daniels]


Catlin Powers and Drogar Jyid with SolSource 3-in-1

Catlin Powers and Drogar Jyid with SolSource 3-in-1 [Photo by Scot Frank]

HeatSource Textiles (initiate in 2009) offer a renewable means of staying warm at sub-zero temperatures and were developed in conjunction with Himalayan pastoralists who found that climate change was rapidly eradicating their traditional means of staying warm during herding. The design employs the phase change properties of locally-available materials to provide a mobile form of energy storage and controlled heat delivery. The textiles are fully reusable and can also be recharged with solar energy when people aren’t wearing them. Find out more on the HeatSource website and follow it on twitter. [Funders: Lemelson-MIT International Technology Award]

HeatSource Textiles
HeatSource Textiles

The Global Citizen Water Initiative (Citizen Water) (initiated in 2008) works with NGOs, universities, and health clinics to teach villagers how to test their own water sources using simple, inexpensive kits. The results of these tests help match water sources with appropriate local treatment providers. In addition, the initiative’s website—although still in the development phase—will provide an online map of this data for use by researchers and health regulators. Find out more on the Citizen Water website and follow it on twitter. [Funders: Google.org, Tides Foundation, MIT TauBetaPi, MIT IDEAS, the Baruch Family, Legatum Center]

Drogar Jyid runs Citizen Water seminar

Drogar Jyid runs Citizen Water training seminar [Photo by Scot Frank]

We are also developing an illustrated Applied Science and Engineering Reader Series (ASER) for rural schools with chapters on topics such as waste management, water quality, indoor air pollution, latrines, solar cookers, greenhouses, and water treatment/supply methods. Find out more on the ASER website.

The task of enabling others to make their own change is as frustrating as it is intangible. This work cannot be accomplished by handing out food or money, nor through infrastructure development or technology transfer alone. It requires a deep respect between people. Most of all, it requires a willingness to work and learn alongside one another and from each other.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers (me) and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). I will be posting on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find me on Twitter @catlinpowers.

Posted in Citizen Water, HeatSource Textiles, One Earth Designs, Projects, SolSource 3-in-1 | No Comments »