It’s a challenge for designers to get our heads around the concept of open collaboration, though, and away from the ‘patent, patent, patent’ mentality that pervades design for consumption in the northern hemisphere.”
– Designer, Niki Dun

©2005 Niki Dun

The Massive Change in Action site was launched this week, an education website based on the Massive Change project. One of the featured projects is by Niki Dun, a 2002 Industrial Design graduate of the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. The Bicyle Ambulance was Niki’s ECIAD thesis project, which she later took to Malawi in East Africa to test and develop. The design is simply brilliant and brilliantly simple. It responds to a very real human need; it is human-centered design at its best. Congrats to Niki for being featured on the Massive Change site, but also for having the courage to take her design out of the classroom and in to the hands of the people she was designing for (a step that is unfortunately often left out of student projects like this). The development of the project is a great example of cross-disciplinary as well as cross-cultural participatory design. But my favorite part of the project is that Niki will be putting the schematic drawings for the design online, free to use and free to improve on. The Bicycle Utility Trailer is one of the first spin-offs, another design developed by Niki and her team in Malawi after completing the Bicycle Ambulance. Projects like this make me feel very self-conscious about the relative superficiality of my own work.

The entire Massive Change in Action site is really worth taking a look at.