Technology for Luddites
“I really love gardening but I have a bad back and when it comes to staying bent over in the garden it gets rough. So I built this Helper Machine. I call it My P-Machine. Planting/Picking/Pulling weeds/Putting around the garden machine.”
More.
Hat tip to Rob De Schutter.
“There is a huge need for construction materials, at the same time the planet everywhere is littered by millions of used car tires. A way has to be found for re-using the materials that car tires are made of: rubber and steel. Large scale processes for this are well known. At the smallest scale of use better methods of recuperation have to be developed.”
“Each car tire contains 70 meters of steel wire with a 1 mm cross section. When the properties of the composing parts of a used rubber tire are well understood, then the practice of recuperation can be adapted to it.” Illustrated manual at Demotech.
“Stable and strong – you can almost make anything with lashing.”
Illustrated manual at makeprojects.
Previously:
The tool shown here was designed for use in outdoor nurseries specializing in ornamental and bedding plants. At nurseries in California where it was tested, it reduced workers’ forward bending angle by as much as 47%.
The time spent working at a forward-bent angle of more than 20 degrees was reduced by nearly half. Hand gripping effort was reduced by more than half. Lifting strain was reduced by 40%.
Workers reported less work-related pain when using the handles, and those who had the most severe symptoms at the start reported the most improvement.
What happens when two industrial design students from Sweden end up in Kenya creating a pedal powered machine for small-scale farmers who are often illiterate and speak more than 60 languages? You get a do-it-yourself design that seems to have come out of the IKEA factories – pictoral manuals included.
“Made in Kenya”, the bachelor project of Niklas Kull and Gabriella Rubin, is a textbook example of low-tech made accessible to everybody, regardless of their native tongue and language skills.
Sub-irrigated planters are simple devices that allow low-maintenance, low-water consumption container gardening. Appropedia has DIY-instructions, using plastic buckets or bottles.
Previously: Water batteries for trees, How to make your own low-tech vertical farm.
