Lately I' been listening and reading about stories of 'innovation from within' emerging markets. The role of women was always key to those innovations. Women have a crucial role in homework, buying food and household items. Especially in one project in Africa, women were key figures to implementing an innovation of a solar cooker and spreading the word of how to cook with it.
http://journeytoforever.org/sc.html
The fascinating issue is that not the 'design' alone is the innovation here, but the way it is disseminated among potential users through key stakeholders. Women meet up and informally exchange the way the cooker works among each other. Some are evangelize the use others learn from them in 'workshops'. The cooker itself is a departure form the old wood fire, which is more expensive and contributes to really bad air quality and health problems in many areas in Africa. The difficulty to promote this cooker is the different cooking method. The food cooks much slower, traditional practices of cooking are undermined. Therefore, identifying key-evangelists' to promote the benefits of this cooking method was key for this innovation.
I think this is a great case study for Block 4.
In addition, Tim Brown from IDEO mentioned in his blog a book that just came out. Its about bridging the world of rich and poor. Its currently out of stock, but surely an interesting topic for global design thinking.
I think this is a great example, in true Papanek spirit, i feel strongly that we should have some examples of this kind of work in our course. Practical Action, a charity whose HQ is in the UK, have many designs of this sort. The ones that stick in mind are a floating garden made of hyacinth roots which can survive even when the rivers flood and a water pump driven by a childrens' roundabout, but there are many more. Community is key in this, however great the idea is, without people sharing what they know diffusion does not happen.
Posted by: Georgy | March 16, 2009 at 10:43 AM
Yes, the play-pump roundabout is a great example! There are also examples in South-east Asia, a motorcycle fitted with (I think) a satellite internet access collects and sends of emails while driving from village to village. There was an exhibition in the US that talked about 'Design for the other billion', but some project were actually criticized by the fact that they did not involve local community enough and designs were actually not adopted - 'innovation from within' was clearly missing here.
Posted by: Nicole Schadewitz | March 16, 2009 at 10:55 AM
"A cheap solar cooker has won first prize in a contest for green ideas." Great, I thought that idea should be rewarded.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7991654.stm
But maybe the reward is really to scale it up.
Posted by: Nicole Schadewitz | April 09, 2009 at 08:53 PM