The following is reposted from Red Cedar Technology.
Red Cedar Technology to Help Reengineer Cold-Chain Containers
HEEDS optimization software used to design new generation of vaccine carriers to help eradicate disease
East Lansing, MI (March 29, 2010) – Atlanta-based firm, SEEDR L3C, recently received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve reverse cold-chain vaccine transport containers. SEEDR, in partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has selected Red Cedar Technology’s design process and optimization software to reengineer the potentially life-saving containers.
“The Red Cedar Technology team and the HEEDS® platform enable us to organize and process exceptional complexity, and rapidly explore simulation data that will help expand our possibilities and drive our decision making,” explained SEEDR managing director, Michael Moreland.
Reverse cold-chain containers are used by countries and aid organizations to ensure that vaccines are maintained at the required temperature while they are transported to remote locations for immunization campaigns. The primary goal of this project is to redesign and custom engineer the reverse cold-chain containers to improve their performance, affordability, and environmental footprint.
Dr. Brent Burkholder, Director of the CDC Global Immunization Division, said he hopes the project can “protect the significant investment in costly vaccines, and, more importantly, to ensure the safety of those receiving immunizations.”
The new containers have the potential to strengthen immunization and disease surveillance programs by reducing vaccine and specimen loss. In addition, these lighter and less-expensive containers offer substantial cost-savings potential. With approximately 135 million children born in 2009, global immunization efforts cost billions of dollars. The CDC Global Immunization Division alone will spend $170 million on such efforts this year. “From polio to measles to the H1N1 virus, this technology has the potential to enhance efforts to track and help eradicate the world’s most-threatening diseases,” said Moreland.
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About Red Cedar Technology: Red Cedar Technology improves and accelerates the design process for companies facing complex engineering challenges. Our software and consulting services provide engineers with the expertise and technology to reduce product development time and significantly increase productivity during the design process. Product teams worldwide use our expertise to design safer cars, engineer life-saving cardiovascular stents, and develop innovative structures for air travel and space exploration, among many other groundbreaking applications. For more information, visit www.redcedartech.com.
Media Contact: JoAnne L. Bratten, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Red Cedar Technology, (517) 664-1137, info@redcedartech.com.
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SEEDR managing director, Michael Moreland, presented at Pecha Kucha in Atlanta this past weekend.
Pecha Kucha, also known as 20×20, is an informal forum for creative work encompassing a range of disciplines: advertising, architecture, art, fashion, food, graphics, media (digital, moving, mixed), products, and more.
The forum is held once monthly at Octane and each invited speaker has the spotlight for 6 minutes 40 seconds, showing 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The speakers share and show off their work and the unfolding mix of stuff on show keeps everyone engaged and talking.
Michael presented on the philosophies, strategies, lessons-learned from SEEDR’s work fusing technology, design, global development, and social enterprise. The talk was entitled, “-ATION,” which is the suffix used to denote the result or product of taking an action. It where nouns become verbs and embodies the consequence of acting.
Michael discussed how the scientific advancement that results from our pursuit of understanding how our world works becomes technological functionality. And how this functionality, by itself, is amoral, taking shape only as an extension of ourselves in how we apply it in the products, processes, and institutions we create.
He went on to discuss the consequence of unintended or malicious applications of technology, citing examples from kudzu’s well-intended role in the Dust Bowl to the weaponization of nuclear power. But, he stressed, it is not just how it is applied but we are defined also by and form whom with what accessibility and sustainability. Moreland framed the systemic market reasons behind the gap between those who have access to relevant technologies and those who do not as the context in which SEEDR was born.
Moreland explained SEEDR’s work as a pursuit of the proper application of functionality to aid otherwise intractable problems of both public and private importance. The methods, collaborative partners, technologies, and unique social enterprise structure SEEDR has developed has fostered projects like SEEDR’s work designing a new affordable housing finance product and sustainable building construction process in the Dominican Republic, as well as its current work with CDC reengineering vaccine cold chain containers.
You can see the “-ATION” deck here.
Check out Pecha Kucha Atlanta here, its Flickr here, Facebook here, Vimeo here, and sign up for the newsletter here. And be sure to check out Pecha Kucha international here for more information.
Photos from the event thanks to Terry Kearns.
