30 December 2009

Kinkajou ~ DesignThatMatters Literacy Projector

Here's an ultra-affordable good-enough information display, the Kinkajou by MIT alum Tim Prestero and the DesignThatMatters team. Plastic optics inspired by a Fisher-Price toy married with cheap, bright LEDs, plus going-retro with microfiche, leads to a key tool for literacy education in Mali, their start-country... Interestingly enough, the original Kinkajou concept came out of a 1999 Media Lab class on Wind-Up Browsers where genius inventor engineer Saul Griffith did an initial design. That Browsers class was pretty epic, btw, in being a precursor inspiration for the OLPC XO laptop, the Potenco pull-cord generator, and even the FirstMileSolutions/UnitedVillages connectivity system.

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