Design that Matters
| Founded | 2001 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Timothy Prestero, Neil Cantor, Nitin Sawhney, Saul Griffith, Yael Maguire, Ben Vigoda |
| Type | NGO |
| 30-0172078 | |
| Location |
|
|
Area served
|
Africa, South and Southeast Asia |
|
Employees
|
3 |
|
Volunteers
|
850 and counting |
| Slogan | Design for Social Enterprise |
| Mission | Design that Matters creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. |
| Website | designthatmatters.org |
Founded in 2001 by a team of MIT students, Design that Matters (DtM), is a nonprofit design company that partners with social entrepreneurs to design products that address basic needs in developing countries.
DtM's core competencies include ethnography, design and engineering. DtM manages a collaborative design process through which hundreds of students and professional volunteers contribute to the design of new product and services for the poor in developing countries. DtM has completed projects in health care, education, microfinance and renewable energy. The company has worked in Mali, Benin, Kenya, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and Indonesia. DtM partners include the East Meets West Foundation, Solar Ear, World Education, the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology's Global Health Initiative (CIMIT GHI), the Centre for Mass Education in Science (CMES) in Bangladesh and the Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank in India.
In 2012, Design that Matters received the National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement.
The Kinkajou Microfilm projector is designed to assist night-time adult literacy education in developing countries. The Kinkajou uses microfilm to store up to 10,000 reference images on a US$5 cassette. Using a high-intensity LED light source and inexpensive plastic optics adapted from Fisher-Price toys, the device is able to project the references images onto a classroom wall. The device draws power from a motorcycle battery, which users charge during the day using a small solar panel.
World Education, an international nonprofit, implemented the Kinkajou projector in 40 villages in rural Mali in 2004. Design that Matters was named a 2005 Tech Museum Awards Laureate for development of the Kinkajou Portable Library and Projector. The product was featured in the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum's "Design for the Other 90%" exhibit in 2008.
DtM created the NeoNurture Infant Incubator in 2010 to demonstrate how to adapt an infant thermoregulation device to the context of a poor hospital in a developing country. The project was a collaboration with both Medicine Mondiale in New Zealand, and the Global Health Initiative at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, or CIMIT, a nonprofit consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and engineering schools. The goal was to demonstrate how to provide the capacilities of a top-of-the-line infant incubator in an inexpensive device. As part of the early stages of the project, students at Stanford University developed an infant sleeping bag that they then independently developed as Embrace Global. In the final Neonurture design, many product features were implemented using car parts, the idea being that spare parts would be easier to find in a poor country.
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