Cummins’ fridge design is quietly ingenious. Between an outer and inner
cylinder is a compartment in which any medium capable of absorbing water
(usually sand or soil) is placed. Water is then added, and, in a warm
environment, the sun’s energy makes the water evaporate. As this happens,
the sand or soil removes heat from the inner cylinder in the form of energy.
The result is a chilled core, created via the most basic materials and
technology, and thus perfect for developing countries.
“After leaving school, I went to Namibia and witnessed township living,” she
explains. “I saw a nursery where the children had sour milk because they
couldn’t keep it fresh, and meat was just left to dry out on washing lines.
So I created sets of instructions that meant people could make their own
fridges using local, sustainable materials. If people in Africa want to
build these fridges and sell them, that’s fine with me. It’s creating jobs
and creating money.”
In effect, then, Emily gave her design away for nothing – a fact that “scares”
some of the business people she’s sought advice from in the past. “Sometimes
they’d look at me as if I was a child who thinks she’s going to change the
world,” she says. “But it’s not like that at all. I just want to make a
difference, even if it is only slight.” The twist is that Cummins is now
developing a second-generation fridge using similar sustainable technology,
which she hopes will one day compete with the electric models we use here.
“That will be more of a commercial product, but it’s not about making
money,” she insists. “It’s more about trying to help solve a worldwide
problem and making people think differently.”
Watt’s the big idea: DIY Kyoto
In the corner of DIY Kyoto’s compact, second-storey office in Hackney, London,
a small, sleek plastic gadget glows with red numbers. It’s monitoring how
much the three-person company is spending on the electricity that powers its
computers, radio, kettle and refrigerator. They call it Wattson. “The name
is supposed to have a couple of meanings,” smiles Richard Woods. “You could
see it as ‘watts on’, as it can show you how many units of power your house
is using. But there’s also Watson from Sherlock Holmes,” he says, explaining
that they have also developed a piece of computer software called Holmes
which, when used in conjunction with Wattson, can track and store almost
every nuance of a building’s energy usage.
Along with fellow Royal College of Art graduates Greta Corke and Jon Sawdon
Smith, Woods founded DIY Kyoto (www.diykyoto.com)
and developed Wattson when, at university, he “got into the concept of
responsibility as a designer. I realised that it was hidden how much money
and energy a home could waste, but that it could easily be changed”.
It was Sawdon Smith who set the ball rolling with his prototype of a complex
electricity-metering system, which was then seized upon and simplified for
domestic use by Woods, before being beautified by Corke. “When I first had
the idea, the whole ‘green thing’ wasn’t so big,” explains Sawdon Smith.
“People who were eco-friendly were seen as tree-hugging,
granola-eating types. But I didn’t want to produce something that would end
up as landfill.”
“Today, though,” adds Corke, “the problems that are accruing in the
environment are actually bringing a new role to what designers do. It’s the
new test of functionality, the new design element. I was always anti
tree-huggers, but through things like Wattson, we can communicate
environmental issues in a way that anybody can understand.”
That Wattson can help cut up to 25 per cent from a home’s annual electricity
bill means that even those who aren’t kept awake at night by melting icecaps
may be tempted to invest £99.95 in one. And it is, they insist, fun to use:
run around the house turning lights and appliances on, and see the display
rise and fall accordingly, whether it’s set to pounds sterling or watts. “In
the future, we’ll start looking at developing other ‘awareness’ products,”
says Woods. “Something that can show how much water you’re using, or how
much recycling you’re doing; things that allow everyday people to get a grip
on their environmental impact.”
From bad to good: Allan Gay
Allan Gay has a teddy-bear frame, a softly spoken countenance and a badge that
reads “Jesus is my logo”. When he smiles, you get a brief flash of
gold-capped lateral incisor. Today, he works with thousands of disadvantaged
and socially marginalised London youths having founded Community Builders,
an autonomous, moneymaking social enterprise dedicated to investing in and
improving the lives of young people (www.communitybuilders.org.uk).
Six years ago, however, he was a gang leader in east London whose actions
earned him the street name “Al Capone”.
“I was a tyrant,” he says. “I was organised, but had a mad streak. I got into
that life because, as far as I could see, I was just doing what was expected
of me.” The law eventually caught up with Gay, who served a prison sentence
in 2002. It was during this stretch that his Damascene moment came in the
form of Sarah Beeny, who was presenting Property Ladder on his cell TV. “It
gave me a new lease of life,” he smiles. “I knew that I wanted to do
something different when I came out, and I decided that I wanted to get into
property.”
Following his release, Gay started work in a Walthamstow lettings agency and
demonstrated an instinctive gift for the role (“I still had the sales skills
and social skills from dealing drugs on the streets”), rising to become
branch manager in a matter of months, before eventually founding, and then
selling, his own lettings business. After a friend asked him to organise a
youth forum in 2005, Gay threw himself into more youth outreach programmes.
In 2007, with funding from the Pears Foundation and UnLtd, the foundation
for social entrepreneurs, he set up Community Builders, a company
specialising in workshops, intervention work with gang members and
social-action projects.
“We’re almost the same as a normal, everyday FTSE 100 business,” he explains.
“The difference is that we’re run by young people, and have strictly social
aims. We have a system that allows schools and councils or police forces to
pay for our services, but we didn’t want to be a charity, because operating
as a business gives the young people involved the chance to call the shots.”
And although, like any enterprise, Community Builders can measure its success
in pounds and pence, or how many of its tailored “schools” or “police”
packages the company shifts, Gay explains that an independent body that
monitors social change will soon start to measure the social savings
Community Builders can claim credit for. “They’ll work out what the savings
are to the police, or to local councils as a result of our work. So we’ll
eventually be able to put a figure on how much we’ve saved the government
for each young person we’ve worked with,” he smiles. “And I’m sure the
taxpayer will want to know about that.”
