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social designs winners

06Sep07

I just came across a listing of the 2007 designs to improve life and was blown away by these great social innovations.  These awards recognize people who are trying to improve human life everywhere.  I cut and paste my 2 favs below, which is a low cost foot prosthetic and a solar water bottle able to turn river water into safe drinking water.  http://www.indexaward.dk/2007/default.asp?id=706&Article=2599&Folder=2599

Mobility for Each One (Sébastien Dubois)

Approximately 25 000 people, mostly civilians, are mutilated by landmines each year. Hundred of thousands of victims all over the world need proper prosthetic products in order to resume an active life. Unfortunately, a quality prosthesis usually costs between 1300 and 4000 US Dollars, which many do not have the economic means to afford.
Canadian designer Sébastien Dubois has designed a low-cost, high-quality model that can be locally produced for only 8 US Dollars. In order to keep production costs down, “Mobility for Each One” can be produced in any conventional workshop, and the materials needed are easily available.
The prosthetic foot can be fitted to various types of upper leg prosthetics and is developed especially to fit the standards of Red Cross..

Solar Bottle (Alberto Meda & Francisco Gomez Paz)

One sixth of the world’s populatioimage.bmpn has no access to safe drinking water, increasing their risk of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, Hepatitis A and dysentery.
When attending an exhibition under the theme “H2O” at

Milan’s International Furniture Fair, Meda and Paz learned about the SODIS system, a simple, low-cost solution for treating drinking water at a household level. Contaminated water is filled into transparent plastic bottles. When exposed to full sunlight for six hours, the pathogens in the water are destroyed.
Meda and Paz decided to design a container that brings the best out of the SODIS system, and the result is Solar Bottle, which has one transparent face for UV-A + infrared rays collection and one aluminium color to increase the reflections. The high ratio surface/thickness of the low cost four liter container improves the performance of solar disinfection and its flat shape makes it stackable and facilitates storage. A handle makes it possible to regulate the angle for best solar exposition and ensures easy transportation.

Filed under Product Innovation and Trends.  | | Written by: tito
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    This prosthetic foot is great! Let's hope it's production and distribution is propelled forward. Many of these countries with landmine victims have scant prosthetic care and resources in the first place, sometimes with no real access to prosthetists at all. For example, I recently discovered that Belize is the only country in Central America to have no prosthetic services other than an American mission that goes every year. Who would have thought? This group will be making a free-standing clinic with education for local technicians for ongoing care. Here's their site http://www.sonrieministries.org/default.htm

    This would be a great way to teach many communities how to produce these simple but efficient prostheses to promote sustainability in that region.

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