NO CHILD LEFT ADRIFT

摘要

Lina catano bedoya: Andres and I became friends studying product design engineering at EAFIT University in Medellin. We shared a desire to contribute to society through our profession, so we started a tech company called Utopica. We'd each had experiences that presented us with realities we never saw walking between home and campus. For me, it was volunteering with kids from Medellin's poorest schools; Andres traveled all over Latin America asking questions that college couldn't answer. ANDRES WALKER URIBE: With social projects, few people bother to ask, "What is it that you need?" In the tiny town of Sempegua, the answer was "a school." It's by the Magdalena River, and twice a year during the rainy season, the old school would flood. Teachers had to improvise classes wherever they could-in parks, houses. The floating schoolhouse we designed isn't revolutionary-floating buildings have been around awhile. What we did was make it viable for vulnerable communities. BEDOYA: Poor areas like Sempegua suffer the most from floods, but they can't afford high-tech innovations. So our design employs simple engineering, precisely because anything complicated gets expensive. There's no specialized mechanism; it uses displacement.