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Our assignment to detechnologize a product was difficult for me because I’m not terribly “tech-savvy”. But Rich’s talk last class, specifically his statement on making things ‘human-sized’, really inspired me. I thought immediately about a book of essays I read recently entitled The Mexico City Reader. The Book is full of both written and photographic essays that together give the reader a portrait of the city. One series of photographs focuses on Ambulantes, or ambulatory sellers, that travel the city collecting and selling various goods. 
Going beyond the usual hot dog stands and t-shirt carts, these sellers collect materials like cardboard, wood and steel that they can sell to the state. There are also hundreds of street performers that carry their equipment with them as they travel throughout the city. Similar to the can collectors we see on trash day, only on a much larger scale.
Mexico City is the Richest and Poorest city in the world, with most of the wealth concentrated in one area near the center of the city. Flanking this zone are two extremely large barrios that were developed informally as the lake Texcoco was further drained. At first these areas were populated by squatters, but soon private developers started selling parcels of land to people for construction. Now they are the two most populated areas in the city. Connecting these informal developments to the state infrastructure has proven to be a great challenge because so many of the buildings there were built without plumbing or electricity.
My idea is very similar to that of the wifi scooters Rich showed in his presentation, but with a slightly less charitable perspective. I would also want to design the cart in its entirety. These hundreds if not thousands of ambulatory sellers could spread wireless access to these large developments by pirating bandwidth from the richer communities. One major challenge trying to implement something like this would be the security of the electronic devices on the carts. When thinking about the design of the carts and the devices they would carry, I was reminded of the homeless vehicles designed by Krzystof Wodiscko. There ‘mobile homes’ could expand and change to suit the user’s needs, and were made from common and inexpensive materials. But the wireless ambulante would be made with a low profile, whereas the homeless carts were made to attract attention.
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