Frugal Engineering

This article makes some interesting points about engineering and product design, concluding that frugal design and engineering have a lot to contribute to both the developed and developing world. Curiously, the article skirts the ideas of appropriate technology or the Long Now foundation.

At the same time, I read in Newsweek that there will be 5 billion mobile phones in use next year, out of a global population of 7 billion. Considering the number of people either too young or too old to use mobile phones, that is a truly incredible statistic. Of course, the majority of those carrying mobile phones around the world use them for little more than calling or sending text messages. Phones like the Nokia presented in the first linked article offer these services and little else.

This is a frustrating use of resources. Sometimes I felt like I was the last person in Sweden to start using a mobile phone five or so years ago, but I couldn't really be convinced of the utility of carrying a device that could only make (expensive!) phone calls. When I bought my first mobile phone it had a decent camera on it, which was useful for note-taking, but I also very quickly learned to love Opera Mini, which gave me access to almost the entire internet through GPRS. This was a more monumental event than gaining access to the internet for the first time in college. Back in '96, the internet had the tiniest fraction of the world's information searchable, but by 2006 it was a different story altogether.

The point is, every mobile phone has the basic functions to allow access to the internet. They are by their very nature telecommunication devices, so network access shouldn't be a problem. They have displays, even if they are rudimentary, that can present text. And they have some sort of input device, a keypad. The internet is now a great depository for all manner of sounds, video, and images, but it is still largely driven and organized by text. That 5 billion people next year can have access to that information from almost anywhere is truly revolutionary. But can these simple phones access the internet? Are they provided with the software to make it possible? I certainly hope so.

Smart phones are great, but I think these not-so-smart phones could be truly earth-shattering.