Design Challenge Hacks Expensive Tech: Lifesaver for Millions of Babies!
Jane Chen was one of a team of students in a d.school called Design for Extreme Affordability.”
The class challenged them to design a baby incubator for 1 percent of the traditional $20,000 cost.
According to Jane, in the developing world “4 million low- birthweight children die within the first 28 days because they don’t have enough fat to regulate their body temperature
If they had raced into this as simply a cost problem, they would have produced an inexpensive electric incubator — a seemingly reasonable solution but one that, as it turned out, would have failed to address the root of the problem.
Instead, they took the timid find out what really mattered. They went to Nepal to see the challenge firsthand. That’s when they discovered that 80 percent of babies were born at home, not in the hospital, in rural villages with no electricity.
Thus the team’s real challenge, it suddenly became clear, was to create something that did not require electricity at all. With that key insight, they began in earnest to solve the problem at hand.
Eventually, Jane and three other teammates launched a nonprofit company called “Embrace” and created the “Embrace Nest,” which uses a waxlike substance that is heated in water, and then placed in a sleeping bag-like pod, where it can warm a baby for six hours or more.
By getting out there and fully exploring the problem, they were able to better clarify the question and in turn to focus on the essential details that ultimately allowed them to make the highest contribution to the problem.
The Takeaway? Empathy is Your Superpower! ✊
This story is a golden nugget of wisdom for anyone who wants to make a difference:
1️⃣ Empathy: Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes (or tiny baby booties) to understand their needs.
2️⃣ Observation: Don’t just read about the problem, see it for yourself!
3️⃣ Adaptability: Ditch assumptions and design for the real situation, not what you think it is.
Jane and her team show us that the coolest inventions come from understanding the real problem and putting people first. Pretty inspiring, right?
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Story Credits: Essentialism Book by Greg Mckeown
