Transcriber: Omar Estaitih Ávila Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
Good morning everyone. Can you hear me?
So, normally I spend my time consulting professional companies
on how to apply technology and innovate with it,
but also on how to humanize technology.
But this job of mine has taken me to all kind of places.
It has taken me to the poorest parts of the world,
to the most fanciest corporate boardrooms,
and this experience has taught me a lot.
And today I want to share with you some really unusual stories about
how the poorest and the most difficult situations,
people try to improvise and build on technology
to make it useful and relevant for themselves.
So I'm going to talk about frugal digital,
in the sense that frugality is an alternate vision
of creating a digital inclusive world.
Today there is a huge gap
between what is available as technology and who can access them.
And the poorest of the poorest people
find amazing ways to bridge this gap themselves.
What you can learn from that? What processes can be inspired from that?
And how we can apply that in creating the next generation product
for the two thirds of the world
which don't have the fastest and the fanciest digital access?
So frugality as a concept exists in every poor society.
It's all about optimizing, it's all about up-cycling
It's all about improvisation.
It's about being as efficient as possible in terms of economics,
but also in terms of what is available,
and how to keep on using it in the best possible way.
So, this spirit is not there in the digital world today
because silicon technology today is mostly about cultural of excess.
Everyone is talking about the fastest,
and the best and the dazzling and the most shiny black box you can ever buy.
But this is a different kind of world.
I'm going to talk about the story of a new age entrepreneur.
So this story stems from one of our researches that we did in India.
This is Mr. Sadishrai.
He is the most unusual character I've ever met in my travels.
He is an entrepreneur of a different kind,
because he is the next generation digital entrepreneur,
in one of the poorest parts of Mumbai.
He runs a small scale enterprise.
He runs a small shop that looks like any other shop from outside,
except that if you look very closely, you'll discover something interesting.
He has a digital payment service in the shop.
He makes most of his money
by selling subscriptions and talk time on cellular networks.
But in the backside of his store, there is this little corner
where he has a team of people
who can fix almost any kind of mobile phone.
And they are very proud to say they can fix it at the cheap level.
They can make changes to your phone,
they can fix broken phones, they can flash new software on it.
It's a whole new universe in there.
They have amazing know how and methodology around this.
There is a huge culture of reverse engineering
and sort of discovering how to fix things.
And this knowledge is deeply encoded
in the informal education sector of this kind of poor societies.
This is how they make a living.
The best part about this is that they also train other people.
We talked about school dropouts early today.
And they actually take school dropouts and train them
to provide them a new form of livelihood.
And they do actually earn pretty decent wages
almost comparable or even better than university trained students.
Then there is the Technology Ecosystems around them.
This is a different kind of environment.
It's not about precision engineering, it's not about fantastic fabrication,
it's not about the fastest and best manufacturing set up.
It's about the craft of technology
which is very different from the science of technology.
In most developing nations there are a lot of traditional crafts,
which are still existing.
And these kinds of traditional crafts are interlinking with a new kind of craft.
It's all about the crafting of technology.
People know how to create custom hardware for you.
They know how to build an amplifier for your car or your apartment.
They know how to fix things.
They know how to build you a particular kind of computer.
They know so much about you as a person,
and they try to tailor make the technology for you.
This is what crafting technology is about.
And then the Eco-system has the support
of low cost tools and supplies for making these things happen.
On the sidewalks of many of these cities from Africa, to India, to South East Asia,
you'll find numerous shops
selling all kinds of tools and supplies for this kind of industry.
And then there are small retailers, who actually help in creating and selling
these kinds of technologies
bought in the traditional centrally manufactured systems,
but also in the informal sector
where you can get specific things made for your own purpose.
Then there's a whole culture of recycling, but in a very different sense.
It's about salvaging what is available.
And there is the street scene where you can buy
second hand computer parts to basically build up
any kind of computer for almost one tenth the price
that you can buy in the retail store.
You get low cost substitutes for the most expensive parts.
There is an entire industry manufacturing this kind of substitutes.
So what we can do with all these?
This is an amazing example of how a solar panel is made
from waste and broken solar panels.
They re-patched and built up this thing and it sells for about
one forth, or one fifth of the price of what you'll end up paying
for a properly manufactured solar panel.
It has it's issues. It's not issue free but at the same time, it does the job.
And even if it is broken you can get it fixed.
That is the best part about this.
I found amazing precision motors, which are so expensive to buy online today
and you can buy them on the streets for almost nothing.
So what does it give us?
It gives us a culture of fix it yourself, which is very prevalent.
It gives us cheap fabrication.
It provides us amazing capabilities in the sense that
a huge amount of processing parts for a very little cost,
thanks to the way most cheap technology is progressing.
And there is an Eco-system in inexpensive peripherals,
because of the way print media works,
and the way printer manufacturers provide peripherals.
You get inexpensive parts from salvaged printers, and plotters, and whatnot.
So what can this give us?
It's a interesting take
and how can we apply this, is the bigger question.
So this is what I call as the silicon cottage industry.
It is a different kind of industry
which is all about doing it in the very small scale
and in a decentralized fashion but highly customized
and tailor made to individual requirements.
So this is another story of an inexpensive television.
So what happens when a large bank throws away huge amounts of old monitors
and moved on to LCD technology?
Well, this is what happens.
You find salvaged computer monitors that have been taken and refurbished
with television tuners to make them into televisions.
So they converted those from banks to televisions that can be sold
through a system of kits that is locally manufactured
and distributed to rural markets.
So you can buy almost a color television for 30€ including warranty,
because it can be fixed very so easily almost anywhere.
So in spite of all this, we sort of decided that we have to find
ways to apply these kinds of processes and methods into new kinds of products,
and new ways of thinking around creating digital access.
So this a project which we called a "lunch box".
It's a multimedia learning platform that we created for schools
that don't have the means to buy access to digital information.
Schools are social settings.
When we visited the poorest of the poorest places in the remote corners,
we discovered unusual schools
run by just one teacher or they'd be lucky if they have a room to study in.
And the most amazing thing about these schools
is that it is a fantastic social setting.
The children get together, they spend time there, they engage themselves,
they learn and they sort of participate together in a class.
And the teacher has a very important role to play in this.
The teacher is the facilitator,
but today, the teacher does not have the means, or the tools,
to give the children the access to this huge digital world.
So, we said, how can we provide and make the teachers into facilitators
to a digital world.
And so we took up this challenge,
and we said, we have to find ways to empower the teachers.
We have to make the teacher a digital gateway,
and we have to design inexpensive multimedia platform for them to use.
Today, ultimate visions about a digital inclusion
usually talks about a little laptop-like device or a pad of some kind.
All of this is interesting, but it makes the class unsocial.
It gets every student to stare at the screen
and hope to participate in the class.
It does not even provide the teacher the right platform,
because the teacher needs to get engaged with the children
as much as providing tools, and means and access.
I don't know how many of you teach,
but if you try teaching to a classroom full of students with laptops
staring at the little screens is really disheartening.
So, if you want to teach, you want to have good participation,
how do you create a tool for these students, is a big question.
So, we said, let see what is available first.
So, we went and scavenged around
at the local markets to find what is available.
So we found this amazing little pico project on mobile phones.
This mobiles phones which are really tiny projectors that can project
for a little bit distance, with a little bit luminosity.
We went and found a flash light with rechargeable batteries.
We found a lunch box to put everything into.
We found little speakers that could amplify the sound.
We put all this together and we sort of created this mishmash of things.
We basically borrowed different pieces of technology from
whatever it was available in the local area.
So the projector mobile phone was a fantastic multimedia platform.
It was connected, it has GPRS connection, it can connect to the Internet.
The flashlight gave us really bright LED and a rechargeable battery pack.
The lunch box was a nice little package,
and the speakers gave enough sound level for us to make a little tool.
So we went to one of those industries,
which is all about fixing and repairing and all about tinkering.
And we put together this team
that took the skills of these kinds of people
along with some of my colleagues,
and we created this amazing little intervention,
that some people call it a hack
where we took the flash light and the LED and we hooked it to the mobile phone.
We sort of re-purpose the whole thing so it produced enough luminosity
that can be used in a reasonably lit classroom.
We salvaged some other parts from here and there, we put them together.
We packaged it all into a nice little box, we called it a hardware mash up,
and it's totally improvised. It's 100% improvised.
So we made this little box as the first test to see how effective this is.
Can it really solve some of the issues?
Can the teachers really get empowered with this?
So we took it to classrooms,
we took it to some really unusual settings where you don't even have electricity,
and this gave us some really valuable learning.
Of course there are lots of issues with it that are not so simple to solve.
We realized that the batteries were draining very quickly.
The brightness wasn't enough sometimes.
The sound level had to be very high
because the children, once they get excited they want to scream,
they want to jump into the lesson, and the teacher also needed some training,
and needed some hand holding to make this happen.
So we said OK.
From this learning we'll make the next iteration and that's what we made.
We made the next box and we tried it out again in some schools,
and the next iteration after that we made a slightly bigger box,
because we realized that size wasn't a big constraint actually.
Because the teachers were actually willing to carry these boxes,
if they provided them real genuine value.
And we decided that it probably needs a little bit of solar power back up
so that the batteries don't drain so fast.
We also discovered that cars and trucks batteries
were wildly available at these places
because that's how most people run their televisions.
And so we provided provisions in this box
to connect up to batteries from cars and trucks.
We also decided that this whole curriculum,
if we design a new curriculum, needs to be built on existing curriculum.
So we don't need to create everything from scratch.
So we created a new format, in which we could collect information
in a lot of open source material, and videos and class instructions,
and science experiments, and whatnot, and animations from the World Wide Web,
and we created a little format on a USB key.
And so this whole box runs off one single USB key.
And all that the teacher needs is once in a while
to get hold of one of those USB keys, and copy the information onto it.
Or even if an organization wants to do something about it
they can post by regular mail this USB keys
and then plug in this box and the teacher can sort of start the lesson
based on their requirements
and not based on how the curriculum dictates what needs to be there.
So we created this little box,
and I have a little demo down there for people who are interested.
I can show later on how it works and what are the features in it,
and how actually can be built from whatever is readily available.
And this box, our estimate is that it costs about close 70€ to 80€.
Compare that with a computer and LCD projector
and whole bunch of other things including steady power supply,
this is a real bargain.
And cost is a fundamental starting point in these kinds of economies.
You start with cost, you need to create value
and then eventually the product picks up by itself.
The best part about this, is that it's locally serviceable.
That means that If it breaks down or if it has some issues,
it can be taken to one of these mobile repair shops somewhere nearby,
and it can be fixed almost without any issue,
because the technologies in there are mostly based on mobile technologies,
and it's based on very simple fabrication techniques.
All you need is a few tools and a little bit of knowledge
on how to construct these things and deconstruct it.
So what we can do with this, is the real question.
So education is just one of the areas
that we are addressing in the spirit of frugal digital.
We think that this can be applied to all other kinds of sectors.
We are right now working on testing these things out in the education context,
but at the same time, we want to find ways of scaling this idea.
So we are working with different collaborators
on scaling it at about 37.000 schools in India right now.
But the best part is, the same approach can be applied to other kind of areas,
including low cost medical diagnostics.
You can do agriculture advisory. You can do soil and water testing.
There are endless amount of possibilities
if the processes around these things are tailor made
for the context and the situation, and the economics of a certain place.
So this is what all frugal digital is about.
And you can find out more information about this if you want to, online.
Thank you!
(Applause)