Convenient cargo
Drivers of a broken-down 20-liter water bottle delivery truck in downtown Yangon turn their cargo into hazard warnings through a bit of strategic placement and just-in-time repurposing.
Mobility as subjective
In this not-so-mobile (note the tires) "food truck" parked outside of Chatuchak market, the novelty of the ambiance must prove sufficiently attractive: the logistics and challenges of eating a meal with utensils in a moving motor vehicle would be far more daunting.
Linemen
Pairs of men equipped with 15-foot toothless rakes wait at the main entrances to Sagaing's Industrial Zone, their employment made possible by the under-designed/too-hastily constructed electrical grid infrastructure.
Truckdrivers must pay these duos to allow them to pass safely through the miles of powerlines that transect the industrial zone's primary road at too low of a height - a salient example of the sort of misstep possible on a headlong rush towards development. What would the solution in your local context be to this particular problem? Or would it never even have occurred in the first place? I can imagine were this to happen in China that before the line-lifter market even had the chance to properly develop all of the power poles in the industrial zone would be lifted up an additional 20 feet in the dead of night by an unseen team of hundreds. Your mileage (and context) may vary.
Bonus feature from Steel City, America of what may eventually happen in the Sagaing Industrial zone: The updating of the electrical grid. Merely sink a new and improved pole into the ground, move over every wire, streetlight, etc., and then hack apart the old pole in strategic chunks so as not to have it fall down on the new one.
Transplanted seating
The supply chain of Myanmar's buses is a more appropriate subject for a book than a blog entry, so I'll refrain from describing each step in the process here (for now, at least). Consider, though, that because no buses are manufactured in Myanmar, they must all be imported.
As part of the restoration process that buses almost universally undergo upon entering the country, their interiors are removed and everything inside is reconfigured. In certain municipal buses, the original seats are not put back in, or are put in using a different setup, because the bus's interior must be modified to fit the sizable compressed natural gas tanks that will power the bus (this is limited mostly to Yangon and Mandalay, the two largest cities and where CNG filling stations are located).
The process of shuffling around the seats to accommodate the compressed gas tanks creates a supply of surplus bus seats, which may be purchased either directly from bus restoration workshops or from a middleman at a market. Here, the blue vinyl seats queued up for reupholstery were actually purchased from a market in Mandalay by this bus repair shop after they deemed the seats the bus came with to be unfit for reinstallation.
Another source of demand for such "extra" seats comes from folks such as the owner of the Liteace truck in the included picture, who, when relegating passengers to the rear of the truck wants to appoint them in comfort and style. This adapted seating solution is far kinder to rear passengers than the usual standard, which consists of throwing a plastic or straw mat into the bed of the truck and hoping your passengers have enough upper-body strength to hang on for dear life when going around corners.
What opportunities exist here? Is there a need for more custom-designed, bespoke "aftermarket seating packages" to fit in the back of these Toyota Liteaces? Will we see the emergence of more theme packages such as those seen in the interior of many conventional passenger cars in Myanmar featuring doilies, soccer teams, and/or anime characters, only weatherproofed for rear truck seats? Which kind/brand of bus seat is best at accommodating passengers, being retrofitted to the rear bed, etc.?
As regulations change and purchasing a vehicle becomes more simple and affordable for the masses in Myanmar, which enterprise will recognize this opportunity first and extend into this potentially large market - aluminum crafters who already excel at pre-designed packages for the rear bed of Liteaces (Apex Company has taken care of the bed cover for this truck - note the front of the rear bed cover acting as a roof), or the bus retrofitters, who already have experience installing/uninstalling seats and can extend that knowledge to smaller trucks without much additional effort?
Improvised Braking
In many contexts, jerry cans play an integral role in keeping cars on the road. Although they most often perform this function by carrying spare fuel, Myanmar's ingenous car-hackers, adept at keeping cars running for decade after decade, have managed to "think outside the can" as to their wider potential. In both the case of this Fire Engine Red 70's Toyota Hilux and the World War II-era Hino army truck pressed into commercial service moving sand, jerry cans have stepped in to serve as brake fluid dispensers. If you look closely, you'll notice the fluid level indicators marked on the side of the Hilux's jerrycan.
Umbrella bed
Using a truck bed's shape for umbrella storage, (imminent) velocity for umbrella drying, and isolation from the passenger compartment as a means of separating wet umbrellas from dry passengers. How does a product's design accommodate users living in a country with a monsoon season, particularly when the more common reaction to a monsoon in terms of behavior is umbrella-carrying (as opposed to raincoat-wearing)?