Cards for Humanity - Thought Experiment on Brainstorming Big Ideas

I love it =) Unfortunately, my poor understanding of the specific local problems in... well, anywhere other than the US limits my ability to do that coherently. I also recognize as a major flaw that people in the "west" have a strong tendency to infantilize people in less developed countries.

I feel like the first step to addressing actual problems in these places is always the same step you would use in identifying a market problem -- find people in that market and ask them what they think would be helpful!

So for me, I see the idea of this as to provide a context for engineers to look deeply at what is really going on in these places, by ideally asking people there how they can help.

Imposing ideas never works well, so I think that while this is hopefully useful as a motivation tool to learn and think about where your tech skills might fit in to solve major problems, ultimately it's only going to be useful if people who actually live in these places are involved. I'm hopeful that this lesson will become apparent as people look in more depth at how their ideas might work in practice, but it would be neat if there were a way to incorporate that directly... I just don't have the knowledge to do it.

Certainly Somalia and South Africa have very, very different problems, for an obvious example. I think this game would best be played with ready access to the internet, an open mind, and that just researching the ideas that are developed will improve our overall understanding of just how difficult these problems are.

In any event, I really, really would love it if other people added or modified these templates to expand it to fields I'm not familiar with. For instance, I didn't include "art" or "music" as tools, although I am quite sure they could be.

I think these are both games named after the 'cards against humanity' which harbors no grand or good ambitions. Also available in a print your own version.

http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/