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Smart Citizens

Team

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Joining Forces with our Friends in Bangalore

At the moment of writing the whole of MediaLab is in a state of deep concentration. The final presentations will take place next week, meaning that everything that is done is oriented towards presenting the product in the most stunning way possible. In order to achieve this we decided to team up with India even more. The final movie will be an explanation of how the two teams exchanged knowledge and ideas on tackling the global problem of e-waste.

Amsterdam’s SeeThru platform puts emphasis on education and making people aware of what’s inside their phones, but also what the impact is of mining the materials. Take the polluted rivers of China as an example, this is pollution coming from the cadmium found in the battery of your smartphone. In the southern region of Guangxi (China) rivers are heavily polluted as a result of this mining process, mainly because there are no clear policies that is keeping the polluting companies responsible for their mistakes. This is the aspect of the SeeThru website that is showing these kind of stories mediated by an interactive map (see underneath).

Schermafbeelding 2016-01-11 om 19.45.59

So SeeThru does education, whereas Bangalore is creating a technical infrastructure to actually recycle the broken e-waste. Two different approaches, but they are definitely complementing each other. This is what we’re willing to stress in the movie – the way our smartbin and the educational platform are additional to one another.

Schermafbeelding 2016-01-11 om 16.14.18

The pieces of the puzzle are coming together. It is nice to see that the design across cultures idea is working out and that the different cultural contexts are actually bringing each other further in the design process.

Lets hope our faces after the final presentations are as happily smiling, just as they were at our recent lunch at Cisco.

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