http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273674.html
MIT's Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day
>From impoverished Peruvian villages to MIT's D-Lab, professor Amy Smith
and her spirited team of engineers are on a mission: Fight global
poverty and improve living standards for developing countries—one
low-cost, accessible invention at a time.
By Logan Ward
Published in the August 2008 issue.
The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El
Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but
ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the
valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for
centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.
The farmers of Compone feed corn to their livestock, grind it into meal,
boil it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and stockpile it as insurance
against future unknowns. They burn the corncobs, stripped of kernels, in
the earthen stoves they use for cooking and to heat their homes.
It's the stoves that worry Amy Smith. One morning, the 45-year-old
inventor stands on the front lawn of the town's community center, beside
a 55-gal. drum packed with corncobs that is billowing smoke, a box of
matches in her hand and dressed for comfort in faded jeans, avocado
T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled over a thick curtain of dirty-blond
hair. Smith is ringed by three dozen campesinos who make no move to
dodge the lung-burning, eye-stinging cloud. If she just waited a few
minutes, the embers would burst into flame on their own and the smoke
would dissipate in the intense heat. Instead, she drops a match into the
barrel, then jerks her hand back. Nothing happens.
Smith is trying to turn the cobs into charcoal. For an award-winning
engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this would seem
to be a humble goal. Wood charcoal has been in use for thousands of
years. However, for many of the world's poor, it can be a life-saving
technology. Compone's farmers are among the 800 million people worldwide
who use raw biomass—agricultural waste, dung, straw—for fuel. Globally,
smoke from indoor fires makes respiratory infections the leading cause
of death for children under the age of 5, claiming more than a million
young lives a year. Charcoal burns much more cleanly. "I don't know how
quickly we can change cooking habits here," Smith says, "but I'd like to
see people breathing less smoke inside their homes."
A well-liked instructor at MIT and member of the Popular Mechanics
editorial advisory board, Smith is a rising star in a field known as
appropriate technology, which focuses on practical, usually small-scale
designs to solve problems in the developing world. She has brought four
undergrads to Compone, along with Jesse Austin-Breneman, an MIT graduate
who works for a community organization in Peru, and one of her
engineering collaborators, 53-year-old Gwyndaf Jones. To get here, the
team has lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing
equipment and a heavy wooden crate bearing a pedal-powered grain mill
more than 3500 miles in taxis, airplanes and buses.
The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old
branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the
other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith's D-Lab,
a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in
Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination;
last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare
for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2
per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying
jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven
additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India
and China. In Smith's view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel
have their benefits. "If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a
waterborne disease," she says, "you really understand what it means to
have access to clean drinking water."
Smoke continues to envelop the ruddy-cheeked spectators in Compone.
Children dart in and out of the circle as if playing in a sprinkler.
When the smoke starts to dissipate after another try, her students, who
have been watching nervously, let out a hopeful gasp. But just as
quickly the white cloud is back, lazily boiling out of the drum.
Fortunately, Smith seems impervious to embarrassment, like the
ringmaster of some traveling circus to whom an endless progression of
dusty venues has taught one lesson: Never stop the show. Her toothy
smile stretches wider as she strikes another match ("I'm really a
pyromaniac") and another ("that's why I have so few hairs left on my
hand") and one more ("it's a personality disorder") until—ta-da! Flames
jet out and she jumps back ahead of a whoosh that feels like a punch in
the chest. The smoke vanishes.
After 10 minutes, Smith touches her new boot to the side of the
barrel—sure enough, the rubber sole starts to melt. That's a sign for
Hong to make the drum airtight. The student gets help to lower it to the
ground, blocking holes drilled into the bottom, and then seals the top
with a steel lid and dirt. Inside, the corncobs will slowly carbonize,
impurities baking off over the course of several hours. The result will
be black, corncob-shaped charcoal briquettes.
Amy B. Smith grew up in the Boston suburb of Lexington, Mass., not far
from MIT, where her father taught electrical engineering; Smith's mother
taught math and Latin in a local school. A childhood year the family
spent in India sparked Smith's interest in the developing world. "Seeing
that many people living in poverty must have made a lasting impression
on me," she says, "because I've known my whole life I'd do this work."
As a child, she set aside half her babysitting earnings for UNICEF;
then, after completing her undergraduate degree at MIT, she joined the
Peace Corps and spent four years working as a beekeeper and teacher in
Botswana's Kalahari Desert.
Smith returned to Cambridge to earn a master's degree in mechanical
engineering. According to Smith, her advisor, professor Carl Peterson,
was one of the few professors who didn't make her feel foolish because
of her passion for simplicity. "He has the gift of seeing the underlying
physics and understanding energy flows and work flows of a system almost
instantly," Smith says. When he assigned his students the task of
redesigning a hot-melt glue gun, Smith's classmates turned in drawings
showing multimember linkages and other complex proposals. Smith's design
cut out all but two parts. "I felt like such a goober," Smith remembers,
"but he said, ‘No, this is much better.'"
She finished her degree in 1996, and went looking for design challenges,
turning first to her contacts in Botswana. The AIDS epidemic was raging.
"I met with someone from the ministry of health, who predicted that by
the year 2000 a quarter of the population would be dead. These were the
kids I had been teaching while in the Peace Corps," Smith says. "That
was hard to hear. But I don't do biomedical research. I wasn't going to
find the AIDS vaccine." The epidemic highlighted the poverty of rural
medical centers, which lacked the electricity needed to do even simple,
overnight lab tests. That was something Smith could tackle. She
developed a "phase-change" incubator for culturing samples that relied
on a simple chemical process, rather than electricity. The project won
Smith the first of several engineering prizes, the $7500 B.F. Goodrich
Collegiate Inventors Award.
After returning to Cambridge, Smith completed a design she'd begun
during grad school for an improved electric mill to grind grain, a
project with the potential to reduce drudgery for women worldwide.
"People in the U.S. would be like ‘that's cool,' but they didn't really
understand because none of them had spent hours with a mortar and pestle
grinding grain by hand," she says. "I had." The mills already on the
market broke easily and the replacement parts were expensive and hard to
find; the machines tended to join the carcasses of other nice inventions
shipped from labs in Europe and America and then undone by a lack of
spare parts and followup.
Despite their simplicity, Smith's creations made her a minor celebrity
at MIT, and in 2000 she became the first woman to win the $30,000
Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The same year, she began teaching full time
at the university. It was nearly 30 years since German economist E.F.
Schumacher had published Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People
Mattered, the book credited with launching the appropriate technology
movement. Schumacher argued that many of the infrastructure projects
funded by the World Bank and other organizations hadn't improved lives
on the village level. "He rightly and aptly pointed out that big
solutions don't fit for villages. You have to make it small," says Paul
Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE), whose own
low-cost pumps and irrigation technologies have helped millions of
farmers. "That's what Amy does—she understands design for people who
live on a buck a day."
Smith was ready to inspire a new generation of engineers, but she
quickly saw that her students—few of whom had her Third World
experience—were working in a vacuum. In 2002, she launched D-Lab,
bringing students to Haiti, where they were inspired to find an
alternative to burning wood charcoal, critical in a country that is 97
percent deforested. Her team developed a way to carbonize sugar-cane
waste fibers, called bagasse, then combine the material with a binding
agent to form charcoal briquettes. The experience cemented Smith's
belief that the next stage in appropriate technology must be to design
hand-in-hand with the end user. "Designers in the developed world rely
on focus groups and user input," she says. "Why not do that in the
developing world?"
The charcoal project established her as the world's leading expert on
what she jokingly calls "carbon macrotubes," a nod to that darling of
the high-tech world, carbon nanotubes. Smith rents an office for a
Haitian group that has taught the technique to hundreds of their
countrymen, and the process is being adopted in Rwanda and other
countries. At MIT she still sends up clouds of smoke doing practice
burns to experiment with various materials. "Donkey dung is really
nice," Smith says matter-of-factly, "because it's prebriquetted." (Her
students roast tofu dogs over the barrel fires to comply with university
rules that allow open fires only for barbecues.)
Smith's team and the residents of Compone eat lunch as the corncobs
slowly carbonize in the drum. Austin-Breneman hands out slabs of cheese
and bread, and points people toward a plastic crate of sodas. Men and
women—some in iconic Indian fedoras, others in ball caps—lounge on the
grass, while two pigs nibble leftover corncobs. "The most important
thing we're doing is bringing consciousness to our community," says
Richard Llamacponcca Ravelo, a surveyor from the nearby city of Cusco
who grew up in Compone and invited Smith to visit after meeting
Austin-Breneman. "We want people to realize that the custom of burning
corncobs is very unhealthy—using charcoal instead would be much better."
Several campesinos migrate to the community center's porch, where
Jessica Leon, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering major, pedals a
stationary bike to power a small grain mill. She and Gwyn Jones built
the bicimáquina out of angle iron and recycled bike parts back at D-Lab,
borrowing the design from a nonprofit group in Guatemala called Maya
Pedal. "Most of the welds are mine," Leon says, beaming. "At MIT the
focus is often on theory or cutting-edge technology, but with Amy you
learn about a real problem and then actually do something about it—not
just in a lab but with materials you can see and feel." Unfortunately,
the bike's chain keeps popping off. A few men pipe up with suggestions
in Spanish and Quechua, the local Indian language. Jones turns to Leon
with a smile. "A town of any size has people who can work on bikes."
Not that he really needs the help. Jones helped found Merlin Metalworks,
one of the world's premier makers of high-end bicycles, in 1986; the
company produced the first high-strength titanium alloy frames and
supplied equipment to Lance Armstrong and Greg LeMond. He sold the
company, walking away with enough of a payout to spend his time
wrestling with technology for poor villages. "Amy's not charismatic in
any traditional way, but her sense of purpose and enthusiasm are
infectious," says Jones, who is just one of the talented people to be
captured by Smith's hard-to-resist gravitational pull. "She's tough, but
not macho. If she's traveling and can't find food or a place to sleep,
it doesn't make the slightest impression on her."
"You can't say no to Amy Smith," says Kenneth Pickar, former chief
technology officer for the $6 billion aerospace division of AlliedSignal
and now a Caltech mechanical engineering professor. Last summer, Smith
recruited Pickar to help launch the International Development Design
Summit (IDDS), an event that she intends to hold annually. It was a
month-long bust-your-knuckles workshop that drew problem-solvers from
about 20 countries. The goal was to spur a new approach to appropriate
technology—co-creation, in which engineers disseminate not just
inventions, but design skills.
It's early in her career to start talking about a legacy, but Smith's
greatest impact may come through such efforts, rather than from her own
designs. Many entrepreneurs have proven the scalability of their
products, Pickar says, but "Amy has demonstrated the scalability of her
passion. When you look at all her acolytes continuing the march, I'm
confident her approach will work." One of those influenced by Smith is
former MIT student Shawn Frayne, who has developed a valve for plastic
water-disinfection bags and who won a 2007 Popular Mechanics
Breakthrough Award for his work on a revolutionary wind-power generator
for lighting homes. A former D-Labber, Jessica Vechakul, is designing
bicycle ambulances for use in Zambia. And Smith is personally funding
Austin-Breneman's two-year stint in Peru, partly from a
half-million-dollar MacArthur genius award she won in 2004.
In Cusco, Peru, handheld metal corn shellers based on this plastic
original may soon ease an everyday chore for villagers. “Women may spend
thousands of hours shelling corn each year,” Smith says.
The simplest technology on display in Compone creates the biggest stir.
It's a thick, tapered plastic ring, lined with ridges, that Smith picked
up in Zambia. She gathers the villagers around a colorful wool blanket
piled high with dried corn on the cob. Women here spend many hours
painfully prying kernels off cobs with their fingers. Smith inserts an
unshelled ear into the ring and twists. The ridges in the ring dig into
the cob, popping dozens of kernels with every motion. Faces brighten,
and a few women unconsciously rub the joints of their thumbs. The mayor
of Compone goes first, the crowd laughing as he twists too fast and the
cob breaks. But he quickly finds his rhythm, exclaiming "Interesante!
Interesante!" as the kernels explode from one cob after another. Even
the scrawny dogs hanging around the fringes get excited, poking their
heads in to nibble scattered kernels and then darting guiltily away.
"A small improvement like that can make a huge difference in people's
lives," Smith tells me. "It might mean they can plant three extra rows
of corn because they have more time, or maybe their kids don't work as
much, and instead they go to school."
By the end of the afternoon, Smith's team is fried by the equatorial
sun, huffing in the thin air and exhausted by the struggle to
communicate in Spanish. Smith cheerily tells the wilting group that some
locals have challenged the Americans to a 3-hour uphill hike to take
samples from Compone's water source, starting at dawn the next day.
"They were trash-talking about us gringos not being able to hack it,"
she says with a grin. "I, unfortunately, was trash-talking back."
In the morning, the sky can't choose between sunshine and spitting rain
as we trudge behind a pair of local water overseers to a series of
springs. Except for bird song and the crunch of gravel underfoot, all is
quiet. Conversation ebbs and flows, ranging from how much energy we're
expending going up and down small hillocks to African beekeeping
practices to favorite colors from childhood. For Smith, it was brown. "I
just felt for brown," she says, pausing to catch her breath. "Here you
have a color of so many useful things and yet it's no one's favorite."
Smith's admirers like to trade stories about both her bottomless energy
and her occasional fits of unselfconscious geekiness. During her Peace
Corps stint in Botswana, she sang her own Setswana translation of Bob
Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" at a school ceremony, only to learn later
that the phrase was a euphemism for passing gas. A few years ago at MIT,
she helped launch an annual design contest called Duct Tape Delusions.
("Bring your dreams. We'll bring the tape.") Her own duct-tape clock
hangs on the wall at D-Lab near a coffee table she made from a concrete
latrine slab on blocks. ("D-Lab," Smith says, "is more like the
developing world than any other place at MIT.") Her big red Craftsman
toolbox has drawers labeled: "things that write or measure," "things
that cut" and "sticky things."
The hike to the water source is exhausting (score one for the Compone
locals)—and we arrive back at the community center tired, thirsty,
sunbaked and laden with samples. Two years ago, community volunteers
used pickaxes and shovels to bury a 4-mile-long water pipe to supply
Compone. While that made life easier for villagers, the water needed to
be boiled for safety—local leaders are hoping Smith will have a solution.
As the team prepares the samples using one of Smith's incubators, Leon
discovers that parts—steel washers, rubber gaskets, wire mesh—are
missing from the testing equipment. "They must have fallen out of a
bag," she says, sighing. The team improvises. Jones files off the edge
of a tin petri dish and chisels out the center to create a washer. Leon
and neuroscience major Jackie Gold hop a colectivo, one of Peru's
crowded stop-and-start minivans, for Izcuchaca, where they buy a pair of
children's rain boots to cut into gaskets and hardware cloth to stand in
for the mesh. Later, working cross-legged on the floor of the municipal
building, the students are upbeat. "I like that we're using a shoe,"
Leon says, holding up a bright-blue rubber ring scissored from the boot.
"That's the whole point of this trip—innovation."
Last fall, Smith and "a bunch of real professors" (she is officially a
senior lecturer) traveled to Saudi Arabia to present their research.
"Everyone else had all these equations and graphs and differential this
and that," she says. "And I've got a picture of a kid with a bucket of
water on his head and a corncob turned to charcoal." The audience
bombarded Smith with questions and ideas. "Sometimes people don't refer
to what I do as real engineering," Smith says. "It's so simple. But
sometimes simplicity is harder than complexity."
In recent years, design for the developing world has received increased
attention, thanks partly to a well-publicized effort to build laptops
cheap enough to supply school children in the poorest countries.
Perhaps, given time, such a technology will be transformative. But most
of Smith's work is based on the notion that hacksaws, wrenches and
welding skills can still make a difference.
Before we leave Peru, Smith visits a dirt-floored metal fabrication shop
in Cusco. There, she convinces a tradesman to machine a stainless-steel
corncob sheller to match the plastic one she had shown off in Compone.
The sheller quickly takes shape amid a shower of sparks and the strobe
pops of a welder's torch. It occurs to me that I may be observing the
birth of a local industry. Out in the diesel-choked street, Smith pauses
for a moment. "There's this belief that in order to stop poverty, we
have to find ways to get people to stop being farmers," she says. "What
we need to do is find ways to stop them from being poor farmers."
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