Amy B. Smith

Amy Smith (born November 4, 1962) is an American inventor, educator, and founder of the MIT D-Lab and senior lecturer of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Early life and education Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her father, Arthur Smith, was an electrical engineering professor at MIT. Smith says that being exposed to severe poverty as a child made her want to do something to help kids around the world. "Living in India is something that stayed with me—I could put faces on the kids who had so little money." While she was serving in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, she decided what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She is also one of the founders of the popular MIT IDEAS Competition. In 2000 Smith won the Lemelson–MIT Student Prize, which honors inventors who are also good role models. Smith has developed a small, easy-to-make corn sheller "for removing the dried kernels from an ear of corn. The corn sheller can be either cast in aluminum or made from a sheet of metal." More information on the corn sheller including instructions on how to make it is available under a Creative Commons License at the D-Lab Resources page.

IDEAS competition Smith co-founded the MIT IDEAS Competition where teams of student engineers design projects to make life easier in the developing world.

WorldChanging reported on August 14, 2007 that the results from the first International Development Design Summit had been very positive with end products including an off-grid refrigeration unit tailored for rural areas using an evaporation based cooling method to store perishable food and a low-cost greenhouse from recycled and widely available materials.

More information on projects from IDDS can be found here.

Rethink Relief Design Workshop Smith was instrumental in creating the Rethink Relief Design Workshop in 2011. Rethink Relief is "dedicated to creating technologies for humanitarian relief that specifically address the gap between short-term relief and long-term sustainable development."

The workshop was co-organized in October 2011 by industrial design faculty at the Delft University of Technology and the D-Lab of MIT. It brought together 26 people to explore the differences in thinking between relief organizations, development organizations, and designers. Groups worked throughout the week to create concepts and prototypes to address challenges in relief work. These addressed clean water availability, re-purposing of aid materials, transportation challenges, and first aid supply logistics.

Creative Capacity Building Smith and colleagues at D-Lab have been working on a new type of curriculum - Creative Capacity Building or CCB. The purpose of CCB is to place "the expertise in the village instead of at MIT."

The CCB curriculum teaches the design process without expecting strong literacy or other academic training. The goal is for individuals, groups and communities to be able to not only articulate their needs but to design and build solutions.

Awards Collegiate Inventors Award, 1999 (for the phase-change incubator) First woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, in 2000. MacArthur Fellowship, 2004–2009. Time magazine named Amy Smith one of their Time 100 Most Influential People for 2010 in the Thinkers category