Based out of the MIT Media Lab, ThinkCycle is a collaborative design initiative with a genuinely international academic community and a healthy bias towards sustainable development. Concepts are peer-reviewed as they progress, and to date include topics as diverse as biomimicry for sustainable innovation, rural neonatal care, and arsenic remediation.
It's great to see something that might also deal with the phenomenon that Lars Erik Holmquist refers to as "cargo cult design", in which "You essentially build a fetish object that has the appearance of a real artefact, but it doesn't actually do what you have promised it will do... What you're doing, in effect, is praying to the gods of technology to come and sort out all your real problems"
We often lack the technological or contextual knowledge to effectively solve design challenges. While it perhaps isn't necessarily ThinkCycle's primary intention, by harnessing complementary knowledge bases they've created a brilliant, pragmatic resource for reality-checking visionary concepts and designs.
