Hardware Things: It's all about perspective, you see
Hello there,
There are two ways to look at things: as they are, as Kai Löffelbein examines the disposal of e-waste in Agboloshie, Ghana; or as they could be, like the Agboloshie Makerspace Platform builds spacecrafts from the same e-waste.
As they say, the choice is up to us.
Happy March!
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Things I Enjoyed Reading
3D printing for medicine has been talked about quite a lot, about how it could help surgeons practice for surgeries. A good case study of that is captured by Micrive Infinite - a design company in Nairobi - who produced a model to help dental surgeons extract a needle from the jaw of a 6 year old.
Imagine being born in a war-torn region and growing up around all that, what are you likely to create? In Mogadishu, Mohammed Ali - obviously not the boxer - is building military-style tanks using scrap metal parts: from motorcycle engines to improvised pipes.
There seem to be multiple manufacturing races going on: for smartphones - between Kenya, Rwanda and the current leaders, South Africa; for automobiles - between Morocco (current leaders, buoyed by exports to the Middle East) and South Africa.
Interesting Things
Small science teams are better.
What makerspaces teach you about space stations.
How design decisions affect the usability of sanitation devices.
Purposive sampling vs random sampling - the solar power edition.
Company Spotlight
Addresses in Ghana, like most parts of Africa, are usually written without a postal code. This can affect logistics planning, among other things, and is the problem that SnooCODE aims to solve. SnooCODE has since powered Ghana's National Ambulance Service, helping to reduce their response time and improve their location accuracy, and is focusing their new development on a new technology: drones.
[Read more about this technology].
Anecdotal Things
Speaking with Sesinam Dagadu, the creator of SnooCODE, there were some points that really struck me as instructive. There is a benefit to building infrastructure after other communities have, as you are then able to build in newer technology that simply was not available initially.
So while postal codes were initially designed for the easy distribution of mail, newer 'location codes' can be designed for verification, privacy and secure payments.
Sesinam will be speaking at Datasheet, the conference by Hardware Lagos on Saturday, April 6th, 2019.
Tweet of the Month
In Nigeria, a quick guide on how to retard innovation.
https://twitter.com/eketiette/status/1099038891368239106
Have a good month!
Sai anjima,
Chuma.