Ages ago, I had Vol. 2, _The Metal Lathe_ which was one of the 7 vol. "Gingery Books", a series on _Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap_ (Vol. 1 was _The Charcoal Foundry_) which used as its central conceit the fact that a lathe is the one tool in a machine shop suited to easily replicating itself (insert old machinist joke about how you can make anything with a shaper, except money).
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
When I went to South Africa last, we went through a few slums.
It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.
They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.
Music, much like sport, is seen by many working class people as a way to make some money, so not completely senseless. Art to a lesser extent.
Carpenters/joiners are a good half-way house, as they can provide both practical assistance to the community as well as selling collectibles/souvenirs or whatever.
The problem is the minute some of these people pick up skills or money, they leave the slums behind. The plumbers and electricians may make better money rigging up office blocks than from fitting out the slums.
> I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.
Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.
Apart from the obvious disclaimer that some parts of Africa function much better than others...
Zimbabwe's agricultural sector was wrecked by handing farms to Mugabe loyalists who didn't know what to do with them. His government didn't just go for whites, but also some of the black farm workers who would have known how to use them.
Likewise, the famine in Ethiopia was not helped by either Mengistu's Marxist government (who used Live Aid money for arms) or the previous set up under Emperor Haile Selassie which was based on clientism.
Yeah, a bunch of Africa's problems were entirely self-inflicted. But... Western nations just dumping their surplus on Africa under the guise of "donations" certainly didn't help.
I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation
To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)
That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.
A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately
The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.
So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?
Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
> If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
There are many, many, many solutions like this on YouTube from all over the world. I have to admit that there do seem to be more Russian ones than anyone else, but maybe they're just better at posting video. I've seen an insane amount of homebuilt tractors and offroad vehicles coming out of russia.
Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?
I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts.
Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
Front forks and the crank require special tools to remove. I assume the free wheel assembly would be the same. I don't know if it would be possible to modify these to be serviceable with basic tools, the point is an African could probably work out how to fix a bike, the issue would be affording tools and spares, and availability of those tools and spares.
> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
Well you strip all the crap off, don't you? Just run the barest frame possible.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.
You do know that it is possible to buy a durable, heavy duty steel bicycle that is not department store trash, right? We have hundreds of these were I work.
They're actually surprisingly inexpensive, for what they are. It does look like they're single-speed which limits them to nice big flat sites, but they look like they'd hold up well.
Have made a few suggestions above. Obviously I don't see Africa as a uniform continent, but extremes of dryness and humidity can be found in different parts, in some areas roads are bad and so on. Also good places for bike locks (which we all need), maybe water bottles, cargo features and lighting (since some roads will be unlit (again a general issue.)
Yeah, that sounds about right. I assume such bikes, parts and tools do exist. Can probably order it all on alibaba. I intend to investigate and do this in the coming years, but have to attend to other things first.
The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.
Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.
Buffalo bicycles cost around $150 at least. That's frankly way too expensive to be a good bike for developing countries no matter how well suited it is for rough terrain.
The best bikes I saw were ones that a kid from a family could buy for maybe $20 in local currency and the repairability comes from the cheap cost - if something breaks down, you can find the replacement part from a spare bike that broke down months ago.
oh wow, yeah, $150 is far too expensive. Its unsurprising, given how flashy their site is and their like 100 employees - what are they all even doing, other than patting themselves on the back?!
The site shows all the telltale signs of self-important, low-impact NGO.
Some parts of Africa are similar to elsewhere, but obvious things would be parts that can deal with either extreme dryness or humidity (both problems in different parts of the continent), good suspension (for areas with bad roads), bright colours (for visibility on shared roads), integration of bike locks and easy self-repair (for people in more remote areas).
it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system
the OLPC was the "send them bikes" disguised as the DIY-able system. They designed what they thought would be the best computer for impoverished children when in reality those children had no real use for a computer
I dunno, saying they don't have a use for a computer seems incorrect to me, even in the poorest parts of the world today, a substantial minority have acquired their own computer that's cheap, small, efficient, has a built in long distance radio, can run arbitrary software, doesn't require reliable electricity (I mean cell phones)
obviously it's a different technological and economic today compared to 2005, but still, "the global poor don't need computers" is questionable just based on the fact that they are spending their own money to get them
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
Making your own bicycle is a waste of time and energy. If you’re buying in bulk from China, you can get a bike for around a $20 per unit cost. I know that $20 is a lot of money in some parts of the world, but it would make far more sense to organize bulk purchases than to try to start up some kind of ersatz low quality bike industry.
I used to live in Thailand, and over the last 10 or so years it seems that the kind of DIY content you find on Youtube has had a positive effect. Before then it was difficult to find a building maintenance team that understood the purpose of a waste water P-Trap (unfortunately I'm not exaggerating)
I think this extends to wealthy communities too. Basically every item in my home more complex than a spoon is beyond my capacity to manufacture or repair. A resource that teaches me how to build useful things without relying on a complex supply chain or prohibitively expensive tools would be pretty darn liberating.
Well, fundamentally, there are two different types of furniture:
- platforms
- boxes
so if one can build a drawer box, one should be able to make pretty much anything --- it's just a matter of working out how to cut things to length/width and possibly reduce/adjust thickness and what sort of joinery one wishes to use.
See my top-level post elsethread for the metal-working angle.
You know you already have that resource, right? That's what the internet is. There's nothing stopping you from learning, for example, woodworking today. You just have to start.
Whilst technically possible, becoming a journeyman carpenter, plumber, bricklayer, electrician and plasterer isn't practical for most people, in terms of time or money.
The site we're discussing shortcuts past traditional skills and tools to give you useful items. That's more the kind of resource I have in mind.
You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
Ship a village 1000 bikes and one person is going to end up seizing control and selling them to everyone at market value. Perhaps even under the guise of being a social non-profit whose profits go to help people (extremely ineffectively)
> The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
People who ask this have never gone above and beyond to help someone, expecting nothing in return save for the gratitude they receive. It's a damn shame.
This is of course all wonderful and the ideas presented here might also be useful for Western nations if the war machine starts gaining momentum in, say, a decade or two and things will turn uncomfortable.
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
What do we care more about? The present? The current generation? Or future generations? Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? The perpetuation of human civilization? The perpetuation of human civilization with a set of values that that supports the growth and happiness of all?
That's the first question, right? Alignment. Sustainable alignment.
From there, it's all about sustaining those shared values, and minimizing risk.
Build bonds: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or establish trust. It works out better in the long run; people don't usually Like to stab each other in the back
Trampling starts cycles of revenge, and that's no fun for anyone involved either
Exploitation prioritizes short term gain and screws you in the long run, more often than not.
And Illich (where the term "tool" is quite broad, including anything from a knife to a highway system):
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
Damn, thank you! I often refers to myself saying "Naive heuristic : avoiding gadgets or services (free or not) that increase inequality by design, through technology or business model or both, would be a good starting point." but I can now point to this!
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
As other comments have implied, but not explicitly said, they do their own engineering already with what they have.
Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued.
Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence.
EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me.
"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained"
As someone who has spent some time in sub-saharan Africa, I can tell you that there is lots that can be done if just seeing the possibilities.
Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.
In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.
Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.
I've never been to sub-saharan Africa, but I did grow up broke enough to be on the receiving end of people with good intentions.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the realities of a situation guided by those who more deeply understand it can very quickly prune the possibilities that an engineer sees. Many engineers would just get frustrated and give up. Many leaders would become impatient with those engineers.
I think to get people's heads out of the clouds and produce real results requires a very special kind of engineer. That is most likely going to be someone local, not an outsider. One can definitely help on the education side of things for the locals, but I'm not convinced that's where the real problems are. It's more likely political and economic. Not even the best engineers in the world are going to solve that.
I suspect you've never spent any meaningful amount of time in the local environments, or you wouldn't have made this comment.
As I elaborated on in another comment, it is commonplace to find that people who have little to no education and resources are missing countless opportunities to implement simple improvements to almost everything.
This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well)
What is needed is genuine collaboration and communication between people living in whatever situation and others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
> This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well) [...] others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
The trouble with your premise is that it doesn't just apply to local people, it applies to people in general. Incompetence is all around us. Notice that everyone is a local in the place where they live.
But local people at least have the benefit of knowing their own situations, which puts them ahead of some other rando who doesn't even have that and presumes to know better.
And hence, AS I SAID, people should collaboratively work together. There's no presumption - despite you recognizing that incompetence is all around us, you'd be amazed at how many completely obvious things are not done, and other things done very poorly
Which is a misunderstanding of the premise that locals know best.
No one thinks that going to someone and offering them ideas is bad. The thing people actually object to is imperialism, and they object to it because it's common. All over the place you see not just governments making rules from an ivory tower, but even well-meaning non-profits providing grants or resources with the requirement that things be done in a particular way with no regard for local conditions.
If you're trying to help someone then you shouldn't need to coerce them. Nobody was ever objecting to the cases where you don't.
Actually, plenty of people - including the person I was replying to - explicitly argue that locals know best and you're being imperialist by even suggesting that outsiders might have anything useful to contribute other than money.
And, yes, you do need to "coerce"/convince/persuade/retrain people across many dimensions - people are generally extremely resistant to change, and instead stick with whatever theyre already doing. Not all interventions are just immediately self-evidently beneficial. Eg. "Hey stop destroying your topsoil by every means imaginable - removing and burning all waste from the harvest, not planting in contours to prevent erosion" and much much more. That takes time to prove out and even then requires a leap of faith.
I do strongly agree, though, that "well meaning" non-profits are quite often completely clueless and, arguably, destructive. Often through the very gifts they give, which often don't even work, or at least go counter towards the necessary goal of developing self-sufficiency.
One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)
Yeah, I agree with this. Though, I think you could make bikes for much cheaper with some ingenuity. Certainly some bike-powered appliances.
Also I think OLPC was a misguided project, as most of these things are. Its out of stem with maslows hierarchy of needs. Folks who are subsistence farmers with drought, smoke filled homes and stomach parasites don't need a laptop and academic education. They need practical and actionable tools and techniques to better meet their basic needs, a state from which they could better pursue academics etc
No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't the hardest part of a new business, is it? Etc.
There's not actually all that many useful things that can be made in poor, underresourced countries and villages. It's cheaper to buy them from a Chinese factory that is highly specialized at making those useful things in huge quantities and send them via container ship to the place where they're needed. This is as true for random poor people in Africa as it is for me when I buy stuff cheap on AliExpress.
If you're in a country like France, where buying fans for your daughter's schools is not allowed [0], or installing your own store-bought AC unit either, making DIY devices seems the easy part, sadly.
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
I thought of this guy as well. I love the spirit of attempting to make open source farm machinery. I think that domain and ones like it are under addressed by open source in general. I think the guy who started it still makes content on youtube but much of it seems to be recordings of zoom webinars he does. Not really sure what the state of the project is
I've never really understood the point of open source ecology. As you noted, it seems egregiously complicated and expensive. I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.
I would argue that, for anything with value, there is value in having a decent open source option for that thing. I think farm equipment is valuable, so I think it's great that someone is working on an open source option. You are right though, it is an enormously uphill battle. To get off the ground, there would likely need to be a well funded non profit involved. Would be cool to see Futo or similar tackle something like this
I think it makes more sense if it's not viewed under the aspect of trying to be maximally productive in its output. If you look at it over they years, they've also tried to do a share of public outreach / education (though I'm not sure how successful), and I think they also sustain themselves in terms of labor with burnt out tech people that are looking for a change of scenery.
So similar to a good zoo, that does both active conservation work, and at the same time public education (e.g. in the form of guided tours for school trips).
> I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.
I think even in a well-executed form, it would likely still be quite obscure, as there is next to no need for it in western societies (apart from emergency preperation).
MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques
I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.
My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
You might want to look at biogas digester design - I met farmers near Hanover who were running big biogas digesters, and using the excess heat to heat their homes and pools all winter…
I've been following this guy a couple of years now (as well as many other mentioned in the comments like LowTechMagazine, Simplifier, OSE, etc)
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
That looks rather primitive. I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one. If the designs were adapted so that they no longer looked as they’d been designed by an anarcho-primitivist, would we still regard them as low-tech at all?
I love this project. I often lament how narrowly focused on tech/software open source tends to be. It is the most powerful example of human altruism that I can think of but it tends not to address a lot of peoples basic needs. I would love to see an open source house, car, bike, etc much more than I would like to see another solution for coordinating container clusters or something
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
Also lots and lots of manufacturing and repair work is like kept secret from the common people or at least that is the general vibe. So I'm happy for this initiative.
1. Identify a locally viable deciduous tree species.
2. Plant this species on the afternoon aspect of the sun in your location. So for northern hemisphere plant to the southwest. For southern hemisphere plant to the northwest.
3. Enjoy shade in summer and sun in winter, plus cleaner air.
Another option depending upon your architecture is to take advantage of forced air within a roof cavity. Buy a large diameter fan with an electronic control, install at apex, and set it to operate when the temperature exceeds a certain point. This will result in a house wide temperature drop with no need to expend $$$ setup plus dollars per hour per room on air conditioning.
Another option is simply shading. One of the simplest and most traditional approaches here is the drop awning. A drop awning consists of a retractable material expanse which can render a building surface in shade and thus promote rapid air movement and cooling in the hottest periods.
Two final options include internal forced air: passive variant (open all the windows and doors) or active variant (ceiling fan, solar works) and insulation or thermal mass.
Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.
If you don't have AC but do have a refrigerator, you can build a DIY AC using a box, bottles of frozen water and a fan. There's YouTube tutorials on how to do it.
I have friends who use it in their apartment which doesn't have AC and doesn't allow installation of one.
Do the thermodynamics of that work out beyond a localized shift? (kitchen is hot, other room cool?)
I've always thought that refrigerators should be boxed in with air circulation where filtered intake air for the back comes from the basement and the then heated air is piped up to the attic to be vented.
what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.
Ages ago, I had Vol. 2, _The Metal Lathe_ which was one of the 7 vol. "Gingery Books", a series on _Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap_ (Vol. 1 was _The Charcoal Foundry_) which used as its central conceit the fact that a lathe is the one tool in a machine shop suited to easily replicating itself (insert old machinist joke about how you can make anything with a shaper, except money).
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/google-post-by-marcus-wolsc...
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/3d-printed-milling-machine-i...
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...
[1] https://archive.org/details/natureartofwor00pyed
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
You might like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Appropedia posted here every few years but paradoxically very little success here.
Awesome resource, thanks for sharing!
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
When I went to South Africa last, we went through a few slums.
It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.
They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.
Music, much like sport, is seen by many working class people as a way to make some money, so not completely senseless. Art to a lesser extent.
Carpenters/joiners are a good half-way house, as they can provide both practical assistance to the community as well as selling collectibles/souvenirs or whatever.
The problem is the minute some of these people pick up skills or money, they leave the slums behind. The plumbers and electricians may make better money rigging up office blocks than from fitting out the slums.
> I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.
Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.
The White Man's Burden by William Easterly covered this in some detail quite a few years ago.
Apart from the obvious disclaimer that some parts of Africa function much better than others...
Zimbabwe's agricultural sector was wrecked by handing farms to Mugabe loyalists who didn't know what to do with them. His government didn't just go for whites, but also some of the black farm workers who would have known how to use them.
Likewise, the famine in Ethiopia was not helped by either Mengistu's Marxist government (who used Live Aid money for arms) or the previous set up under Emperor Haile Selassie which was based on clientism.
Yeah, a bunch of Africa's problems were entirely self-inflicted. But... Western nations just dumping their surplus on Africa under the guise of "donations" certainly didn't help.
That is why Heifer International is such an important charity:
https://www.heifer.org/our-work/approach
I think, largely, both options should be used in tandem. Give the hungry some fish, they need it, but while you're there teach them how to fish
I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
> why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
Because no one is willing to pay them for it and they have bills to pay.
This is the reason we won’t tax the bots for UBI, they have bills to pay too.
Check out David Malawey's work: https://www.youtube.com/@davidmalawey
He's teaching proper engineering with commodity parts and accessible technologies.
In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
The Carter Center has nearly eliminated the Guinea Worm: https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.
The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation
To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)
That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.
A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately
The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.
https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...
There are plenty of nonprofits making a difference, your cynicism aside.
How is that difference measured, in general?
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.
https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/#by-the-nu...
> Since our efforts began in 1986, the incidence of Guinea worm has fallen by more than 99.99% to 10* human cases in 2025
Notice I am not asking for an example. Anecdata of one, and for sure there are many, in isolation is—demonstrably—mostly PR.
So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?
>How is that difference measured?
So it is personal attacks? Are you joking?
Is there no gatekeeping of pools of money?
Because i would rather solve the problems close to home, the problems involving those billionaires.
Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.
Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.
We spend 60 years of our lives being miserable so that the last 10 will be slightly less miserable. How does that make sense?
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
World Bicycle Relief has one approach to the transportation angle:
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
> If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
There are many, many, many solutions like this on YouTube from all over the world. I have to admit that there do seem to be more Russian ones than anyone else, but maybe they're just better at posting video. I've seen an insane amount of homebuilt tractors and offroad vehicles coming out of russia.
Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?
Well I'm not African so I don't know.
I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts.
Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
Front forks and the crank require special tools to remove. I assume the free wheel assembly would be the same. I don't know if it would be possible to modify these to be serviceable with basic tools, the point is an African could probably work out how to fix a bike, the issue would be affording tools and spares, and availability of those tools and spares.
> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
No. I politely covered BSOs
"very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use"
You want cheap and reliable, not cheap with a load of doodads to make it seem expensive.
Well you strip all the crap off, don't you? Just run the barest frame possible.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.
The problem is BSOs tend to have weird/non-standard parts which complicate repair/replacement and the tools necessary for working on them.
You do know that it is possible to buy a durable, heavy duty steel bicycle that is not department store trash, right? We have hundreds of these were I work.
https://www.worksmancycles.com/indbikes.html
They're actually surprisingly inexpensive, for what they are. It does look like they're single-speed which limits them to nice big flat sites, but they look like they'd hold up well.
Have made a few suggestions above. Obviously I don't see Africa as a uniform continent, but extremes of dryness and humidity can be found in different parts, in some areas roads are bad and so on. Also good places for bike locks (which we all need), maybe water bottles, cargo features and lighting (since some roads will be unlit (again a general issue.)
Yeah, that sounds about right. I assume such bikes, parts and tools do exist. Can probably order it all on alibaba. I intend to investigate and do this in the coming years, but have to attend to other things first.
Sounds like a Dutch bike would work well
https://www.buffalobicycle.com/storage/documents/Buffalo_com...
The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.
Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.
Buffalo bicycles cost around $150 at least. That's frankly way too expensive to be a good bike for developing countries no matter how well suited it is for rough terrain.
The best bikes I saw were ones that a kid from a family could buy for maybe $20 in local currency and the repairability comes from the cheap cost - if something breaks down, you can find the replacement part from a spare bike that broke down months ago.
oh wow, yeah, $150 is far too expensive. Its unsurprising, given how flashy their site is and their like 100 employees - what are they all even doing, other than patting themselves on the back?!
The site shows all the telltale signs of self-important, low-impact NGO.
Some parts of Africa are similar to elsewhere, but obvious things would be parts that can deal with either extreme dryness or humidity (both problems in different parts of the continent), good suspension (for areas with bad roads), bright colours (for visibility on shared roads), integration of bike locks and easy self-repair (for people in more remote areas).
it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system
the OLPC was the "send them bikes" disguised as the DIY-able system. They designed what they thought would be the best computer for impoverished children when in reality those children had no real use for a computer
I dunno, saying they don't have a use for a computer seems incorrect to me, even in the poorest parts of the world today, a substantial minority have acquired their own computer that's cheap, small, efficient, has a built in long distance radio, can run arbitrary software, doesn't require reliable electricity (I mean cell phones)
obviously it's a different technological and economic today compared to 2005, but still, "the global poor don't need computers" is questionable just based on the fact that they are spending their own money to get them
Saying they had no use for a computer was a poor choice of words. Rather, OLPC wasn't what those communities needed
It's extremely expensive to ship bikes around - even old unused ones.
isn't this what bike thieves do though?
> bespoke
I see what you did there
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
There are game-theoretically aligned ways.
See for example https://oneacrefund.org/ [0] where they have a revolving loan fund.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
[0] The person who started also appeared in a podcast where they explained the basics https://foreveron.com/podcast/episode-035/
Making your own bicycle is a waste of time and energy. If you’re buying in bulk from China, you can get a bike for around a $20 per unit cost. I know that $20 is a lot of money in some parts of the world, but it would make far more sense to organize bulk purchases than to try to start up some kind of ersatz low quality bike industry.
I used to live in Thailand, and over the last 10 or so years it seems that the kind of DIY content you find on Youtube has had a positive effect. Before then it was difficult to find a building maintenance team that understood the purpose of a waste water P-Trap (unfortunately I'm not exaggerating)
I think this extends to wealthy communities too. Basically every item in my home more complex than a spoon is beyond my capacity to manufacture or repair. A resource that teaches me how to build useful things without relying on a complex supply chain or prohibitively expensive tools would be pretty darn liberating.
Well, fundamentally, there are two different types of furniture:
- platforms
- boxes
so if one can build a drawer box, one should be able to make pretty much anything --- it's just a matter of working out how to cut things to length/width and possibly reduce/adjust thickness and what sort of joinery one wishes to use.
See my top-level post elsethread for the metal-working angle.
You know you already have that resource, right? That's what the internet is. There's nothing stopping you from learning, for example, woodworking today. You just have to start.
Whilst technically possible, becoming a journeyman carpenter, plumber, bricklayer, electrician and plasterer isn't practical for most people, in terms of time or money.
The site we're discussing shortcuts past traditional skills and tools to give you useful items. That's more the kind of resource I have in mind.
You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
Ship a village 1000 bikes and one person is going to end up seizing control and selling them to everyone at market value. Perhaps even under the guise of being a social non-profit whose profits go to help people (extremely ineffectively)
Source: I've literally seen this with my own eyes
> The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
People who ask this have never gone above and beyond to help someone, expecting nothing in return save for the gratitude they receive. It's a damn shame.
This is of course all wonderful and the ideas presented here might also be useful for Western nations if the war machine starts gaining momentum in, say, a decade or two and things will turn uncomfortable.
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
Imo it depends on priorities!
What do we care more about? The present? The current generation? Or future generations? Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? The perpetuation of human civilization? The perpetuation of human civilization with a set of values that that supports the growth and happiness of all?
That's the first question, right? Alignment. Sustainable alignment.
From there, it's all about sustaining those shared values, and minimizing risk. Build bonds: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or establish trust. It works out better in the long run; people don't usually Like to stab each other in the back Trampling starts cycles of revenge, and that's no fun for anyone involved either Exploitation prioritizes short term gain and screws you in the long run, more often than not.
Seems somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
And Illich (where the term "tool" is quite broad, including anything from a knife to a highway system):
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
Damn, thank you! I often refers to myself saying "Naive heuristic : avoiding gadgets or services (free or not) that increase inequality by design, through technology or business model or both, would be a good starting point." but I can now point to this!
Neat, found out https://www.appropedia.org this way!
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/ but I’m not sure if they are still active
They are! But it seems like most of the effort is from the founder, himself. They could use some more hands and cash...
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
As other comments have implied, but not explicitly said, they do their own engineering already with what they have.
Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued.
Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence.
EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me.
"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU
Over here in the UK I've seen some pretty original bicycle adaptation with electric motors and even a 2 stroke engine added to aid propulsion.
In India there is a word for this kind of thing Jugaad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
As someone who has spent some time in sub-saharan Africa, I can tell you that there is lots that can be done if just seeing the possibilities.
Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.
In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.
Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.
I've never been to sub-saharan Africa, but I did grow up broke enough to be on the receiving end of people with good intentions.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the realities of a situation guided by those who more deeply understand it can very quickly prune the possibilities that an engineer sees. Many engineers would just get frustrated and give up. Many leaders would become impatient with those engineers.
I think to get people's heads out of the clouds and produce real results requires a very special kind of engineer. That is most likely going to be someone local, not an outsider. One can definitely help on the education side of things for the locals, but I'm not convinced that's where the real problems are. It's more likely political and economic. Not even the best engineers in the world are going to solve that.
I suspect you've never spent any meaningful amount of time in the local environments, or you wouldn't have made this comment.
As I elaborated on in another comment, it is commonplace to find that people who have little to no education and resources are missing countless opportunities to implement simple improvements to almost everything.
This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well)
What is needed is genuine collaboration and communication between people living in whatever situation and others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
> This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well) [...] others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
This is insane.
Care to elaborate? (and not cut out the most important context from my comment)
The trouble with your premise is that it doesn't just apply to local people, it applies to people in general. Incompetence is all around us. Notice that everyone is a local in the place where they live.
But local people at least have the benefit of knowing their own situations, which puts them ahead of some other rando who doesn't even have that and presumes to know better.
And hence, AS I SAID, people should collaboratively work together. There's no presumption - despite you recognizing that incompetence is all around us, you'd be amazed at how many completely obvious things are not done, and other things done very poorly
Which is a misunderstanding of the premise that locals know best.
No one thinks that going to someone and offering them ideas is bad. The thing people actually object to is imperialism, and they object to it because it's common. All over the place you see not just governments making rules from an ivory tower, but even well-meaning non-profits providing grants or resources with the requirement that things be done in a particular way with no regard for local conditions.
If you're trying to help someone then you shouldn't need to coerce them. Nobody was ever objecting to the cases where you don't.
Actually, plenty of people - including the person I was replying to - explicitly argue that locals know best and you're being imperialist by even suggesting that outsiders might have anything useful to contribute other than money.
And, yes, you do need to "coerce"/convince/persuade/retrain people across many dimensions - people are generally extremely resistant to change, and instead stick with whatever theyre already doing. Not all interventions are just immediately self-evidently beneficial. Eg. "Hey stop destroying your topsoil by every means imaginable - removing and burning all waste from the harvest, not planting in contours to prevent erosion" and much much more. That takes time to prove out and even then requires a leap of faith.
I do strongly agree, though, that "well meaning" non-profits are quite often completely clueless and, arguably, destructive. Often through the very gifts they give, which often don't even work, or at least go counter towards the necessary goal of developing self-sufficiency.
What do you figure happened, such that people largely haven't done this?
One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)
Yeah, I agree with this. Though, I think you could make bikes for much cheaper with some ingenuity. Certainly some bike-powered appliances.
Also I think OLPC was a misguided project, as most of these things are. Its out of stem with maslows hierarchy of needs. Folks who are subsistence farmers with drought, smoke filled homes and stomach parasites don't need a laptop and academic education. They need practical and actionable tools and techniques to better meet their basic needs, a state from which they could better pursue academics etc
No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't the hardest part of a new business, is it? Etc.
There's not actually all that many useful things that can be made in poor, underresourced countries and villages. It's cheaper to buy them from a Chinese factory that is highly specialized at making those useful things in huge quantities and send them via container ship to the place where they're needed. This is as true for random poor people in Africa as it is for me when I buy stuff cheap on AliExpress.
It doesn't make anyone money...
If you're in a country like France, where buying fans for your daughter's schools is not allowed [0], or installing your own store-bought AC unit either, making DIY devices seems the easy part, sadly.
[0]: (French) https://www.lexpress.fr/environnement/canicule-il-offre-dix-...
[1]: (French) https://www.lemonde.fr/argent/article/2026/06/19/canicule-de...
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
I thought of this guy as well. I love the spirit of attempting to make open source farm machinery. I think that domain and ones like it are under addressed by open source in general. I think the guy who started it still makes content on youtube but much of it seems to be recordings of zoom webinars he does. Not really sure what the state of the project is
I've never really understood the point of open source ecology. As you noted, it seems egregiously complicated and expensive. I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.
I would argue that, for anything with value, there is value in having a decent open source option for that thing. I think farm equipment is valuable, so I think it's great that someone is working on an open source option. You are right though, it is an enormously uphill battle. To get off the ground, there would likely need to be a well funded non profit involved. Would be cool to see Futo or similar tackle something like this
I think it makes more sense if it's not viewed under the aspect of trying to be maximally productive in its output. If you look at it over they years, they've also tried to do a share of public outreach / education (though I'm not sure how successful), and I think they also sustain themselves in terms of labor with burnt out tech people that are looking for a change of scenery.
So similar to a good zoo, that does both active conservation work, and at the same time public education (e.g. in the form of guided tours for school trips).
> I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.
I think even in a well-executed form, it would likely still be quite obscure, as there is next to no need for it in western societies (apart from emergency preperation).
Seems dead.
Only seems that way. They've been around for over twenty years and AFAICT they have staying power. Youtube uploads from the founder last month.
https://youtube.com/@marcinose
MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques
I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.
Any part of the process we hand over goes away forever. This way, society becomes dependent, and M$, OpenAI and Apple see RoI.
Any usage, even minor, is at too great a cost.
Certainly no parallels with our manufacturing capabilities, no sir. /s
My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
Here's a decent post about the idea: https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-heaters-from-jean-pain/
You might want to look at biogas digester design - I met farmers near Hanover who were running big biogas digesters, and using the excess heat to heat their homes and pools all winter…
Oh thanks! This is exactly what I was thinking!
I've been following this guy a couple of years now (as well as many other mentioned in the comments like LowTechMagazine, Simplifier, OSE, etc)
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
https://opensourcelowtech.org/wifidish.html
Sort of in the same vein, I've really enjoyed this book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/76998.Reader_s_Digest...
Lots of really interesting tidbits, and a great lemonade recipe, among lots of other gems.
For a more academic approach see the Foxfire Series:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/88939-the-foxfire-series
Here's a similar project focused on agtech & iot - https://github.com/mitra42/frugal-iot
If anyone else has pointers to low cost sensor network appropriate for small scale farms please share!
IMO, the wind turbine is way too complex to be actually useful. It's definitely not reproducible for $30 unless you have access to a junkyard.
The power drill required for it isn't especially low tech. A cheap used solar panel is a better solution in 95% of situations.
That looks rather primitive. I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one. If the designs were adapted so that they no longer looked as they’d been designed by an anarcho-primitivist, would we still regard them as low-tech at all?
" I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one."
It is not about aesthetics but functionality achieved with cheap avaiable material. That looks seldom beautiful.
Similar guy (though a more mysterious persona), and another noteworthy low-key web page: https://simplifier.neocities.org/
See also
- The astounding Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
- Appropriate Technologies wiki https://www.appropedia.org/
- Global Village Construction Kit https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ (blueprints for 50 open source technologies that are fundamental to civilization)
I love this project. I often lament how narrowly focused on tech/software open source tends to be. It is the most powerful example of human altruism that I can think of but it tends not to address a lot of peoples basic needs. I would love to see an open source house, car, bike, etc much more than I would like to see another solution for coordinating container clusters or something
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
Reminds me of the book "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope" by William Kamkwamba. Good read.
Excellent work. People here forget that "low tech" can be much more difficult than "high tech".
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.
Also lots and lots of manufacturing and repair work is like kept secret from the common people or at least that is the general vibe. So I'm happy for this initiative.
this is the kind of open source project that makes me question my life choices every time i install a node module
I'll share this to all the NGO's ik which can further spread the info, Thanks :)
It would be interesting to see if an air conditioner or refrigerator can be made in this manner
Yes, an air conditioner can be made as follows.
1. Identify a locally viable deciduous tree species.
2. Plant this species on the afternoon aspect of the sun in your location. So for northern hemisphere plant to the southwest. For southern hemisphere plant to the northwest.
3. Enjoy shade in summer and sun in winter, plus cleaner air.
Another option depending upon your architecture is to take advantage of forced air within a roof cavity. Buy a large diameter fan with an electronic control, install at apex, and set it to operate when the temperature exceeds a certain point. This will result in a house wide temperature drop with no need to expend $$$ setup plus dollars per hour per room on air conditioning.
Another option is simply shading. One of the simplest and most traditional approaches here is the drop awning. A drop awning consists of a retractable material expanse which can render a building surface in shade and thus promote rapid air movement and cooling in the hottest periods.
Two final options include internal forced air: passive variant (open all the windows and doors) or active variant (ceiling fan, solar works) and insulation or thermal mass.
Air conditioning: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/no-ac...
Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.
If you don't have AC but do have a refrigerator, you can build a DIY AC using a box, bottles of frozen water and a fan. There's YouTube tutorials on how to do it.
I have friends who use it in their apartment which doesn't have AC and doesn't allow installation of one.
Do the thermodynamics of that work out beyond a localized shift? (kitchen is hot, other room cool?)
I've always thought that refrigerators should be boxed in with air circulation where filtered intake air for the back comes from the basement and the then heated air is piped up to the attic to be vented.
Love it. Another great site along these lines: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
I printed this out for the looming Zombie apocalypse.
This is amazing
I sure that ai will eat everything
what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.
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