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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