Catching up with inventor William Kamkwamba Interview with Chris Anderson

DIY, hacking, and craft have recently drawn attention in HCI and CSCW, largely as a collaborative and creative hobbyist practice. We shift the focus from the recreational elements of this practice to the ways in which it democratizes design and manufacturing. This democratized technological practice, we argue, unifies playfulness, utility, and expressiveness, relying on some industrial infrastructures while creating demand for new types of tools and literacies. Thriving on top of collaborative digital systems, the Maker movement both implicates and impacts professional designers. As users move more towards personalization and reappropriation, new design opportunities are created for HCI.

Technology has always played a central role in how we

structure our societies. Marshall McLuhan’s mentor Harold

Innis distinguishes between communication media that are

biased towards space (e.g. easily transported and

disseminated) and media that are biased towards time (e.g.

cast in clay, metal, or stone, and capable of enduring

indefinitely) [23]. He argued that the dominant bias of

communication technology in a society shaped the

character of that civilization, both in how it was perceived

through history based on what was preserved in the material

record and in how it administrated itself while active.

Following this, McLuhan went on to develop some of the

earliest theories of electronic media, positing four “laws of

media”. These laws of media framed all technologies in

terms of their social impacts within the context of human

technological development. He argued that every medium

enhanced or extended some human capability; that it

obsolesced some previous technology or practice; that it

retrieved a previously obsolesced practice or function; and

that it had the potential to reverse into an unanticipated

opposite outcome (a nod to our ability to imagine a

dystopian extreme for any technological advance) [33].

Technological practices, from this perspective, are never

isolated from their social or economic contexts, or from the

history of previous technological practice.

The industrial revolution effected radical technological

transformations of Western society that started in Britain

and spread across the world. Industrial infrastructures thrive

on interoperability, standardization of measures and

components, and specialization of knowledge and labor. As

advances in manufacturing, metallurgy, energy production,

transport, textiles, and agriculture reshaped the landscape,

the population exploded and a new “middle class” of

workers emerged. With these technological advances came

a host of social transformations: the spread of literacy, a

new urban environment, and a newly framed relationship

between work and leisure time [4]. The human capabilities

necessary to achieve industrialization were quite different

from those that were developed in pre-industrial societies.

At the same time, the sum of human knowledge was

exploding: philosopher Pierre Levy is commonly cited as

identifying the period of 1751-1772 as “the end of an era in

which a single human being was able to comprehend the

totality of knowledge” [29]. As human knowledge grew, it

became increasingly necessary for individuals to specialize,

often at the cost of broader know-how. Whereas knowledge

of basic handcraft and agriculture was once common, in the

new urban environment one could go through life without

ever having to repair a cart, milk a cow, or sew a dress.

If we broadly apply McLuhan’s laws to the industrial

revolution, we might say that it enhanced manual labor

practices by extending and automating manufacturing and

agricultural processes. It obsolesced many of the individual

craft practices of the day, replacing handmade items with

mass produced “products”. At the same time, it retrieved a

set of classical values around education and self-

improvement through the rise of widespread literacy, and it

reversed into a machine culture that treated everything as a

resource to be consumed, while rendering the workings of

that machine increasingly unknowable. The technologies

underlying our modes of production continue to transform,

however, with computation now heavily implicated in their

evolution. While industrial mass

Inventor and author William Kamkwamba returns to the TED stage a decade after his TEDGlobal 2007 talk in which he spoke about building a windmill for his community at the age of 14. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, he shares with us where his dreams and accomplishments have taken him. TEDArchive presents previously unpublished talks from TED conferences. Enjoy this unedited talk by William Kamkwamba. Filmed at TEDGlobal 2017.