Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Start from What We Can Do to Change the World


My life is surrounded by fancy stuff. Although I am a normal student who works hard and tries to get a job to feed myself and cover the tuition fee, I am drown in fashion posters and latest technology news everyday. Fashion bloggers are showing off luxury products that worth thousands of dollars. Businessmen are talking about A&M deals. It seems that our society is so well developed that everybody is rich and that no one suffers from the pressure of life.

But this is not the truth of our society. When I first saw the numbers displayed in the first lecture of the class, I was shocked. There are uncountable amount of people struggling with deficiency of food, water and shelter, let alone health insurance and education.

Those problems are difficult to completely solve in a short time. The reasons for the poor living condition are propound and complex. Wars, political upheavals, limited arable land and poor infrastructure can all be causals of people’s poor living condition. For example, we cannot change the climate from arid to wet in Africa, nor could we immediately build industry infrastructures in rural areas. So it seems so hard a task that we cannot accomplish.

I changed my mind after I learned the projects that are already applied to people’s daily life. Those projects do not aim at changing the political environment by revolutions, or change natural environment by huge construction plans. Those change makers took practical actions, and used limited resource to make people’s life easier. As Shane Snow reported to us in A New Ingeniously Designed Shelter for Refugees—Made by Ikea, Shelters are made to settle refugees[i]. In Africa innovations: 15 ideas helping to transform a continent, Hippo rollers are invented to help residents to carry water, trees are restored to make the soil more fertile, water pumps are built to help farmers to grow crops[ii]. Those projects bring not only convenience for people, but also the hope and opportunities for a better life.

The successful innovation projects share the listed common attributes. Firstly, the needs are clarified. Teams take real life problems that people face as the central thought of designs. For example, shelters for refugees are made by light materials, and are equipped with basic facilities. Secondly, technologies are utilized to lower the cost and lift the user experiences. Just like what is said in One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education[iii], technology is finally poised to disrupt how people learn. Khan academy seized the opportunity and offered free courses for distant people. Thirdly, there should be help from organizations to provide human resource and financial support. Without Ikea, the shelter program would encounter more difficulties in designing and constructing.

Once I thought that only tremendous revolution can solve problems like poverty and famine. But those project made me realize that we should not wait for big changes, but should start from what we can do to change the world. Everybody deserves a better life.  

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