Russians have for decades fashioned functional objects from such cast-off items as forks, plastic bottles and onion bags. Collector Vladimir Arkhipov sheds light on the artful labours collected in his archive of “post-material folklore”.

A commonplace Hindi term, jugaad describes everyday acts of innovation. As artist Sanjeev Shankar tells it: “A guy with 10 rupees has a dream to own a tractor or a television. He’ll start thinking in a radically inventive manner to get it, and do so with whatever means or resources he has at hand.”

Maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging around environmentalists, urban planners, academics and other “change agents” lately, but the phrase “effect change” — often followed by a nebulous but inspiring call to action — seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

Chris Rainier has spent the better part of the last 15 years photographing the world’s tattooing cultures, indigenous and otherwise. His last, best place for tattoos was on the island of Siberut, six hours by boat from the west coast of Sumatra, then another six hours up river in a motorized dugout canoe. Andrew Gregg reports on the documentary he filmed there with Rainier.

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child]
While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic [...]

[Photo: Christopher Frey]
Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially [...]