3rd World Design Internship

I’m curious if anyone out there would know where to start looking for an internship that dealt with designing for people in 3rd world countries. It’s been a passion of mine to experience this type of work which could be so beneficial to peoples lives. An internship also would lend itself to a non-profit type of organization. Please leave any information possible!

Thanks core,

ryan

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how easy it will be to find such an opportunity. In my college our “final project” was our our Thesis. We spent 1 semester of purely research, and the 2nd semester was designing the actual product. I don’t know how prevalent this structure is for classes, but I’d strongly suggest that if you have an active interest in this focus of design for 3rd World countries, you should think about theming a project based upon that. Find an organization you can do a volunteer trip for, and state your intent off the bat. Think about a specific problem that you want to solve to begin with. Shelter out of refuse or inexpensive mass produced materials? Water purification? etc. See if you can spend a week in a 3rd world country doing volunteer work, and observe the specific scenario/problem you wish to solve for. Then come back and work on a project based around that. I’m sure if you made a prototype the group you volunteered with would consider bringing it out on the next volunteer trip and testing it. Good luck.

try www.dddxyz.com

ciao!

I listened to a lecture by Dan Buchner and he talked about ICSID having interp programs, they’re not interns though, but two week interp programs. I think the coming up one is creating a world house, but before they’ve gone to Zimbabwe and tried to solve a water problem. http://www.icsid.org/projects/projects/articles229.htm