68 Technological Social Innovations

From energy-producing playgrounds to crowdsourcing SMS water, these technological social innovations meld the digital and the social. One of the most recent examples, similar to the text messaging system that helps to create clean water systems, also uses the crowd but this time to fund it. Flip Our Class is a project created in part through Andrew Jackson High School in Florida by a teacher.

Other technological social innovations include international scalable water systems and cashless microfinance institutions that also use cellphones. While technology seems to be the answer—or perhaps the savior—these days to any and all social problems (and sometimes social problems that are merely created), the answer isn’t always technological and sometimes it serves to ask a new question.