The whole world may be a better place one day because visionary young idealists like Providence students Andrea Jones, Steve Daniels and Tino Chow cared enough to work for change on a global scale.

The three university students and others spent six months planning a conference entitled “A Better World by Design,” a multidisciplinary symposium that was inspired in part by the Brown University student chapter of Engineers Without Borders, an international organization that Daniels said works to improve the infrastructure of developing countries.

“Creativity,” said Daniels, a junior at Brown majoring in commerce, organizations and entrepreneurship, “is really the driving force behind this.”

“By definition, engineers and designers solve human problems,” he said. Without necessarily offering a judgment pro or con, he noted that many engineers and designers focus on the “luxuries” of life. “We wanted to take a step back and ask if we are improving society,” he said.

“It’s not money that solves problems,” added Chow, a Rhode Island School of Design senior majoring in industrial design. “It’s ideas that solve problems.”

Jones, a Brown junior majoring in engineering who hopes to attend medical school, spoke before the conference – which was scheduled for Nov. 7-9 at Brown, RISD and nearby Providence environs – of how many topics that were to be explored are usually kept in separate subject “boxes,” whether it be design, engineering, architecture or the environment. The student organizers’ goal, she said, was to find connections among such matters often seen as disparate.

Although none of the three are from Rhode Island (Jones comes from Chicago, Daniels from New York and Chow, Singapore and Hong Kong), they wanted to showcase the ingenuity of designers, artists, engineers and others based in Providence. “We want to applaud what they do,” Chow said. “We want to help position Providence as a mecca for design,” Daniels said.

Guided tours of AS220, the Steel Yard, Farmacy Herbs and Cornish Associates, all in Providence, were part of the conference agenda.

“The Steel Yard is interesting to us because they are creating social change through art,” Chow observed, and the same goes for AS220, an organization well known for supporting and promoting artists. Farmacy Herbs is a nonprofit herb shop and Cornish Associates, a real estate development firm specializing in new urbanism.

Other topics the students decided to focus on included: social design in the workplace; social design in academia; medical design; graphic design for activism; urban housing; social change in the arts; solar cookers; open source robotics and companies that integrate “people, planet and profit” into products and services.

Iqbal Z. Quadir, founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech on doing business in developing countries.

In 1993, he founded Grameen Phone in rural Bangladesh to provide telephony and self-employment opportunities for the poor, particularly women.

Quadir told Providence Business News that, as a result of creating Grameen Phone, he learned that “bottom-up” economic progress is not only possible but preferable in developing countries. “My read of history is that developed countries of today have become developed through the entrepreneurial technology-based rise of citizens,” he said, in contrast to “the top-down development that the West itself has pursued for developing countries. There is a complete disconnect there.

“So I wanted to correct that in my own way [by creating Grameen Phone], and I found that whenever I went to speak somewhere, young people wished they could do that, themselves,” he said.

Individuals “can make a difference. They always have,” he said. •