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- Hacker News
- My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
Here's a decent post about the idea: https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-heaters-from-jean-pain/
by hmhrex - You might want to look at biogas digester design - I met farmers near Hanover who were running big biogas digesters, and using the excess heat to heat their homes and pools all winter…by swiftcoder
- I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.by Max536752
- Any part of the process we hand over goes away forever. This way, society becomes dependent, and M$, OpenAI and Apple see RoI.
Any usage, even minor, is at too great a cost.
- MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniquesby ewheeler
- Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.by gaigalas
- Seems dead.by Geezus_42
- I've never really understood the point of open source ecology. As you noted, it seems egregiously complicated and expensive. I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.by nchmy
- I thought of this guy as well. I love the spirit of attempting to make open source farm machinery. I think that domain and ones like it are under addressed by open source in general. I think the guy who started it still makes content on youtube but much of it seems to be recordings of zoom webinars he does. Not really sure what the state of the project isby camwhite
- If you're in a country like France, where buying fans for your daughter's schools is not allowed [0], or installing your own store-bought AC unit either, making DIY devices seems the easy part, sadly.
[0]: (French) https://www.lexpress.fr/environnement/canicule-il-offre-dix-...
[1]: (French) https://www.lemonde.fr/argent/article/2026/06/19/canicule-de...
by jiehong - I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.by CurtMonash
- What do you figure happened, such that people largely haven't done this?by nchmy
- As other comments have implied, but not explicitly said, they do their own engineering already with what they have.
Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued.
Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence.
EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me.
"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained"
by sublinear - Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/ but I’m not sure if they are still activeby alanwreath
- They are! But it seems like most of the effort is from the founder, himself. They could use some more hands and cash...by cjameskeller
- Seems somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technologyby Atiscant
- Damn, thank you! I often refers to myself saying "Naive heuristic : avoiding gadgets or services (free or not) that increase inequality by design, through technology or business model or both, would be a good starting point." but I can now point to this!by utopiah
- And Illich (where the term "tool" is quite broad, including anything from a knife to a highway system):
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
- You might like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Appropedia posted here every few years but paradoxically very little success here.by utopiah
- Awesome resource, thanks for sharing!by grep_it
- I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
by xmprt - > It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
by maeln - it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able systemby Palomides
- What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
by benj111 - Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
by csomar - > If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
by MisterTea - World Bicycle Relief has one approach to the transportation angle:
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
by WillAdams - > It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
- I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
by nchmy - Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...