Sensor Nodes and Watering Holes
How 12 Media Labbers transferred tech tools to a community of Kenyan innovators
By Lisa Katayama, Program Manager, Media Lab Director’s Fellows
It’s close to midnight on a Friday. Amidst the thinning crowd of Kenyans coming home, a small team of Media Labbers, fighting jet lag, stand in the dark airport in Nairobi, our bags filled with hardware. We are here for the first ever Director’s Fellows offsite on international soil, an experiment that has already defied all odds. For the past week, we’ve been juggling our desire to be here with concerns that maybe, right now — when reports of random bombings by Islamist militant extremists and tourist evacuations are the main hits that Google News yields for the region — is not the best time to prototype technology solutions in Kenya. In the end, we all decided to come, albeit with a security detail and written promises to MIT not to take any random outings outside of our pre-planned schedule.
When Joi Ito created the Director’s Fellows program a year and a half ago and I came on board to run it, we wanted to come up with groundbreaking ways of fulfilling Joi’s promise to make the Lab more of a platform than a container. The Fellows come from an extremely wide range of industries and geographies. By design, no two Fellows are alike, which is the only way it makes sense that a chess grandmaster, a comedian, a virtual magician, and a prison activist ended up in the same cohort. The Lab has tools that the Fellows can benefit from, and the Fellows have insights and community networks that the Lab would otherwise be hard-pressed to access. To catalyze these collaborations, we hold what we’re calling offsites — adventures into Fellows’ home turf that take us out of our comfort zones and into environments that are not necessarily native to us.
Our goal is not to hold short-term pop-up hackathons in remote areas with strangers, but rather to inspire and advance research with committed collaborators who can help us spin off sustainable, impact-driven projects. We don’t want to tell people what they need. We want to learn from local communities and empower them with technology. By engaging creatively at the intersection of outreach, culture, and technology, we are inventing new paradigms for cross-disciplinary, intersectional collaboration that creates a lasting effect on the world.
The Media Lab team that just set foot on African soil is as diverse as the wildlife that surrounds us. We are Sierra Leonian, Russian, Kenyan, Japanese, German, Chinese, and American. There are the three socket hackers from Hugh Herr’s Biomechatronics group; a team of engineers from Joe Paradiso’s Responsive Environments group; and a contingent from Ethan Zuckerman’s Center for Civic Media. Colin Raney, Advisory Council member and IDEO managing director, is here to help lead the project teams and design the interactions. I’m here to lead the program and make sure our mission is carried out successfully. Our hosts Juliana Rotich and David Kobia, who are Director’s Fellows as well as the co-founders of Ushahidi , greet us in Nairobi. And Joi Ito, the director of the Lab, joins us tomorrow.
I wasn’t kidding when I said our suitcases were full of hardware. Our toolkit includes two alpha sense air quality sensors, high-intensity LEDs, five PIR sensors, several other types of sensors whose names escape me, bread boards, jumper wires, microphones, GPS, a radio station, five Arduinos, and 10 BRCKs for connectivity when we’re off the beaten path. We also brought some technologies that were built at the Lab — a metering device called Sambaza Watts; a “fit pen” robotic arm that measures stiffness of body parts; and Tidmarsh sensor nodes that can “listen” to the surrounding environment.
For the next week, we are working with teams of Kenyan innovators who represent the perspectives of the local communities and have the tech- and business-savvy to carry forth the projects we start together. We’ll spend three days in Nairobi prototyping tech solutions to urban challenges at the iHub and three days in the field at Tsavo East National Park working with wildlife rangers who are combatting poachers. (And, it turns out, lots of time sitting in traffic.)
