Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
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WillAdams
Ages ago, I had Vol. 2, _The Metal Lathe_ which was one of the 7 vol. "Gingery Books", a series on _Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap_ (Vol. 1 was _The Charcoal Foundry_) which used as its central conceit the fact that a lathe is the one tool in a machine shop suited to easily replicating itself (insert old machinist joke about how you can make anything with a shaper, except money).
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
I've been following this guy a couple of years now (as well as many other mentioned in the comments like LowTechMagazine, Simplifier, OSE, etc)
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
If anyone else has pointers to low cost sensor network appropriate for small scale farms please share!
turtlebits
IMO, the wind turbine is way too complex to be actually useful. It's definitely not reproducible for $30 unless you have access to a junkyard.
The power drill required for it isn't especially low tech. A cheap used solar panel is a better solution in 95% of situations.
ewheeler
MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques
hmhrex
My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
I love this project. I often lament how narrowly focused on tech/software open source tends to be. It is the most powerful example of human altruism that I can think of but it tends not to address a lot of peoples basic needs. I would love to see an open source house, car, bike, etc much more than I would like to see another solution for coordinating container clusters or something
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
Max536752
I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.
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plastic-enjoyer
That looks rather primitive. I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one. If the designs were adapted so that they no longer looked as they’d been designed by an anarcho-primitivist, would we still regard them as low-tech at all?
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mrhottakes
Excellent work. People here forget that "low tech" can be much more difficult than "high tech".
mrbluecoat
Reminds me of the book "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope" by William Kamkwamba. Good read.
Guestmodinfo
Also lots and lots of manufacturing and repair work is like kept secret from the common people or at least that is the general vibe. So I'm happy for this initiative.
m-i-l
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
this is the kind of open source project that makes me question my life choices every time i install a node module
elias1233
It would be interesting to see if an air conditioner or refrigerator can be made in this manner
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gaigalas
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
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joshuaS98
This is amazing
ahana_537
what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...
[1] https://archive.org/details/natureartofwor00pyed
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
Ages ago, I had Vol. 2, _The Metal Lathe_ which was one of the 7 vol. "Gingery Books", a series on _Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap_ (Vol. 1 was _The Charcoal Foundry_) which used as its central conceit the fact that a lathe is the one tool in a machine shop suited to easily replicating itself (insert old machinist joke about how you can make anything with a shaper, except money).
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/google-post-by-marcus-wolsc...
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/3d-printed-milling-machine-i...
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
You might like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Appropedia posted here every few years but paradoxically very little success here.
Seems somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
I've been following this guy a couple of years now (as well as many other mentioned in the comments like LowTechMagazine, Simplifier, OSE, etc)
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
https://opensourcelowtech.org/wifidish.html
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/ but I’m not sure if they are still active
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
Sort of in the same vein, I've really enjoyed this book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/76998.Reader_s_Digest...
Lots of really interesting tidbits, and a great lemonade recipe, among lots of other gems.
Here's a similar project focused on agtech & iot - https://github.com/mitra42/frugal-iot
If anyone else has pointers to low cost sensor network appropriate for small scale farms please share!
IMO, the wind turbine is way too complex to be actually useful. It's definitely not reproducible for $30 unless you have access to a junkyard.
The power drill required for it isn't especially low tech. A cheap used solar panel is a better solution in 95% of situations.
MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques
My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
Here's a decent post about the idea: https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-heaters-from-jean-pain/
Similar guy (though a more mysterious persona), and another noteworthy low-key web page: https://simplifier.neocities.org/
See also
- The astounding Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
- Appropriate Technologies wiki https://www.appropedia.org/
- Global Village Construction Kit https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ (blueprints for 50 open source technologies that are fundamental to civilization)
I love this project. I often lament how narrowly focused on tech/software open source tends to be. It is the most powerful example of human altruism that I can think of but it tends not to address a lot of peoples basic needs. I would love to see an open source house, car, bike, etc much more than I would like to see another solution for coordinating container clusters or something
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.
That looks rather primitive. I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one. If the designs were adapted so that they no longer looked as they’d been designed by an anarcho-primitivist, would we still regard them as low-tech at all?
Excellent work. People here forget that "low tech" can be much more difficult than "high tech".
Reminds me of the book "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope" by William Kamkwamba. Good read.
Also lots and lots of manufacturing and repair work is like kept secret from the common people or at least that is the general vibe. So I'm happy for this initiative.
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.
I printed this out for the looming Zombie apocalypse.
Love it. Another great site along these lines: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
this is the kind of open source project that makes me question my life choices every time i install a node module
It would be interesting to see if an air conditioner or refrigerator can be made in this manner
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
This is amazing
what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.