How to Design Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems by Jack Morgan

Notas del editor

1. This is one of the world’s greatest design events, so of course they asked me to talk about my design work.
2. SO I SAID, “GREAT… I’m going to talk about Poverty, War, and Death.” I know, aren’t you glad you came to this talk?
3. But I do this because I believe we can design solutions to the world’s biggest problems, starting with poverty. So with a show of hands, how many of you can read? Not a trick question. Ok, if you see anyone without their hand up that means they’re not paying attention. Ok, you can all read. Of course you can - you learned when you were children.
4. Yet globally, more than 780 million people cannot read or write. Most of them live in extreme poverty, and unless they can get access to education, most of them will stay there.
5. The reason for this tragically simple - throughout history, people in developing countries simply have not access to books. In many classrooms in Uganda for example, there is just 1 textbook per 30 students. But it’s not all bad… astonishingly, the situation IS improving despite a severe lack of books! So why is this? Well, if you look carefully at this picture you’ll see it’s not a book she’s holding… so what is it?
6. It’s a tablet! A smart device, connected to the internet. Over the past decade, millions of people in developing countries have come online using everything from e-readers to smartphones to tablets, with a single device able to hold more than 30,000 books.
7. When researchers dropped 20 tablets in a remote village in Ethiopia - with no instructions, and where none of the adults could read, they returned a few weeks later to find that the children there had not only figured out how the tablets work - they had actually begun learning English words. The fastest learner among them was 8-year old Kelbesa Negusse, who proudly proclaimed to the researchers: “I learn things with the computer.”
8. But that’s not all - the UN came out with a study not so long ago that showed that more people have access to cellphones... than toilets! That says something about our priorities, doesn’t it? But this access to technology is already helping millions of people educate themselves, and lift themselves out of poverty. And overwhelmingly, they are doing this by learning a new language. The vast majority are learning just one language in particular... a language spoken by everyone in this room.
9. That’s right - about 1.5 billion people are learning English. Many of them are doing this to get a better job and get out of poverty.
10. The reason for this is simple; in most countries, you can earn between 25 - 100% more just by knowing English. But... there's a problem.
11. Learning English has always been very expensive. It typically costs about $1,000 dollars to learn it fluently. So the irony is that you need to learn english to get out of poverty... but to learn english, you need $1,000.
12. So what can we do about this? Well, for the first time in history, we can offer access to education in a medium that can reach billions of people at almost no cost… cellphones.
13. I know this because I'm part of a team that is trying to make education free for everyone in the world. It’s an app called Duolingo, and we knew that if we wanted millions of people to learn a new language, it had to be FUN. They had to WANT to practice every day. So we designed Duolingo to feel like a game. We also designed a friendly mascot to be the face of the app, like Mario for learning. We chose an owl, to represent knowledge. When we designed the owl one of the Co-Founders said “Do whatever you want... just don’t use green. I hate green.
14. So we made the owl green to mess with him. And that same playful spirit runs throughout everything we’ve built…
15. …But despite that playfulness, our mission remains very serious. To make education free for everyone in the world.
16. We now have more than 300 million people around the world using this app to teach themselves a new language, 100% free. But... there’s another problem! We started getting emails from people that said:
17. “Thank you for helping me learn English… but now I want to go to college to get an education, and I need a certificate to prove it! Can you help?” It turns about that about $5 billion a year is spent by people just trying to prove they can speak English. To do this, they have to take a standardized test. These tests cost about $250. Now that mind not sound like much…
18. ...But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, many of the people taking these tests are from developing countries where $250 is more than a month's salary. There’s that irony again.
19. And that’s not all… like most standardized tests, you have to travel to a big testing center like this to sit the exam. Looks fun, doesn’t it? The problem is - if you’re in a developing country, often the test center is in another city. Meaning you may have to travel hundreds of miles to get there. For many, this means a plane ticket they can’t afford…
20. This is because globally, there is just 1 test center per 2 million people.
21. And so it became clear that break down the barriers to education is still not enough - we also need to break down the barriers to opportunity.
22. It was then that we realized that Duolingo was actually being used by both the richest man in the world…
23. …and at the same time by school kids in developing countries. The main thing they have in common…
24. They’re connected connected to the internet. 50% of the world is connected to the internet.
25. So even if you don’t have access to the internet, your friend probably does. We knew we could use this to do for opportunity what we had done for education…
26. So we launched the Duolingo English Test and made it available to everyone online, Eliminating the in-person testing center.
27. To do this, we record the exam from start to finish using something almost every device has built right into the screen… the camera. Here’s what that looks like…
28. This also allows us to prove your identity without having to meet you in person, by matching the face on your ID with your face on the camera.
29. And unlike traditional tests that have a fixed list of questions, we can draw from thousands of questions and customize the test for each individual, so no two tests will be exactly the same. That makes it very difficult to cheat.
30. For example, you might get asked to speak a sentence aloud in english like this…
31. …or you might get a more unfortunate one like this.
32. We wanted to design a simple way to explain that you REALLY can take the test anywhere.. so here are the traditional test centers…
33. and here’s the Duolingo English Test. And just to make it really clear you can take the test anywhere…
34. we also added a little boat. So you can take it on a boat if you want. Again, a playful spirit applied to solving a serious problem.
35. This is working. For the first time in history, people from even the most remote villages in Africa are getting access to a college education at universities like Yale, Stanford and John’s Hopkins, lifting themselves and their families out of poverty.
36. And It’s not just people in developing countries that are doing this - the test is also helping people who don’t have a country. We partnered with the United Nations to accept Refugee ID’s, so even people without a country to call home can have the chance to find one.
37. That brings us next, to war. Because we’ve been able to reach so many people, we now have one of the largest datasets of language learners in existence - and we’ve studied millions of people spanning every single country on the planet.
38. Our researchers created this map, and it shows the most popular languages to learn in each country around the world. And it tells us a lot of interesting things - for example we can see really clearly that most of the world is focused on learning English.
39. And it’s not just in developing countries, this is even the case here in the United States! It turns out the most popular language to learn in Miami is actually English, where more than 50% of the population are immigrants.
40. And while we were analyzing the data, we noticed something unexpected...something strange.
41. And if I zoom in here, perhaps you’ll be able to see it too. The data told us that the most popular language to learn in Sweden… was Swedish. Sounds like a mistake, doesn’t it? It can’t be that hard to learn, can it? So why was this, why was the most popular language to learn in Sweden Swedish?
42. Refugees. Sweden saw more than a 10x increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum in the country between 2015 - 2016, and as they arrived they all began looking for a way to learn Swedish for free. But where did these refugees come from?
43. Many of them came from Syria. As a matter of fact, there are now more registered Syrian refugees than the entire population of the city of Los Angeles - there are more than 6 million Syrian refugees and counting.
44. When the Syrian refugee crisis began, we responded by launching English and German courses for Arabic speakers, redesigning our entire app to work when flipped around for Right to Left languages. Within weeks, 3 million Arabic speakers had signed up. But we knew the scale of this problem was even bigger than that... so we decided to go further.
45. Much further, actually! About 6,000 miles further to be exact. We were invited by the United Nations to visit this place…
46. ...this is Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan, and it is one of the largest refugee camps in the world.
47. Azraq Refugee Camp has a population of 37,000 refugees. And out of 37,000 refugees…
48. ...60% of them are children.
49. As I’m sure you can imagine, most refugee children are forced to grow up with no access to education whatsoever, so not only do they lose their countries and their homes, they lose their futures, too.
50. But we had actually spent a lot of time focused on educating children. Duolingo for Schools allows students to study anywhere in their own time, while their teachers track their progress, assign homework etc.
51. More than 300,000 classrooms are using Duolingo for Schools - so there are actually more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are in the entire US public school system. But the biggest surprise of all…
52. Is that the refugee camp was actually using this to teach thousands of refugees.
53. And they weren’t just teaching them, they were certifying it too. When we spoke to the boy holding this certificate, he said…
54. “I love to learn English... so that life would continue”.
55. This story later became the subject of a documentary called Something Like Home, and it promotes the United Nations Refugee Council petition, that asks the governments of each country around the world to make sure that all refugees in their country get access to a free education.
56. So for millions of people, education doesn’t just improve people’s lives… it saves them. And conversely that brings us…
57. …to death.
58. After the documentary was released, we were approached by the Native American Navajo Nation…
59. ...but they weren’t trying to learn a new language… they were trying to save an old one.
60. According to The United Nations, an endangered language goes extinct every 3 months, when the last remaining speakers of that language die.
61. And by the end of the Century, half of all of the world’s languages will have disappeared. But here’s the kicker… when a language dies, it’s not just words and phrases that are lost - entire cultures disappear as well.
62. For example, Native Americans hate to say goodbye. So much so, that they don’t even have a word for it! The closest translation is simply “I will see you again”. So they wanted preserve that spirit by passing it on not just to their own children, but to everyone.
63. To make this possible, they used the same tool that our volunteers use to crowdsource free language education...
64. ...It’s called the Incubator, and it allows teams of bilingual people to build a language course the same way you would edit a Wikipedia article.
65. When the Navajo people began on this journey, there were just 170,000 remaining speakers of Navajo left alive. By the time they were finished, around 400,000 people were learning Navajo as a second language on Duolingo.
66. We titled this project: Lost for words. And here the Chief’s portrait is made from those words.
67. So by preventing languages from dying, we can prevent entire cultures from dying with them.
68. So… poverty, war, and death. While we can’t make these problems disappear completely, we can use design and technology to help overcome them.
69. Lately we’ve been talking a lot about the downsides of technology and disruption - and we should be talking about that!
70. But we should also consider how we can use technology yo design solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. To make Digital Equality a reality, and give everyone a chance. If we can do that then we can have education for all, and we can have opportunity for all - THEN maybe, just maybe, we can have equality for all. Thank you.