The Leapback: Kenyan makes Tea with Mobilephone

Samuel Mwaura of Ting’ang’a , a electrician in Rural Africa in Kenya has developed an invention which uses an ordinary mobile phone to switch on electronic devices and perform ordinary household tasks. The enterprising system uses a second motherboard as an interpretive system to relay messages as commands to mechanical and electrical switches.

Mwara created this tea maker from a modified deep fryer, the tasks are ordered so that the number of times he calls determines the tasks wanted, his intention is to make domestic life easier and to enhance private security.

These days in development the interdisciplinary approach is to provide ubiquitous tools that encourage two new factors we consider a lot: leapfrogging and leapback. Leapfrogging is when a technology allows a community to skip steps of development and jump ahead to modern circumstances very quickly. The mobile phone is a great example of that, rather than waiting for the telegraph lines and train tracks and telephone lines that made our systems possible the population can simply leap ahead to having a cell phone, and even therefore access to the internet and potentially enjoy full participation. The really critical part is the leapback; the amazing inventions and applications of these technologies that come out of the diverse communities as they are adapted and personalized for local use. If we keep the flow of information open enough then the leapback is allowed to follow the innovation and invention back to the source and we can benefit from the latent diversity and genius of the many people it is possible to reach in this process.

Rather than ubiquitous Open Source technology creating a bland and featureless world the reverse is true; the ability to meet basic needs and create an atmosphere of human dignity fosters a creative atmosphere from which great adjustments and adaptations can flow very quickly. Coupled with the ability to have real time communications and 3D fabbing stations ideas can literally take shape and be modified at a very rapid pace. The potential for adaptation and diversification of basic ubiquitous technologies and human habitat infrastructure is truly limited only by the human imagination.

Our task in this struggle is threefold: first off to create a circumstance where humanity and its weakest members are thriving, to modify our sense of place and participation to adjust to a more global perspective, and to create and introduce bright green technologies that will rapidly advance a condition of ecological stability and diversity.

Mwara's innovation is an excellent example of this potential revealed in its nascent form. Its actually a lot harder to make a cup of tea automatically than it is a cup of coffee...first he had to invent the method of creating proper tea with a machine! I would think that creating an arduino system that can prompt a coffee maker would be pretty simple by comparison to Mwara's circumstances, although he is an electrician by profession and an inventive one at that. My own artistic tendencies have been turning more and more towards electronics lately and I admit that even after my recent ewaste purge I still have a nifty pile of bits to take apart and hackerspace ghetto rig into something cool.

"In the future there will be time for tea" is a motto that I proposed more than five years ago in my livejournal sustainability groups. Abstaining from frivolous travel and exploring the next dimension of reality in the tradition of artists for a year i walked to the store and kept a studio in Second Life and learned that the faster part of the future is past us and the part that is slow is a surprise and the part that is fast is that the future is already here.

mmmm tea. My favorite.
Original article in The Standard a Kenyan publication