Hasta La Ideas

Our friends behind the Design Museum Boston, Derek Cascio and Sam Aquillano, are trying to Kickstart a project called “Designing a Difference” to unite nonprofit organizations with teams of industrial designers. This isn’t the first time that Cascio and Aquillano have turned to Kickstarter for funding; we were glad to see their extremely successful “Retail: Retell. Recycle. Rethink.” exhibit come to fruition at the Prudential Center in Boston. Each project will culminate with an exhibit of the process behind the collaboration in order to educate the public about design and innovation.

“Designing a Difference” already has its first client: Smallbean, a nonprofit from Boston. Smallbean provides solar-powered computer labs to schools across Africa, allowing citizens to participate in this globally connected world. Additionally, Smallbean’s Citizen Archivist Project (CAP), developed with assistance from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches computer skills by having participants make a digital history of their communities through oral interviews, photographs, and video footage. In this two birds, one stone approach, Smallbean helps communities left behind in the wake of technology both adapt to the current state of the world and preserve their old world.

Cascio and Aquillano have assembled a team to help Smallbean’s computer labs generate revenue in order to keep them sustainable. This revenue takes the form of selling excess electricity generated by the solar-powered labs via rentable batteries. The technology and systems behind the ESCARGO, or Excess Solar as a Revenue Generation Option, program is being designed in conjunction with the Newton-Tanzania Collaborative. The Kickstarter funding will help the team purchase solar panels, batteries, and electronics to make ESCARGO a reality.

Interested in helping? Kickstart it here!

In fact, the designers were pleased to give Core77 an exclusive look at the sketching process behind the ESCARGO:

(more…)