Funded primarily by the personal savings of group members and a grant from the National Science Foundation, residents of Jalalabad have built the FabFi network: an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles.

Jalalabad's longest link is currently 2.41 miles, between the FabLab and the water tower at the public hospital in Jalalabad, transmitting with a real throughput of 11.5Mbps (compared to 22Mbps ideal-case for a standards compliant off-the-shelf 802.11g router transitting at a distance of only a few feet). The system works consistently through heavy rain, smog and a couple of good sized trees.

With FabFi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity---thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources.

In FabLabs, technology brings people and ideas together. FabFi embraces this same principle. The public hospital, which houses the endpoint of FabFi Afghanistan's longest link, has become a shared community resource, providing downlinks to a growing number of locations in the city center.

The shared infrastructure facilitates communication between FabFi users all over the city as they collaboratively grow and maintain the network. The FabFi user group is learning valuable skills that will soon allow them to generate revenue for themselves and the Lab by building, installing and maintaining FabFi links as part of a "FabFi Club" at the FabLab.

Fast Company reports that residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once. While it sounds like science fiction, FabFi could have important ramifications for entire swaths of the world (including rural America) that lack conventional broadband.

Although the Netherlands recently became the first country in the EU to pass a comprehensive Net Neutrality law, the United States and other Western countries are dragging their feet. But why wait?

If they create their own internet in a war torn country, what's our excuse? 

Q: Are there issues surrounging design for social innovation you feel are important to examine, yet are currently ignored? And how do you suggest we address them?

A: In my view, one of the most challenging issues related to design for social innovation is the quality of its results. 

In fact, when we discuss traditional products, in general, we have a language and the needed sensibility to discuss their qualities. Vice versa, when we talk about design for social innovation, things are quite different and we still don’t know how to do it. 

Let’s consider, for instance, a solution based on the sharing of places or products. Given the title of your magazine, Shareable magazine, I suppose that you think that to share is good. And I agree. But, what are the qualities you consider to give this positive evaluation? How do you discuss them? As a matter of fact you can share something in many different ways. We should be able to judge how much effective and economically viable each one of these different solutions could be. But also, and in my view, here is the major designers’ specific responsibility, we should have the criteria and the words to discuss different ways of sharing, endowed with different sets of soft qualities. As you can imagine, this is today a particularly challenging issue. 

We need to stop assuming that pure market forces will blissfully take us towards an innovative future. We need a deeper understanding of where we are going in order to encourage more innovation. Raw capitalism is fantastic at improving quality and driving down costs but it also rewards a monopolistic lock-in that tends to discourage companies from playing nice with others.

The entire purpose of this "Beyond Mobile” blog is to discuss and explore unlocking the future of smart devices. I feel strongly that this is being held back by a number of forces, but a critical one is being able to liberate web applications on handsets.

[...]

The mobile web community is a crazy, amazing, determined bunch and they are fervently working on making the mobile web reach it’s potential. In many ways this community feels a bit like barbarians at the gate. What will hold this crowd back isn’t their energy but the foot dragging that we’ve already seen in this industry. The Browser Ghetto isn’t an accident, its more ‘abuse by neglect’ on the part of Apple and Google. They’ll get around to it, but only eventually.

The PaperPhone will be officially be unveiled at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada by Roel Vertegaal—an associate professor of Computer Science and director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Canada.

In an exclusive interview, Vertegaal said, "This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years. The computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen. This is not a maybe. This is a definite. This is what your phone will look like."

With design starting to be applied to many other broader fields than just producing graphics or products, a crack team of designers from the innovation consultancy IDEO is spearheading a non-profit endeavor with one simple goal: Use design to change the world.

Si vous pensez que je suis en train de déplorer à grands cris la puissance destructrice des objets, vous vous trompez. C’est exactement l’inverse. Je suis consterné de voir à quel point ils ont perdu de leur force. Parce que j’aime les objets, je veux qu’ils fassent partie de la famille au lieu de n’être que des partenaires jetables.

Une réflexion intéressante sur les objets et la consommation, par Dmitri Sokolov-Mitritch, journaliste russe pour Izvestia.

Nanotech tea bag creates safe drinking water instantly, for less than a penny

A new "tea bag" uses nano-fibers to suck contaminants and bacteria out of water, providing a desperately-needed, cheap solution for the billions of people without clean drinking water.