Keeping Things Cool The Lotek Way

Posted by tomo at 01:08 AM in . | 1 Comments

When you have the need to refrigerate fruits and vegetables and you live in Nigeria where you have no electricity because you live off the grid not by choice but because you have no choice... what do you do? You wait until someone invents a Pot-in-Pot Preservation/Cooling System. It works like this: you take a small earthenware pot and place it inside a larger pot, fill the space between with wet sand, cover the smaller pot with a cloth and place the contraption in a cool area, keeping the sand moist. The evaporation of the water to the outside of the larger pot causes a decrease in temperature inside that allows foods that would otherwise spoil in a day stay edible for weeks. For this, Mohammed Bah Abba won a Rolex Award [horrible flash site].

Like the Rolex Awards, the MIT IDEAS Competition offers prizes for great new ideas. However, rather than applying with your idea and hoping to be one of the 5 picked for a $100,000 prize, here you submit a proposal for an idea with the hopes that some team will be up to the challenge, with a prize in the $5,000 range. Health, especially drinking water, and education have been popular proposal topics (as they should) such as the proposal for a BioSand water filter that costs less than $1. This competition is only open to groups with 1/3 MIT students as members.

Also affiliated with MIT is Design that Matters, "a Massachusetts nonprofit, helps underserved communities realize an improved quality of life by creating products and services that meet needs identified by the communities themselves." DtM also has courses at MIT to get students involved.

Also affiliated with DtM is ThinkCycle. This is the most open project of this group and has the most "challenges". Anyone can propose and be involved in a challenge, but there are no set prizes. Still, I think this is GREAT. People identify and describe discrete problems that exist today and then people from various professional disciplines offer partial solutions and helpful discussion and they do this for fun (is it truly altruistic if it's fun?). ThinkCycle provides the infrastructure for everybody to find and collaborate with each other online with ThinkSpaces, which are like simple online notepads.