Their current flagship project, the hippo roller, though not much more than a tough plastic barrel and pulling handle, is beginning to have an immense impact on the role of women in developing societies.

In many small villages a large proportion of a woman’s day is spent fetching water. This design allows a single person to transport a much larger amount of water much more quickly with much less effort (I might be able to push a car, but I could never carry one on my head). The beauty of this invention isn’t just in the immediate benefit of more water, but in the benefits that flow downstream (all puns intended) of freeing women and children up from this back-breaking work and giving them time to focus on education and self-improvement. This then has a massive cumulative beneficial impact on the rest of the village. All this just from applying a very old solution (the wheel) to a very old problem. Social change through re-inventing the wheel.

In a similar vein Engineers Without Borders have been applying advanced design to alleviate a growing problem in Dafur refugee camps. The problem is that collecting firewood is becoming an increasingly dangerous activity. The area immediately surrounding the camps has been denuded of tinder so the women have to go further and further to gather the wood required to feed their families. This has the double-whammy impact of both increasing malnutrition as less meals are cooked and increasing the chances of being mugged or raped by the marauding gangs in the outlying areas.

The solution the clever kids from Berkeley designed to meet this problem is beautifully simple – make a more efficient stove. The more efficient the stove, the less fuel you need to cook the same amount of food. The less fuel you need, the less time needs to be spent scavenging. The less wood that is removed from around the camps, the less the resources get depleted. The less the resources get depleted, the more people the area can sustain. That’s what I call a virtuous circle.

Another not-for-profit I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with, Inveneo, have a more high-tech solution, but a similar understanding of how to trigger these positive feedback loops by introducing efficiency gains early on in the process. Even though you may pay more for the hardware, if you draw down less power the downstream benefits are magnified to dwarf the initial outlay. By improving the power consumption of their hardware and software Inveneo manage to make computing infrastructure affordable enough for poor societies to sustain the ongoing costs themselves.

What ties these all together is maximizing the efficiency of resource utilization – getting more results from less input. But what makes it even better is that the beneficial results seem to be exponential. The savings fan out as the compounding effects of the initial efficiencies multiply.

The eureka moment for me was realizing that changing the world needn’t involve a lot of hard work – it’s all about leveraging small efficiencies. Archimedes knew this when he said “give me a fulcrum on which to rest and I will move the world.” By increasing efficiency at an early stage in a process the benefits compound along the way, giving us the lever required to shift the direction of our resource depleting way of life.

A user’s interaction with a piece of software or web site is as much emotional as it is functional. Compare the soft, warm, fuzzy feeling you get when first interacting with a product from 37 Signals, say, to the stomach churning reaction you get when booting up Lotus Notes, for example.

This immediate emotional response will pervade the whole of a user’s long-term impression of a product, imbuing their relationship with whatever feeling was conjured up in those preliminary interactions. They say that in most job interviews the interviewer makes up their mind within the first 5 minutes. The same is equally true for software.

That’s the reason that I’m often accused of prematurely optimizing the UI. I’ve been round the block enough times to have been bitten by the following type of interaction:

Me: “This is just a wire-frame, we’re only trying to prove out the functional flows of the application. Don’t worry about the layout or the look and feel – that will be dealt with later.”

Client: “Ooh, I don’t like that font … and I think that’s our old logo. Maybe we should give it a drop-shadow or something. I’m disappointed, I expected more from you guys …”

After a host of similar experiences I now make sure that I give whatever product I’m working on an appropriate level of design and polish for the current stage, while still trying to evoke positive emotional responses. In my mind it’s always worth spending an hour or two tweaking a CSS file to tighten the layout, soften the lines and add a little sparkle – a little :hover goes a long way. Then even if the application isn’t functionally complete at least it looks professional and imbues the client with a sense of confidence and pleasure. This will put them into a much more positive state of mind, which can only be a good thing for the next stages of the project.

Call me shallow if you want, but when I arrive at a (studiously) un-styled site, like our guru Martin Fowler’s, I have a negative knee-jerk reaction making me resist reading the wise words he’s actually written. When, however, I land on a site where they care about the first bite I feel compelled to carry on reading all day.

If someone in a meeting has a bit of chopped herb stuck in their teeth it’s really hard to focus on what they’re saying – you get distracted and have a negative emotional response. In the same way drizzling some coulis and sprinkling a bit of chopped herb onto a plate before serving can provoke a positive emotional response which fools the diner into enjoying their food more.