To most computer scientists grid computing may sound clichéd but its a trend that has many implications for future economies, especially for small enterprises.

The wikipedia defines it as
"Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labour between processes. "
In many ways it can be look upon as an alternative to super computers. The basic principle of being able to utilize multiple heterogeneous resources is a key element of this. In the economic sense it an alternative to monopolistic central corporations. It is a trend into distributed but independent economic clusters that work in a coherent and interdependent way. The development of Linux has to some extent the same tendencies. It has been developed by multiple contributers from various places in what could be called as “spare time”. It almost sounds unbelievable that an entire operating system has been built this way. Though one could argue that software development is a much more streamlined and controllable process and does not involve material costs and only the cost intellectual input and time.

Is there actually a way to make the same happen in other fields and particularly for social development projects. If the tasks involved are broken down to small sizable chunks it might actually be possible for experts to contribute small amounts of time to individual tasks in their domain. This also could involve sharing of real vacant resources and contacts apart form just time. Recently I saw this news report about how Diabetes is almost reaching a epidemic proportions in Africa. This is largely due to late detection of cases and the lack of effective monitoring and diet control. A interesting point raised was the high costs of small electronic blood glucose monitors and the reagent paper strip.

For a moment let us blue sky and imagine this scenario:
"Openbuilder" is a service that tries to tackle the issue of blood glucose monitors and tries to design one to be cheaply manufactured for the resource availability of a certain region in Africa. A team visits the region to study the resources available and the potential hurdles. Then a study is conducted to see why existing products don't suit the need and costs. The findings are published openly on their website. Experts from across the board are invited to spend one hour to review the findings online and provide inputs and leads. In this case the experts are from bio-chemistry, medical sciences, manufacturing technologies, patent attorneys and small innovators. The aggregated inputs are complied and sent to various experts and organizations requesting contribution of time and other physical resources. Various people contribute to various extents and try to collaboratively build a simple solution utilizing local resources of the region. The various concepts and design solutions are documented and manufacturers are invited to become licensees in a open source style model. The manufacturers have rights to distribute and sell them in their geographic areas under controlled pricing as agreed under the terms of the license"

Of-course this is only a ideal situation and there are many holes in the concept. but for a moment if we imagine that an handful of people world over would not mind contributing say five hours a month in a developmental project in return for due credits. The fundamental problem in this model is that there needs to be a core team of dedicated people to hold such an initiative together and actually have a sustainable revenue model. One could imagine this to be like a not for profit company where team members could actually draw salaries in par with their industry. It is very important have a real business model and have incentive mechanisms for the contributers to realize this idea. Maybe Openbuilder might be for real someday. Its interesting to note that in a open source approach to making physical things is that there is a real cost to development and the product is sold for a profit if its ever sold as there is the actual cost of replication unlike software. Commitment of skilled people is a very difficult thing to ask for, especially for a non profit approach. It would be interesting to see if an system can be developed to utilize micro contributions from wide spread talent to achieve small simple goals towards achievement of a larger development goal. It could look at new ways of project management and also income source for people using the principle of grid computing and new decentralized management ideologies. This also is interesting from the point of interaction design as the whole process involves collaboration between unfamiliar individuals remotely connected. The electronic mediums today do not offer very real interaction with people and it would be a mammoth excerise to study and find interesting solutions to the unusual social dynamics of such a system.

Mass Customization

Mass Customization is an interesting trend in the manufacturing sectors. Be it choosing a colour for your car or getting your message laser engraved on your ipod. Thanks to advances in high speed robotics this is a very real scenario.

The wikipedia defines it as
"Mass customization, in marketing, manufacturing, and management, is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output. Those systems combine the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization. The phrase was originally coined in 1987 by Stan Davis in his book Future Perfect. He described mass customization as the result when "the same large number of customers can be reached as in mass markets of the industrial economy, and simultaneously they can be treated individually as in the customized markets of pre-industrial economies".

Tseng and Jiao define mass customization as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer's needs with near mass production efficiency" (Source: Tseng, M.M., Jiao, J. (2001). "

But an another way of looking at mass customization is to see how products can be actually designed for individual needs rather than just superficially customizing it. This is often referred to as 'collaborative customization', where the end user and manufacture communicate to meet the needs. Most of today’s mass customization are just cosmetic i.e changing the way it looks rather than how it functions or adapts. The real value of this is in going beyond a marketing gimmick to being a system that extracts maximum value for both the end user and manufacturer. There is a real need for customization in some sectors like clothing, accessibility products and systems where there are high ergonomic need to aesthetic need. In contrast modern manufacturing goes against the grain due the fact the it has a rigid manufacturing process. It would be interesting to see how product can be designed to meet functional customization. Ideally this process should take advantage of the crafts sector and cottage industry. Products need to be designed in such a way that it meets the local manufacturing needs and the skill sets available in a particular community. This does not mean that everything is done by the same set of people. In-fact the manufacturing can be distributed and could utilize modules that interconnect in various ways. i.e each small business is an OEM to each other. Also Designers can attempt to design products in such a way that when it looses its original value it becomes a raw material or byproduct for another product or process. Also it would be good if the product had an affordance that was a way to encourage people to repurpose objects. Some attempts can be seen in product packaging etc for many groceries like coffee jars, yoghurt cups etc. Mass customization also has direct bearing to universal design principles and hopefully designer would take advantage of that in the near future.

An amazing example of this is the rubber sandals that are made in many parts of africa and mainly in Uganda out of waste rubber tyres.

How to make your own tyre sandals - http://www.hollowtop.com/sandals.htm

Article on various products out of rubber tyres - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3655022.stm

In the context of high technology products this becomes even more important as by far electronic good produce the most toxic waste in very fast cycles. electronic hardware in-fact needs to be designed to lean itself to multiple applications after its initial life. Already many countries have reduced the use of toxic materials but this is only a small factor compared to what can be done to design electronic product in such a way that it does not contribute to contamination itself.

A typical trye sandal , image credits: http://www.mcaloone.com/

Reconfigurable computing

Reconfigurable computing is a phrase often used to describe microprocessors that can realign their internal architecture to compute in different ways thus lending to multiple functions.
Wikipeida defines it as
"Reconfigurable computing is computer processing with highly flexible computing fabrics. The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to make substantial changes to the data path itself in addition to the control flow."

A modern incarnation of reconfigurable computing is the FPGA ( field programable gate arrays) which is basically a chip with millions of semiconductor units that can be configured to behave as a per user specifications. What is useful about it apart from the science point of view is that it greatly reduces the need to dedicated resources for specific applications. It also creates this interesting situation where the hardware can almost be independent of the software, which in turn paves the way for true open-source hardware. So devices in future might have generic hardware and applications can be loaded on it for various needs. This poses an unique problem of customizable front end and interface. This situation can be looked as an opportunity for many small business world wide as there would be big need for enterprises to actually design and implement specific front ends to industrially manufactured back ends. There has already been a wave of electronic products that try to emulate the swiss army knife approach to product design but none of them have been too successful due the inherent nature of various applications and the way they compliment each other. This also has a lot of cultural bearing and is defined by associative needs. Small business in developing economies can really take advantage of such technologies and find suitable applications for them. They will perpetual advantages compared to mass manufacturers as the cost of customization will be too high for industrial sectors. The potential for such a market taking off is very high if technical and semi technical schools in developing nations actually impart such knowledge and the the basic know how of designing custom products based on standardized OEM products.

Repurposing obsolete technologies

There goes a saying that all technology is military , though it not entirely true but there actually exist a huge amount of technology that is ex military or space research driven. There is not much statistics available but there definitely is a lot to be exploited from such a situation, especially in the area of communication, power, shelter and other infrastructure needs.
There is also large amount of indigenous and age old knowledge in many parts of the world that could be put to good use in a modern from. For example knowledge of various agricultural practices, food processing, herbal medicine and construction techniques could be analyzed, re purposed and developed into a systematic process as a knowledge kit for local communities.

Viral Learning

Last December I went to Mumbai to work on a small project. While I was there I had to goto a tiny little shop near my work place to replace my phone battery. I was taken surprised by what I saw in that 5 ft by 10 ft shop. 2 young men, roughly about 25 in age were busy repairing cellular phones of all kinds and makes. They were not just replacing standard fitting like batteries etc.but they were actually replacing tiny broken components in phone and made them work. Out of curiosity I asked them where they had learnt to fix cell phones and what kind of educational background did they have. I was told that one of them had studied up-to high school and dropped out and the other was studying commerce part time in a nearby collage. Apparently they had learn the basic trade from a cousin and setup this shop to make a living for their family. It left me wondering how they could actually learn to fix such a complicated device? Those 20 minutes of observation was very enlightening. They went about very quickly looking for signs of malfunction and knew the internal parts of most of these devices. they had hardly any knowledge on the actually technology or science of GSM devices but they knew the the craft of troubleshooting very well.

Latter back in Milano I was discussing this with my advisors Simona and Massimo when they termed it as 'Viral learning'. Its an interesting phrase to use as indeed the way this kind of knowledge and skill travels is viral. Looking back its interesting to analyze the cell phone repair shop. With little or no formal technical education these young men had learnt a very useful trade from someone they knew. The transfer of skills and knowledge was by far free and has a model of master and apprentice. The knowledge they acquired is immediately put to use and morphs according to need. They learn to fix new models and keep update with the least gadgets. The reason why such skills are quickly absorbed is due to the fact that there is a very immediate need for it. This also drives more people to absorb it and slowly it becomes a trend. There are no formal institutions teaching such things but the rate at which it expands through informal training is remarkable. Can such a concept be applied to creating new opportunities in developing economies.

Can products and services be designed to take advantage of such a trend. It would be quite exciting to design, say a Mp3 player that small shops like that can build and sell for a fraction of the cost of big brands. it could be designed around commonly available component from other devices like cell phone batteries, compact flash card readers and open core FPGA kits etc . It would be serviceable locally and would generate employment at the very local level. So there is no need to have a central manufacturing plant etc , just source parts, document the design and provide the seed training for small enterprises to start rolling out products. This also has a connection to the mass customization aspect and could go quite well with certain kind of products. Strangely enough there are a few open source Mp3 player schematics available and some attempts on a open source cell phone.

http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/index.html
http://www.frankvh.com/mp3player/index.html
http://www.robs-projects.com/mp3proj/newplayer.html