One of my favorite websites of the moment is AfriGadget. It is a site that showcases astonishing village ingenuity and innovation from across the African continent. The tech is amazing, the creativity and resourcefulness is inspiring, and the stories of the people behind the tech is frequently touching. This site is about people doing big things with precious few resources. Here’s a recent example:

The Bamboo Bike, an endeavour that aims at building bicycles in a sustainable fashion using bamboo as the primary construction material, is a joint project run by Craig Calfree of Calfree Design, a high tech bicycle design firm based in California and The Earth Institute at Columbia University.The bicycle is the primary mode of transport in Africa and it is used for everything from personal transportation to moving medicine and the sick to hospital. Sadly, the design used in most of Africa has not changed for the last 40 years to take into account the different ways in which the bicycle is used. In fact, most bikes in use in most of Africa today are based on a colonial British design tailored to individuals travelling short distances on smooth roads.

While making bike frames based on bamboo is not a new idea, most bamboo frame designs simply use bamboo for construction material in a traditional bike frame design. Leveraging the unique properties of bamboo such as its strength and flexibility to meet the specific needs of populations local to various parts of Africa is one of the primary rationale behind the Bamboo Bike project.

The team working on the Bamboo Bike project in the US, Ghana and Kenya among other locations have a interesting blog (last updated in the summer of 2007) that chronicles the struggles of the project team while on site in Africa.

Project gear including Bamboo Bikes and clothing is available on the Bamboo Bike and Calfree Design websites.

I got turned on to AfriGadget through Kevin Kelly’s also-wonderful Street Use, a site that looks worldwide to see how people make-do, modify, re-use, and improvise with the technology that finds its way into their lives.

Here for AfriGadget
Here for Street Use

Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings have a new public art project on Market Street in San Francisco consisting of large posters illustrating radical and whimsical proposals from local architects, engineers and planners in response to the question: “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics - or physics?” Funding kudos to the San Francisco Arts Commission!

Link to slideshow.

Photo: Mario Tama

Residents protesting the demolition of 4500 units of public housing were beaten by riot police in New Orleans, further revealing the devastatingly irrational and inhumane response to crises precipitated by Hurricane Katrina. Here are links to thougtful coverage:

BAGnewsNOTES
New York Times
Naomi Klein
Bloomberg & another Bloomberg