IN July the Siemens Log Lab in Mondisa, KwaZulu-Natal, celebrated its first birthday, proving that a container can be a tool for social transformation. The Log Lab was pioneered by Hasan Darwish of the engineering faculty of North West University, Potchefstroom, with Siemens Transformers. It is a hi-tech, multipurpose venue fitted inside a container, and is used as a self-sustaining classroom by day and a business by night. The intention was to provide revenue generation and job creation in the community, while focusing on education and entertainment. Darwish believes this is a brilliant example of great design and engineering coming together to empower an entire community. "The innovation in the Log Lab is not the fact that it uses a container, projector, or several other technologies ... those have been done before.... what the Log Lab did differently is it changed items which were liabilities into assets by incentivising the community to use, maintain, and pay for them indirectly...
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