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Businesses Have Designs for the PoorAs anyone who's fallen in love with an iPod or Wii game console can attest to, good product design matters.
It can matter more, in fact, than how many (or what kind) of features are crammed into a device.
Consider the N-Gage game phone that Nokia launched four years ago.
Despite some great features and a global marketing campaign, poor design made the product a highly ridiculed disappointment.
So, given the stakes, it's understandable why top product designers are a hot commodity in the high-tech arena.
But for an increasing number of designers, the stakes are even higher elsewhere: global poverty.
Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor.
In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that's changing.
At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world.
Stanford offers a course called "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability."
One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.
more: edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/12/... (162)
December 24, 2007 | Viewed 23,834 time(s)
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