About TechTravels
This blog deals with some of unintended effects of the collision between culture and technology. These pages will be dedicated in particular to the repair, mod and hack ecosystems that have sprung up around consumer electronics in developing countries.
As an interaction designer and one of the principal founders of Blendid, David Kousemaker researches this topic from a designer/maker perspective.
Techtravels /at/ gmail /dot/ com for questions related to this blog (or if you have any spare frequent flyer miles you’d like to donate).
All content of this side is published by David Kousemaker and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I love your blog, I just wish there were more entries! It’s fascinating! this organic form of learning through immersion is going to give them the edge to surpass us. these people will build the next generation of electronics and software not people who go to school for it and learn in a formal environment with loads of student debt.
Chris
May 3, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Very interesting blog. I believe we share some common interrest in counter-obsolescent strategies. Myself and Lourens Rozema are running workshops called the e-waste workshops since 2005. Maybe we can find a way to collaborate in the future. In any case keep posting (and I’ll keep re-blogging
:
http://www.ewasteworkshop.com/blog/
ben.
Benjamin Gaulon
May 23, 2011 at 9:48 am
I very much appreciate your blog, and have been hyperlinking to it increasingly. When I returned from living in Africa for two and a half years (back in the 80s), the people who most inspired me were the “tinkerers”, the repair and refurbish class. The opposite of the “resource curse”, using know-how to make something unwanted or broken into something valuable – it creates value. During the past ten years, it has been painful to see the “geeks of color” painted into a corner by quick-trigger enviro watchdogs and manufacturers pursuing “planned obsolesce in hindsight”. My own blog started getting shriller in the criticism of “the perfect as enemy of the good”, but it has begun to draw more journalistic interest. Your TechTravels blog has been a place I can direct people to see for themselves how life works for the tech and repair class. You document the very best jobs available to people in many countries.
Robin Ingenthron (@WR3A)
December 3, 2011 at 4:37 pm