Sudeepas

The Safe Bottle LampThe BBC and Shell World Challenge is calling for nominations for 2010.  This is the most interesting annual project, where small projects from all over the world are sent in, ten are chosen and explained, and then you can vote for the one you think ought to win.  The projects make life better, safer, easier; they employ local people, they are hugely innovative, they have already started up without a lot of cash and now are asking for the World Challenge prize to take their project a step further. 

Last year's winner was Dr Godakumbura of Sri Lanka who designed a safe kerosene lamp in response to the unsafe use of ordinary bottles full of kerosene with a wick.  These look remarkably like Molotov cocktails, with similar results.
 
The Safe Bottle lamp is still a bottle, full of kerosene, with a wick.  The bottles however, are locally blown with thick glass, cooled slowly so they are unbreakable and have flattened sides so they don't roll if they are knocked over.  They have a screw-on metal lid that fixes the wick securely.  They are made for about a quarter. 
Money goes a long way in some parts of the world. 

Redesigning something that is already in use, just making it safer, more efficient, more ecologically aware, more local seems to be an intelligent use of design skills.   It is less about invention that it is about refinement.  There is both a humility and an anger in redesigning a lamp made from easily found discarded drinks bottles that works after a fashion, is free, and which sets people on fire.

I hope it is different now, but when I was at school we were taught to invent, from scratch, everything, then refine one's own precious idea to aesthetic perfection and then dream about imposing it on the world.    This is not useful.   The safe bottle lamp is. 

small tools held in great affection

my all-time favourite tool: little hammer, hatchet, screwdriver, nail puller, wire cutter, pliers and whatever that top bit is called that cuts the heads off nails.  Sturdy, dates from before the 1950s, a novelty item perhaps, but surprisingly useful it has been.  And it is so tiny.
 
Is there a name for tools that combine many functions?  where something can be a hammer and an inch later a wirecutter?  It is the opposite of that other attitude: the proper tool for every job.  That is what Lee Valley is based on.  No, this little handy dandy does not expect anyone to use it with great finesse, its function is to be helpful as one is muttering and banging around in the basement and hey presto! there it is, a tiny hammer to knock out a cottar pin wedged in the handle at the back of a clock, as happened this morning.  

Humour me, I'm on my holidays and such things loom large.

Lou Lynn: retro-active

Lou Lynn. Tools as Artifacts. 2009. glass, bronze

There used to be a junk store in Inglewood that just sold tools.  Most of the stuff I have came from it, a few pieces were bought new when I first moved to Calgary – my hammer and saw, and when the old CPR fellow across the alley died his son came to clear out the house and told me to take what I wanted from his father's workroom.  Which I did, except for the 4' piece of steel rail bolted to the bench.  

What I love about these old wrenches and planes, rakes and shovels, saws and chisels is the excellent steel of which they were made and the beautiful handles, satiny with long use under pressure. Compared to new tools with their bright dayglo colours and plastic handles, these old pieces are quiet and still, dark and graceful.

Lou Lynn, a sculptor living in the Slocan Valley, has had an exhibition, Retro-Active, travelling around the province this past year.  She works in bronze and glass, using the heft and monumentalism of basic tool shapes.  Some of the pieces are very large: cast glass adze heads, so large one's hand is Lilliputian.  Tools as Artifacts, 38 bronze and glass pieces pinned in a long line on the wall, are hand-scaled and like many old artifacts, each piece looks like a tool, but the function is unclear.  A piece with a bronze handle and a frosted glass prong is both humorous and mysterious.

In the Nanaimo Museum & Gallery installation Helen Sibelius, the curator of the retrospective, has paired Lynn's work with mining and forestry tools from the museum's collection.  These are no less mysterious: a half-inch thick iron spike like a 6-foot long knitting needle with a small wood handle at the top.
 
In all of this it is the small details that are so poignant.  A plain turned wood handle has a tiny line inscribed half an inch from where it joins the steel: a small, non-functional reference to a ferrule.  Lynn's sculptures makes much of these small details: she isn't making tools, but she is very aware of the hands that made tools, once, and all the small vanities they added to them.

Lou Lynn. Ladle. 2009 bronze, glass, 56 x 46 x 26cm.

small things: Josh Silver's adjustable glasses

Michael Lewis. Adjustable Glasses, The Guardian December 22, 2008Josh Silver is an atomic physicist at Oxford who invented adjustable liquid-filled lenses for eyeglasses.  Given the lack of eye doctors in Africa especially, such glasses allow the wearer to adjust the lenses themselves.  A clever little syringe on the frame fills flexible sacs, sandwiched between two durable plastic shields, with liquid and when the sac is the right thickness to correct the vision problem, the lens is sealed with a screw.  Silver is the archetypal rumpled and brilliant inventor, seen demonstrating his glasses in a TED lecture here.  There is a fairly complete description from 2008 in the Guardian here.  There is, of course, the website asking for help in this project here.

I would say this is a small thing, with huge consequences.  Esther Addley in the Guardian article points out that having glasses improves literacy rates and extends the working life of people who use their eyes to read, sew, embroider, mend nets – any kind of fine work.  A large scheme would train thousands of eye doctors to work in remote regions without much infrastructure or services – a large task indeed.  The small scheme is to put into production simple, self-adjusting glasses and to produce millions of them. 

Issue 23 (call for articles) wants to look at how small moves, small projects, small things can make large changes.  It is important to look at this for many, many reasons, not least of which is that western society is cut off from fine scale detail.  We can't fix our own cars, make our own clothes, cut our own hair or fix our own glasses; we seem incapable of invention. 

I would like a pair of these adjustable glasses – I'm wearing +1.25 readers bought from Nanaimo's Midland Liquidators in 1996 for $10 and they could use a bit of tuning. 

Kenya Ceramic Jiko

reproduced from 'With Our Own Hands'. IRDC 1986

Jikos are traditional charcoal stoves in Kenya made from scrap metal: a small drum has a grate set in the middle.  A fire is made below the grate, pots sit on the top of the drum.  It is a form brought from India to Kenya by railway buildings in the 1890s.  They are inefficient and consume a lot of charcoal.
Kenya Ceramic Jiko (KCJ) is an improved version adapted in 1982  from the ceramic charcoal stoves found in Thailand.  The top chamber is lined with a pottery liner made from clay, rice husks and ash cemented to the metal. The grate is either pottery or metal and the drum is now waisted: the fire is in the bottom chamber, the grate is small and the top flares out to hold the cooking pot.  The KCJ is 50% more fuel efficient.

The Mountain Gorilla population of Central Africa is near extinction because of deforestation due to the production of charcoal.  A workshop has been set up for the local manufacture of ceramic Jikos to reduce the demand for charcoal in areas with massive refugee populations, such as Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  This will reduce the illegal harvesting of wood in the nearby Virunga National Park, the last refuge of the Mountain Gorilla.

This comes by way of the World Challenge