Even in the driest of deserts, there’s a hidden water source: the air.

That's the insight of this year's Dyson Award winner. The annual prizes call on “design and engineering students from 18 countries to create innovative, practical, elegant solutions to some of humanity's greatest challenges,” according to The Huffington Post. This year the award went to Edward Linacre for his groundbreaking solution to agricultural catastrophes caused by drought. He won £10,000 for his invention—the Airdrop—and so did his school, Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology. The Airdrop pulls air into a network of tubes underground, where it is cooled to extract moisture and then funneled down to plants’ roots. See his “elevator pitch” for the project below:

Harvesting water from the air isn’t a new idea; National Geographic reported on the ancient technique of fog harvesting back in 2009. Linacre told the Daily Mail that his design is a unique solution for agricultural issues because “other systems of harvesting water from the atmosphere usually require massive amounts of energy, as they run refrigeration units. Airdrop simply uses the temperature difference between the air and the cool earth beneath the surface.” The Airdrop, he says, is a good solution for rural farmers because it’s low-tech: they can install and maintain it themselves.

Whether or not this design can practically translate to the developing world is still up in the air and probably depends largely upon its cost. Still, the simple idea of tapping into the water that’s present in the air in even the driest of environments could be very promising for increasingly parched areas of the globe.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Assistant Professor Evan Thomas, director of Portland State University's SWEET lab, demonstrates the way that the lab measures the output of two different low-fuel stoves. Photo: Megan McMorran/Mercy Corps

Brilliant ideas don’t always pan out. In the realm of humanitarian development, innovations that fall flat affect more than just investors’ bank accounts.

That's why a small team at an Oregon university has set out to become the testing ground for the world's possibly brilliant humanitarian inventions. This post is the first of a Global Envision series on how they're doing it.

While promising products like self-adjusting eyeglasses or low-fuel stoves generally undergo some sort of lab testing prior to introduction, they often perform differently than expected once they’ve reached their destination due to environmental or cultural differences. Rather than waiting to see results after the fact, Portland State University is working on a grand plan to evaluate magic bullets like these before they hit the developing world.

It's a mission that straddles two separately funded PSU programs. The internationally focused Sustainable Water, Energy, and Environmental Technologies Lab shares a roof with the domestically focused Green Building Research Lab. The latter is stocked with equipment that, as PSU architecture professor Sergio Palleroni put it, "can create any environment on earth, any weather condition." PSU researchers can use the equipment to closely mimic the environmental conditions of the destination country and closely measure products’ performance in all sorts of climatic conditions.

The SWEET lab, meanwhile, focuses specifically on putting low-cost sustainability products through a battery of tests.

"We want to become the Consumer Reports for the developing world," said Palleroni, standing in a lab room devoted to the subject. That means not only ensuring that products function as they should, but also measuring how well they function — and how similar products stack up against one another. Two small, low-fuel, low-emission stoves burned side-by-side when we visited, various sensors measuring their ouput and rate of fuel consumption.

In forthcoming posts in this series, we’ll be exploring a few of the PSU labs’ projects. Stay tuned.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Heather Fleming has been named one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders for 2010. Young Global Leaders are recognized by the World Economic Forum as "exceptional young leaders who share a commitment to shaping the global future."

Born on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, Fleming knows first hand the difficulties people face growing up without resources many take for granted, such as running water or electricity. Her experiences eventually led to the pursuit of a degree as a civil engineer and the start up of Catapult Design, a company she co-founded with Tyler Valiquette. Catapult Design "is a non-profit firm providing engineering and implementation support to the thousands of organizations in need of technologies or products capable of igniting social change."

Fleming has worked with other like-minded designers and engineers as a co-founder of Engineers Without Borders, D2M and as a co-leader for Appropriate Technology Design Team. These design and engineering companies provide low-impact solutions that benefit the world with inventions such as the "turbulent air" turbine, improvements to the Hippo Roller--a water barrel with handles that can be rolled and a fuel efficient cooking stove for Darfur refugees that uses less wood.

See Fleming talk about her passion for the work she does in this video.

Kids looking snazzy in their new specs. Photo: Courtesy of Fuseproject

While the term “four eyes” might strike you as outdated and retro, kids the world over still often think that glasses are the brand of a nerd. For example, students in Mexico shy away from wearing lenses because it marks them as fresh meat for mockery, according to a recent article in Fast Company Magazine. Moreover, their families often can’t afford to pay the high costs of eye care in the first place.

However, a trendy new collection of glasses invented by Yves Béhar’s design agency, Fuseproject, offers solutions to both these problems. The glasses are ultra kid-friendly, available in adjustable sizes, fun shapes and bright colors. On a practical note, they’re made of flexible plastic that any mom would love — they’re almost impossible to break. Perhaps best of all, they’re free.

These glasses are part of “See Better to Learn Better,” a collaboration between the Mexican government, a local optics company and Fuseproject. The program gives free glasses and eye exams to students in Mexico, where half a million students need lenses, says Fuseproject. Next year they hope to give 300,000 pairs of glasses to kids through local partners.

Being able to see clearly translates to greater success in school, according to a Stanford University study. The study suggests that simply giving kids glasses can be as effective as other educational initiatives, such as reducing class size, giving scholarships and tutoring — and it’s usually less costly. From the looks of it, Fuseproject has 20/20 vision with this one.

Students can customize their glasses with this catalog. Photo: Courtesy of Fuseproject

An Architecture for Humanity project site in Sri Lanka. Photo: 2neus (flickr)

Can architects, community leaders, students, and health care professionals all come together to design a better world for people in developing nations? That's exactly what the non-profit Architecture for Humanity is trying to do.

The group is comprised of over 4,500 volunteer design professionals and has chapters in 25 countries around the world. Volunteers design schools, community centers, soccer fields, homes and emergency shelters. About 10,000 people benefit directly from Architecture for Humanity projects each year.

In 2006 the organization created a community website that brings architects and other skilled professionals to collaborate on projects and share ideas for designing a better world, called the Open Architecture Network. The site boasts 15,000 registered users and 50,000 unique visits a month and is the first of its kind.

Open Architecture Network may best be known for their frequent competitions, which are open to anyone. This year's challenge is classroom design and is in response the World Bank's call for the construction of 10 million new classrooms to help meet the millennium development goal of achieving universal education by the year 2015.

Past competitions have taken on other socially responsible causes like constructing mobile health clinics designed to fight HIV/AIDS in remote areas and addressing the digital divide through designing sustainable, low-cost technology facilities for those who need them most. The winning team for the digital divide challenge in Africa designed a community center and technology hub for youth in Kenya's largest slum. The center houses a community radio station, a library, internet cafe and space for community events.