MIT’s Amy Smith on appropriate engineering, Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, California. Food, water, medicine — in the developing world, these basic needs can be impossible to meet. Amy Smith and her students design smart, low cost tools to improve the life of the poorest in our world.

I remember traveling with my father as he worked on appropriate technology projects while I was growing up. Engineers can make huge difference to truly improve people’s lives. The video does a nice job of explaining how combining engineering know how with a passion for improving people’s lives have a huge impact. Amy Smith is a MacArthur Fellow (2004-2009)

Related: KickStart (article on Kickstart: Stanford Engineering to Social Innovation) – Segway Inventor working on bringing water and electricity to the world’s poor

Engineers are responsible for solving a variety of increasingly-complex problems, but oftentimes nature has already figured out the best solutions. For example, velcro was invented in 1941 after a Swiss engineer looked under a microscope to see how the seeds of a burdock plant stuck to his socks. Before this time, there was no good way of producing cheap and reusable adhesion for everyday applications. More recently, engineers have been studying the microfilaments of geckos that enable it to scale walls and leave no residue behind. A synthetic version of gecko feet could enable you to scale walls one day while wearing a special suit (just like Spiderman).

Natural molecular motors made of ATPase, studied by researchers at Cornell a few years ago, have been found to be about 50-80% efficient, a feat thought to be impossible with our current technologies. In the area of heat transfer, structures like termite mounds and bee hives have been shown to be some of the most efficient convection cooling systems in the world. (read Adrian Bejan’s “Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature” for more details and examples.) The increasing plea for building “green structures” will likely be addressed by already-existing natural solutions.

Industry is already sinking their teeth in. Pax Scientific has created impellers based on the shape of the calla lily. Pax’s patented impellers can circulate 4 million gallons of water through industrial storage tanks while drawing no more electricity than a couple of 100-watt lightbulbs. Researchers at Daimler-Chrysler recently spent time studying boxfish to find a better way to streamline their automobiles.

The big payoff will ultimately be cheaper and more efficient energy usage. Places looking to such natural solutions will be in a very favorable spot as resources become more scarce.

See this article in Business 2.0 for more details.