Having grown up in a middle class family in India, this came as a shock to me – 88% of women in India do not have access to sanitary napkins. They resort to using rags, ashes, newspaper, dried leaves and husk according to a study by AC Nielsen. According to an article in Fastcoexist, girls who attain puberty in rural areas miss school or drop out because of their periods. As a result of unhygienic practices, more than 70% of the women suffer from reproductive tract infections, increasing the risk of contracting associated cancers according to Guardian.

Arunachalam Muruganantham, a workshop helper who lived below poverty line in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu had other plans for sanitary towels. He has created a low cost machine for making sanitary napkins. He wanted to make a low cost napkin for his wife who couldn’t afford to buy any. Creating this machine has been an arduous process for Arunachalam. He tried to get feedback from his wife and sisters who refused to discuss his creations. He approached female medical students who weren’t responsive as well. Discussing your menstrual cycle with a stranger wasn’t something any woman that Arunachalam approached was ready to do. He was experimenting with cotton at the time. At his wits end, he did some usability testing by wearing it himself and using a bladder and tube contraption to release goats blood onto his creation.

He tested different materials over the course of two years and figured that the napkins were made from cellulose from the bark of a tree. After getting some samples of the raw material from various companies, he figured out how to make the napkins. He realized that creating cellulose from pine wood fibre was no simple task. The machine needed to do that was close to half a million dollars hence the dominance of big companies in the sanitary napkin market. It took Arunachalam 4 years to create a cheaper machine to do the same task. The machine could make 1000 napkins a day. The machine was awarded the best innovation for the betterment of society by the Institute of Technology in Chennai.  The napkins cost $0.25 (13 rupees) for a package of eight.

Women using Arunachalam's creation to make low cost sanitary pads.

Arunachalam doesn’t sell his product commercially. He provides sustainable livelihood to many rural women. His company helps rural women buy one of the $2500 machines through a loan. Around 600 machines are installed across 23 states. The idea is to create small industries all over India run by women creating a product that helps women. Arunachalam created a revolution around a topic that is considered a taboo. This system driven model will hopefully create a change in the way Indian women view hygiene and health.

References

TechVista is Micrsoft Research India’s annual symposium, that brings together and features people whose work defines new directions in technology and science.This year, TV was held at the Westin, in Pune, India on the 21st of Jan. I had the wonderful opportunity to actually be part of and work with a fantastic team whose project was demo-ed this time. Ours was the DigitalNarratives team and we worked very hard, over the period of four months to pull it off. Some of the other projects that were demoed can be found here.

A digital narrative is a narrative that takes advantage of multimedia and web technologies, providing the author with a new way to build and present a media-rich story, and simultaneously offering the viewer a new way to interact with the content. Microsoft Research India, along with key partners, are currently developing a new technology called Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) that enables creation of digital narratives.

RIN <Rich Interactive Narratives> to me, as an artist and designer, is a great tool to tell compelling stories. Once released, I believe it will change people’s multimedia experiences. RIN is a Techonology which would eventually let all types of digital media unite and can be tied into the form of a story narration or movie.It enables the author (creator) to construct information and media heavy stories/narratives and infact, define the interactions the user experiences when viewing the story. While the design team was mainly focused on creating amazing content for the narrative, we got first-hand experience working with the tool. This was my first official foray into the world of interaction and experience design, and interesting enough, it threw open a space where one could examine of the role of designers in tech research. While the creative/design peeps brought in various skills such as story-boarding, photography, illustration, editing etc that was fully focused on content generation, the dev.  (development) team worked towards creating a more robust tool. The marriage of the two, left brain and right was perfect.

From a geeky perspective, quoting Nikhil Chandran, Project Manager, DigitalNarratives – “All the projects that i have worked on, the outlook towards the whole engagement has been based on the following assumptions:

1. The scope is defined
2. The time is fixed

The past decade has seen a lot of work being done in the arena of development of mobile applications in the developing nations. A lot of them include mobile banking, inventories for agricultural products, education, healthcare etc. There has been extensive mobile phone penetration in places like India, parts of Africa, China, and a lot of South American nations.  A lot of developers and stakeholders in the mobile industry are creating applications for the base of the pyramid users, taking for granted the affordability of mobile handsets and SIM’s by the BOP users. Statistics show that very few BOP users can afford mobile technology. Since mobile and wireless communication makes it so easy for people to communicate and bank even in places that are secluded and far flung, It doesn’t come as a surprise that an innovative startup has thought of a solution to make mobile communication available to BOP users. The initiative is called Movirtu.

As described on the Movirtu website – Movirtu provides innovative mobile technology and business models to wireless telecommunication service providers servicing rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia to help them realize shared access to basic mobile phone services at a much lower cost than has been achieved before. Although we are a for-profit enterprise, the company has an underlying social mission: To expand the use of mobile communication by the rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia living on less than $2 a day to improve their sustainable livelihoods and help alleviate poverty.

User flow for movirtu

Movirtu is developing a series of patent pending products that would enable shared access to basic mobile services for people earning less that $2 a day. For one such application called MXShare, Movirtu partnered with frog design to create a virtual mobile phone system to enable people who can’t afford to buy handsets to call, receive calls and text message using other peoples phones or pay phones. This mode of communication was being followed in the past using SIM cards. The call maker would borrow the phone and simply replace the SIM in order to see his/her contact list and make the call. This involved taking the phone apart and caused both the lender and borrower some amount of discomfort. The SIM’s were also easy to lose and only the person who was carrying it was able to use it, not the whole family.

MXShare is based on similar behavior type of borrowing other peoples phones to make calls. In the case of MXShare, all the information is stored virtually in a telecom cloud and can be accessed by the user by logging into his/her account using a code or a password. This doesn’t require any SIM cards. Frog design was responsible for doing user research and experience design for the product. Extensive research was conducted in Kibera in Kenya where people were interviewed to gather observations to know how people lived and used technology. The technology was well received and everyone was very excited about it. The challenge was coming up with the right nomenclature where the designers decided to go with the established universal language.

‘Cloud Phone’  as it is being called now is being compared to cloud based webmail or google voice. Accessing the cloud costs the subscribers 10 to 20 cents a call. Compared to a $25 dollar handset and a $12 SIM card, the Movirtu solution is affordable for users earning $2 a day or less.

Recently Movirtu raised $5.5 million dollars for expansion in a Series A round of financing. The funding will allow Movirtu to expand to newer markets and help its goal of reaching 4 million users by 2013.

Nigel Waller, the Founder and CEO of Movirtu who is also the POPTECH Social Innovation Fellow explains the step by step functioning of MXShare  -

Movirtu Fact Sheet

I heard Kiran Bedi talk recently at a fundraiser event for SEVA, a non profit organization, based in Richmond Hill, Queens, that facilitates immigration of South Asians to the US. Kiran Bedi is an Indian social activist and a retired Indian Police Service officer. During her riveting talk that included her work in Tihar jail in New Delhi and other inspiring stories, she talked about one of her newer initiatives – the Safer India initiative. The Safer India initiative is a project that has been undertaken under the umbrella of Dr Bedi’s non profit organization called ‘India Vision Foundation’ that was formed in 1994. The India Vision Foundation works in the area of Police and Prison reforms as well as women’s empowerment.

A Safer India Initiative is a web platform that allows the users to send their complaints to the respective State Police Department over the web. All the user needs to do is to sign up and then write their complaint and submit it. The complaint is sent to the concerned police department. India is well known for its bureaucratic and corrupt police and administrative departments. This initiative is a fast track solution to getting your complaint sent to the right person without going through the trappings of bribery and long lines that plague the Indian police and administrative services. That said, the system doesn’t assure that any kind of action will be taken on the complaint. There is no tracking system built into the website yet and it is upto the complainant to follow up on their complaint with visits to the police station. What it does provide is the hope that technology is a universal leveler and that your complaint will be received by the concerned department irrespective of what your social status is within the system.

Web 2.0 platforms that allow community interaction and facilitate civic and social services are picking up rapidly around the world. Gov 2.0 is Web 2.0 for the government. Gov 2.0 has picked up in the US considerably in the past 5 years. The Code for America initiative that was founded by Jennifer Pahlka and SeeClickFix by Ben Berkowitz are two popular examples of using the web 2.0 technologies to work for city governments.  The website for the Orielly Gov 2.0 summit hosted in Washington DC in Sept 2010 gives a good overview of the term -  Gov 2.0 Summit brings together innovators from government and the private sector to highlight technology and ideas that can be applied to the nation’s great challenges. In areas as diverse as education, health care, energy, jobs, and financial reform, there are unique opportunities to rethink how government agencies perform their mission and serve our citizens. Social media, cloud computing, web, and mobile technologies—all provide new capabilities that government agencies are beginning to harness to achieve demonstrably better results at lower cost.

Open government and datasets would be a great asset to a democracy like India to promote good governance. Emerging technologies are already being embraced in the country which handles a majority of the technological work outsourced from the west. The trick is to use these skills to bring about social and civic change within the country. The government needs to make data sets available to its citizens like the data.gov initiative by the Obama administration in the US. There are more than enough grand challenges that the technologists in India need to battle through so that basic services are easily accessible to the local people and we can hold the government responsible for shoddy infrastructure and systems. A good example of such action is  ipaidabribe.com, a website where Indians upload videos of their experiences in paying a bribe, in refusing to pay a bribe, and in not having to pay a bribe. President Obama met with Janagraha, the creator of this web platform during his visit to India in Nov 2010.

President Obama attended what is likely the first ever  Expo on Democracy and Open Government in Nov 2010 at St Xaviers College in Mumbai. Samantha Power, special assistant to the President for multilateral affairs and human rights blogs about the event stating in the whitehouse.gov blog – India’s dynamism in the technology sector is well known, as is Gandhi’s legacy in India of civic action and bottom-up change, but today’s expo highlighted something very fresh: Indian civil society’s harnessing of innovation and technology to strengthen India’s democracy — by fighting corruption, holding government officials accountable, and empowering citizens to be the change they seek.

Sonali Sridhar currently works as an Interaction Designer in New York, using web, print and mobile electronics to explore the connectivity and psychology of design. She also works with wearable technology, designing objects that interact with daily life, form addictions and provide comfort. In this interview, Sonali outlines the framework for successful open source projects and explains the gradual blurring of lines between open source and design . She talks about the use of open source hardware in education and explains why taking the ‘I’ out of the equation might just be the way design thinking is headed next.

The second part of the video is titled ‘Indigenous Modernities’ based on the title of Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book with the same title. In this video, she talks about modernity in the context of the developing world. She brings up the perception of ‘Modern’ where it is equaled to western living vs it being understood as sustainable and practical response to day to day problems. To emphasize on that aspect of ‘Modern’, she talks about Old Delhi, Hinglish and FM Radio as examples of practical solutions, interactivity and modern living in the context of the old world. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s recent book Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (Routledge 2005) won a 2006-2007 award from the International Planning History Society.

For Jyoti’s video on sustainability, click here.

The Mobile Activation Station by Holobiont

The Mobile Activation Station designed by Holobiont (Haruka Horiuchi & Frank Hebbert) has been selected as the winner by our three esteemed judges – Raul Smith Correa of ‘Faiscas‘, Soo-in Yang of ‘The Living’ and Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai. They win a grand or $1000 to make their idea come to life. The Mobile Activation Station is a portable reconfigurable table with built-in power distribution, lighting and storage. It turns empty stores into communal spaces. Once built, the Station will be available for short-term use in vacant storefronts along Rogers Avenue in Crown heights, Brooklyn.

The Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio Castro Cosio

The second favorite project for the judges especially Soo-in is the Bus Roots Project by Marco Antonio. Bus Roots is a living garden on the roots of city buses. It brings life to a forgotten space and provides humans with a reminder to pause and let naturte help lead a healthier life.

Traffic Cones into Flower Receptacles by Daniel Ebuehi

The third favorite project for the judges, especially for Raul Smith Correa is the project by Daniel Ebuehi from Philadelphia. In an attempt to bring vitality as well as sustainability directly into the streets of Philadelphia – literally in the middle of the street – this scheme transforms the ubiquitous traffic cone into a flower receptacle that can be assembled to form a garden retreat.

Our special thanks to the third and final judge who helped us make the final decision – Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai.

This competition would not have been possible without the generous contributions from these amazing people and friends :
Ravisharon Kaur
Ramakrishnan Subramanian
Rahul Pande
Kiran Kannacheri
Saravanakumar Velayudham
Sameer Kumar
Keerthik Sasidharan
Saad Tabani
Ritwik Dey
Giana Gonzalez
Sonali Sridhar
Jairam Ranganathan
Amit Desai
Priyanka Gupta
Shweta Mudgal

In simple words, Synthetic Biology is about making living organisms do things which nature had not intended on them doing. Its about taking tiny bits of DNA, splicing them together and inserting them into bacteria. In effect, a bacterium could be made to change colour or made to be bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. In Yashas Shetty’s words, Artist and faculty member at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology as well as Artist-in-Residence at NCBS – National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) – “this mixing and matching of elements to create new things was a bit like what artists did. But instead of using paints and canvas, synthetic biologists used life itself.”

This thoughtful insight by Yashas Shetty led him to mentor a bunch of art& design students – who knew very little, if anything about science to participate in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year. One of the aims of the competition is to attempt to build simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts and operate them in living cells.

The iGEM competition facilitates this by providing a library of standardized parts (called BioBrick standard biological parts) to students, and asking them to design and build genetic machines with them. Student teams can also submit their own BioBricks. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.

Information about BioBrick standard biological parts, and a toolkit to make and manipulate them, is provided by the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, or simply, the Registry. This is a core resource for the iGEM program, and one that has been evolving rapidly to meet the needs of the program. Beyond just building biological systems, broader goals of iGEM include:

• To enable the systematic engineering of biology.
• To promote the open and transparent development of tools for engineering biology.
• To help construct a society that can productively apply biological technology.

As per the rules of the competition, MIT sends all participants 400 bits of DNA. They are all numbered. One cant go to a database of parts on the web and find out which DNA makes what and then make your organism in the laboratory using the DNA bits.

NCBS had been sending students for MIT’s iGem competition for the last couple of years. Last year they decided to send art students – who knew nothing about science – to participate instead. They were called the ArtScience Team from Bangalore. And, unlike scientists, the artists came up with a project which only artists could have thought of: they were going to replicate the smell of first rain in a laboratory— that odour when pure water from the skies mixes with soil.” The English word for the smell is Petrichor, a non-lyrical name for a phenomenon that is so emotive. The primary cause behind the smell, however, has a slightly more lyrical name: Geosmin, an organic chemical.

The students did the scientific parts in the laboratory of NCBS. At the end of it, Shetty says, the experiment didn’t turn out the smell of first rain. Instead there was this smell of dampness.

But it was enough.

They won the third prize for science. The presentation, in which they explained how a group of art students became scientists for a season, got them a special prize for best presentation. “They said that they started off as artists and are now talking to scientists. I think that impressed the judges,” says Mukund Thattai of NCBS, whose laboratory the art students had used for this experiment. The ArtScience Team took synthetic biology to new groups, running workshops to teach designers to build working DIY microscopes using webcams and ran creative workshops at a school for the urban poor. This idea of “human practices” – that is, exploring the ethical and social implications of the technology – was a new focus of last year. What made this team stand out from the rest was the fact that they looked at the field from a beginners perspective and climbed their way up to the knowledge filed and shared it with anyone who was interested. While the other teams were focusing on a problem-solution approach they were more interested in making the knowledge that iGEM was distributing as accessible and open source as possible. Their process- start to finish, complete with drawings was documented in a handbook that was printed at distributed at the competition. It’s no surprise that they ran out of copies. The handbook is available for free download at – http://hackteria.org/wiki/images/a/a1/Handbook.pdf

When I asked Neha Bhatt, member of the ArtScience team – about her first hand experience with synthetic biology and its processes, she said “ it was a real eye –opener. For me, the competition’s process opened up a whole new area I’d never known existed. The field of artists doing science and the boundaries b/w art and science being traversed.”

Apart from being instrumental in changing people’s perspective towards synthetic biology, the participation of students of art+design in an otherwise science competition, threw open many discussions; primarily that was access. Should Science as a field and practice remain inclusive or should it open its doors to creative practioners as well; to explore and create? There were those purists, of course, who simply did not take them seriously, for they believed that artist’s are those who draw the bio diagrams; and the main question that they were faced with was – ” So if  you guys being beginners can be given the authority to play around with real life, can anyone looking to harm society also not to do the same?”

They’re answer was simply that their project was an experiment to these questions.

Team ArtScience 2010 is all set to make another appearance at this year’s IGEM. Here’s wishing them all the best and one hopes that more such lines between seemingly disparate disciplines get blurred, norms get challenged, more knowledge gets shared and that perceptions are constantly altered.

The iGEM 2010 site –

http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page

The wiki of Team ArtScience Bangalore -

http://2009.igem.org/Team:ArtScienceBangalore

Anab Jain is a designer and a TED Fellow, interested in creating stories that lead us towards new, alternate futures. Educated in India, Vienna and London, she is the Founder of Superflux, a design practice working at the intersection of people and technology.

She created ‘The Power of 8’ a collaborative project to imagine alternate, optimistic futures. Most recently she was working on a project called 5th Dimensional Camera that explores the wider implications of living in a world with quantum physics. Her recent talk called ‘My Elastic City – Designing for India’s immaterial urbanism’ at the World Congress for Information technology revolved around soft urbanism in India.

The recipient of Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, Anab has also presented her work at MoMA, NY, Apple Computers Inc, LIFT and SIGGRAPH.

This video footage was recorded on skype so please bear with the quality. Thanks!

Primary health centers are the cornerstone of the rural health care system. In 1991, India had about 22,400 primary health centers, 11,200 hospitals, and 27,400 clinics. These facilities are part of a tiered health care system that funnels more difficult cases into urban hospitals while attempting to provide routine medical care to the vast majority in the countryside. Primary health centers and sub centers rely on trained paramedics to meet most of their needs. The main problems affecting the success of primary health centers are the predominance of clinical and curative concerns over the intended emphasis on preventive work and the reluctance of staff to work in rural areas. -(Source – Wikipedia)

This is where the Low cost self-diagnosis tool comes in.

Winner of the International Design Excellence Awards 08 (http://www.idsa.org/IDEA_Awards/gallery/2008/award_details.asp?ID=35918307), this is a mechanical self-diagnosis tool was created to help patients in rural India capture symptoms and provide them basic information about their disease. Made with recycled materials to maintain low costs, it aims to empower patients and aid doctors with accurate diagnosis and efficient recovery throughout the rural parts of the country.

Designed at Honeywell Technology Solutions in Bangalore by Ankur Sardana (NID) and Parag Trivedi (IDC), this tool displays relevant information. With simple rotation of rings & mapping on the chart, the tool provides -

1. Criticality of disease, basic suggestions (like – ‘how soon to meet the doctor’)

2. Kind of diagnostic tests would be done on them (this is based on the research finding that the villagers are quite suspicious of blood being used for testing & also unprepared for the expense which tests might require)

3. Cases in which they should meet a specialist directly instead of going to a general practitioner

4. Information & contact numbers of healthcare providers

The tool consists of a set of Rings (symptoms), a disease chart & other information. These rings could be made of cheap but durable cardboard. Each ring has set of symptoms. The patient rotates the rings (starting from smallest) & chooses his symptoms by bringing them in one line, below the marker. Each symptom has a number printed on it. The user maps the disease code (set of numbers, 1 from each ring) on the chart. The chart provides tentative result –disease name, severity, next steps, diagnostic tests required to confirm disease, doctor they should meet (i.e. which specialty) & contact information of doctors &hospitals. Made out recycled plastic/cardboard, it is easy to be produced locally in the villages.

The low-cost self-diagnosis tool was born out of the need to provide rural Indian patients with a method to help themselves. Healthcare has not been a priority of rural dwellers in India & they have been used to taking ‘over the counter drugs’ or getting quick relief in the form of a steroid injection from the unregistered medical practitioners- URMP’s (in villages there are usually no qualified doctors). Though an immediate solution, it is not a proper one, disease symptoms resurface & the patient is rushed to a proper registered doctor in the city, who now administers an emergency case where it could have been a case of normal diagnosis. With the tool, the rural dwellers can be empowered with basic knowledge about their disease & can avoid the mistreatment by URMP’s. This tool can also be used by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and self-help groups (in cases of illiteracy) to increase awareness & help make disease symptoms more understandable to the patients. There is also a mutual benefit for healthcare providers and patients. The patients save the money and side effects of self-medication and time, while the doctors have increased inflow of patients and thus more usage of their services.

Currently, in its present form it has not been tested on a large-scale. Most of the feedback has been gathered from the villagers. The educated villagers usually becomes excited, as they understand that they can get empowered if they have some idea of what disease they have. What has been tested in the field (in UP) is a variant in which there are no results, just collection of symptoms. The results have been mixed. Literacy is by far the biggest problem.

While this tool doesn’t aim to act as the messiah of the rural health care problems in the country, it certainly is a step in the right direction. One hopes that it inspires other creative practitioners and problem solvers to delve deeper into this space. It certainly needs more such social innovations.

For more information about more the tool, contact: Ankur Sardana: ankur.sardana@honeywell.com

More on Honeywell at – https://www.honeywell.com/sites/htsl/