Great Problems?
Great Design for me is a design that solves a problem in a holistic and efficient way. Therefore, what are the Great Problems to solve?
Most of the biggest gobal problems a formulated quite vaguely, like overpopulation, climate change and lack of resources and the solution would need a vast change of society and collaboration of nations. But as designers and engineers, what could we work on?
Here my TOP 10 problems to solve with technologies:
1. Affordable water desalination
Climate Change and a rapid growing population we already face massive droughts in some parts of the world. Affordable water desalination could be a solution to this.
2. Low energy consuming artificial meat production
India’s and China’s population found their taste for meat, but our climate and resources can’t handle a world of western meat consumption. Meat consumption has to be decreased or artificial meat production would improve while keeping its input energy low.
3.Cheap highly efficient Solar Power
The energy demand increases rapidly, with developing countries reaching a new standard or life and western countries not reducing theirs. A highly efficient and cheap solar power production would enable worldwide to extract the vast amount of energy in the sun rays reaching our earth, while being (mainly) free of greenhouse gases.
4.Energy Storage
To make renewable energy succeed, we need vast amount of energy storage to store the energy at production peaks and release it at energy production lows. The current energy storage is expensive and the manufacturing is energy intensive. Come up with a new way to store energy, decentralized or not, and we would be a big step towards a renewable future.
5.Feasible Carbon Capture
Even if the world would not produce any greenhouse gases from tomorrow onwards, the atmosphere would need a while to recover. If we could capture carbon and transform, use or store it in some way, we could help to slow down the climate change.
6.Wireless Power
Huge losses of energy due to friction in wires forces us to have local energy production. If we could come up with a new way to transmit energy wirelessly, we could save energy while rethinking our energy infrastructure.
7.Cheap, economically viable recycling technologies
With increased consumption we’ll run short of resources soon, increasing their prices, making recycling viable and urgent. Coming up with new efficient machinery which can separate more accurately, we could regain high quality resources.
8.Automated clean-up of the oceans
The oceans contribute with their algae an extreme amount of Oxygen to our atmosphere. Keeping this ecosystem clean and working is necessary for our survival. Technologies which could clean up the mess we created in the last 50 years, automatically and cheaply without harming wild life is necessary to keep the oceans going.
9.Rural Remote Internet
Better education of the population improves the economy and life standard of the whole nation. Providing rural remote internet would give everyone the same access to knowledge and communication. It also might work against urbanization, opening options of working online from home.
10.Improve Major Weather Forecast
The climate change brings with it hurricanes, flooding and heat waves. Predicting them accurately could save a lot of lives.
And my final bonus one:
11.Fusion
It is a far way to go, but if we succeed in controllable fusion, we would not have to worry about energy anymore.
