This was probably the trickiest workshop in terms of activities. For the participatory research section, it’s rather straightforward. But when it came to participatory design, the process was somewhat less simple. Should we run a field exercise with our Navajo hosts? But given the complexity of the setup, would we be able to explain what they should do as co-designers in an imaginary design scenario within the limited time frame? Should we use ourselves as the participants and run a mock exercise to gain clarity around the methods? But then can we separate ourselves from our previous knowledge as full-fledged design professionals enough to really grasp the concept?

Tyler taking part in the workshop

In the end, we ran a mock exercise around redesigning our CataCamp experience, as all of us had direct end-user experience in that case. One of us served as moderator, and the others were participant-designers, which was useful for gaining direct experience with the ideas of participatory design, but a bit unclear in terms of roles and outcomes. Had time been more abundant, we would have loved to try out the process with community members around a more immediate need (i.e. water supply or shepherding). In the end, we cut out that activity from the final workshop, as we haven’t yet perfected either version.

So in the spirit of the workshop, we’d love to hear from you what activities you think might fit in the participatory design section. What’s worked before? What ideas can you come up with for rapidly (say in 30 minutes) involving local communities and creating a positive learning experience? What should the goals and outcomes be? What will teach organizational staff what it’s like to be an end-user thrust into the role of a designer? Looking forward to your ideas!

[Download the Participatory Design Workshop]

Observation is a tricky subject for writing and teaching. It’s one of those core human functions that everyone does, and has done, for all of their lives. Observation helps us model our behavior, adapt to our environments, and notice key facets of the world.  It can be like telling someone we’re going to have a walking or sleeping workshop.

Observation at the Grand Canyon

That being said, all of us walk differently, and I bet most of us could find a way to do it better. Observational skills are so key to our work, design work, and most work in general, that putting some time into improving them is always worthwhile. This workshop focused on the basics of observation and inquiry – how to take in new environments and situations, how to separate your observations from your interpretations, how to conduct solo interviews, and how to listen to what people are telling you. It owes a great deal to IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit, the methodologies of Jump Associates, and more generally, the fields of anthropology and cultural/social psychology.

One of my favorite things about observation is that everyone, by virtue of training and interests and mental scaffolding, notices different things. Lauren, our marketing expert, caught every novel use of typeface on the road. The engineers in the car noticed infrastructure patterns, while the business-minded [often the same people!] ran numbers on the cost of living and the social scientists [ditto] remembered how people gestured and greeted.  Regardless of our backgrounds, and this is true for everyone, we all found we had the capability to notice a lot. And this ability is foundational for understanding – the key to creating positive experiences and outcomes for the people we serve.

[Download the workshop here]

So I tote my little notebook everywhere now, and use my spare time on the train, in between meetings, or while waiting for water to boil to sketch out anything around me. Now, though I’m proud of my tiny improvements, this post isn’t meant to be about how much fun it is to draw.

Rather, the other day I was trying to draw a book I had lying on the table [instead of actually reading it...]. In the beginning, I’d check the book after every line or curve, measuring out angles and proportions with my pencil. After I got the basics down, I started getting a bit sloppy. I’d go two or three steps before glancing back at my subject, and I’d skip the quick measurements in the interest of time. The initial proportions were great. The later ones, not so much.

It’s the exact same in design. Most designers will faithfully go through the initial research process, dutifully collecting insights, making videos, and observing needs in action. But in many projects,  financial and time considerations can force designers to the sticky notes and studio, emerging only many prototypes later to check their ideas with people out-in-the-world. And the same thing can happen – the metaphorical proportions are off, insights have been mistranslated, or ideas have been lost in the process of moving through too many other brains.

In an ideal world, those who would experience the design would be included in nearly every stage of the process – in research for insights, possibly in synthesis to have their perspective included in frameworks, during high-level design to confirm the general outline, and then in various iterations down to the detailed, nearly-final design to check whether that button is in the right place and right color. Given that, I’m also a realist, and I understand the constraints we all operate under – that process is extremely expensive and rarely possible. There’s also a strong argument to be made for keeping the audience from having too much direct influence over a design, given how rare it is for any of us to consciously be able to state our deep needs and desires. That being said, it’s not bad to aspire to an ideal, and keep in mind that the more we return to our subjects in some form, the more accurate our final creations.

So what does that mean for development, for Catapult’s mission of serving impoverished communities? An implicit thread running through the research suggests that much of international economic development may be focused more on satisfying the needs and reactions of the people helping than the communities supposedly being helped. Not a new issue in nonprofit work – there’s a continual societal questioning of whether someone’s really giving or working or helping to satisfy their own needs for guilt alleviation or pride or meaning, whether any work is truly altruistic, whether aid is imposed on communities, whether there are unintended consequences. These ideas are behind much of the modern movement for participatory development, for listening to the needs of various stakeholders, for human-centered processes.

There’s of course a broader issue here though. A friend of mine once said that she doesn’t really see the point of international development – we’re not all that happy with all of our stuff, so why should we assume that other people will be? What right do we even have to think we know the course that a society should take? There are a range of questions here: health advances can lead to longer lives, but are they better lives? What cultural practices and advantages are inherently lost through globalization/modernization? Is it really possible to do development work in such a sensitive and thoughtful way as to make sure that it’s sustainable, maintains cultural practices, and skirts our own pitfalls? In the end if we do it all perfectly, will anyone even be happy for it? Or will everyone forget a few generations after that there was ever such global poverty, and focus instead on a new version of inequality or a new goal to strive for?

Of course, there are a number of possible answers here, and I’m not necessarily committed to any single one of them. You can challenge the research – a great deal of it is based on direct surveys, which can be subject to all sorts of cultural issues – how do people interpret happiness, will people self-report accurately, will they report honestly, are there social pressures that distort answers, etc. You could say, like the New Yorker does, that happiness might be besides the point. While a certain brand of happiness is part of the American dream, it’s not necessarily every culture’s goal. Lots of different people feel there are lots of different purposes to life, and not all of them include happiness. Some like passion, some like serenity, some like service of a higher calling, some prefer pure variety of experience. Or, you could argue that only after basic needs are satisfied do people even have the luxury of worrying about whether to pursue happiness or some other goal. The literature does show that people subject to extreme trauma or lack of basic needs are indeed dissatisfied, and beyond that, as Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund argues, development can aim to bring people to a point where obstacles are removed, and they can feel free to make choices and pursue lives of dignity – even if they may not automatically do those things. We could see development as related to maslow’s hierarchy on a societal level – only after the entire group’s basic needs are satisfied can the whole society move to consider esteem, love, self-actualization.  Another approach is to try to increase the efficiency of the happiness generated – for some thoughts on this idea, check out the New Economics Foundation Happy Planet Index.

Further philosophical debates can riff on those themes still – do people ever really make choices, what do subjective feelings even matter, in the long run…and so forth. At which point, like many people, you could just follow your heart, your gut, your anger, whatever guiding emotional compass works. I’m neutral on most of these arguments, so I’d be curious to hear how others have dealt with these internal and external debates.

Over the past year or so, as I’ve worked with, met, and gotten to know more about so many amazing organizations, my views have changed. Investing in a nonprofit, through donations or in-kind services or any form of support, is essentially a statement that you believe in the mission of the organization, you believe in the work it’s doing, and you believe that it should continue to exist. Catapult, along with a number of other nonprofits and social ventures, is able to accomplish its goals in large part due to individual donors. I’ve found that if I really believe that this service should be provided and that the existence of this organization in the world is beneficial, then the most direct way to act is to support it. It’s not at all a given that someone else will, because many people believe the way I used to, that support will come from elsewhere and one needn’t worry. And particularly for many innovative early-stage ventures, initial funding can be make-or-break.

So that being said, where exactly do donations to Catapult go? Well, to be able to provide high-quality design and engineering services to our clients, we first have to support Catapulters with livable salaries. When it comes down to it, our employees are the direct agents of our mission. While we do receive fees from our clients to cover costs, the more we receive in donated funds, the more we can pursue project work with clients based not on their ability to pay but their ability to affect the world. Beyond our human power, we also have to keep the lights on – paying rent, buying equipment, procuring prototyping materials, and funding our machine shop costs. And once we can sustainably cover all of those costs, we can afford to look to expanding our team, our project pipeline, and thus our impact.

If you’re thinking about supporting Catapult, but you’re interested in first learning more about any part of our process, feel free to drop us an e-mail. And we’d love to hear what’s on your mind when you choose to give.

The conversation flowed naturally, the wisdom and insights came out too rapidly to write down, and one could tell that the speakers on stage were truly and fully alive, engaged in purposeful endeavors. And, many of the issues they addressed are ones that we’ve been working on over the past year. For example, Tim Brown pointed out that for him “it’s not about the insights scaling, it’s about the ideas scaling” – Catapult has been figuring out how to properly think about scale, and this approach – use the local insights to get ideas that can then be tested elsewhere and spread – is much more along the lines of how we approach things. For Jacqueline, it was about creating a laboratory of things that are working, and scaling enough to be able to speak with authority to larger institutions and thereby effect greater change. Brown also mentioned that one of IDEO’s breakthroughs as they’ve developed in the social space has been to collaborate with NGO partners (Catapult’s model!) and transfer the skills to them instead of brainstorming in an office in New York.

A few of the other pearls from the talk (my apologies if they’re paraphrased or slightly misquoted – I was jotting down as fast as I could):

Novogratz: “Language precedes change” in reference to the growing adoption of the social investing lexicon

“You need to have not just patience, but wisdom” – in terms of properly applying patient capital to grow markets

Brown: “Intuition is the experience of being able to see patterns.” – on trusting one’s insights.

“It’s not that hard to have ideas. It’s not even that hard to make early prototypes. It’s really hard to take ideas out into the world, to make them stick.”

And finally, a perfect summary of what motivates all of us in this area:

Novogratz: ”Poverty is about do I, as a human being have opportunity and choice to make my own decisions and solve my own problems.”

“Dignity comes from choice and opportunity”