Technology for Luddites
The ingenious Chinese wheelbarrow lives on in Angola, Africa. The contemporary design is similar to the Ancient Chinese vehicle, except it uses straight boards and a car tyre.
The machine and the men pushing it are both called “roboteiros”.
More pictures: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12.
Thanks to Marco Cecilio.
The Cyclocarder by Fibershed-contributor Katharina Jolda is a wonderful update to the article on pedal powered machines. The Cyclocarder can turn your backyard, community center, or farm into a human powered wool processing station.
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.
“Barge haulers on the Volga“, a late 19th century painting by Ilja Repin.
“Harvesting energy from the users’ muscular power to convert this into electricity is a relatively unknown way to power consumer products. It nevertheless offers surprising opportunities for product designers; human-powered products function independently from regular power infrastructure, are convenient and can be environmentally and economically beneficial.”
“This work provides insight into the knowledge required to design human-powered energy systems in consumer products from a scientific perspective. It shows the developments of human-powered products from the first introduction of the BayGen Freeplay radio in 1995 till current products and provides an overview and analysis of 211 human-powered products currently on the market.”
“Although human power is generally perceived as beneficial for the environment, this thesis shows that achieving environmental benefit is only feasible when the environmental impact of additional materials in the energy conversion system is well balanced with the energy demands of the products functionality.”
“Human Power Empirically Explored” (PDF, 12MB), Arjen Jansen, 2011.
