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Author Archives: Noel Wilson

Noel is an Industrial Designer (has worked in rapid prototyping, playgrounds, education, bicycle empowerment, a bunch of freelance stuff and also has a writing degree). He works in the social empowerment sphere because his mum told him to, and for job security (as well as wanting to have a hand in shaping our future). He hails from Adelaide, Australia but has a healthy travel bug nibbling on him and love of diversity.
April 30, 2012 - By Noel Wilson

In-the-field prototyping with Jugaad, MacGyver & me

The value of a prototype is in what it can test. It isn’t always necessary to make it pretty, nor to make it function, it totally depends on what you are trying to learn from it. On a frugal budget, be it of time or funds, one prototype can be made to test many things, and then adapted again to test even more…but really prototypes were made to be broken, and if they last too long it is a sign you’re either not testing them hard enough or you’ve become too attached.  I admit…after sweating over prototypes late into the night in my makeshift workshops (set  up in hallways, bedrooms, bathrooms etc) and scrutinizing them for days or weeks, it is hard to let them go, let alone batter them until they fail. But tough love is justified in this case

Prep for the next days prototyping

preparing for the next days prototyping

On this trip I was headed to Rajasthan with Wello to visit a  mix of communities around Jodhpur & Udaipur to tune their device to better suit peoples needs and environment (see our Wello project page). I had to carry my kit on some challenging modes of transport to slice, melt, join, flatten, form, twist and repair our prototypes as we broke them.

welding HDPE in the toilet

welding HDPE in the toilet

Prototyping in the field is a highly unpredictable task. Being as prepared as possible is key, but no matter how much you forecast you will never have everything you need. Rely on bringing quick and lateral thinking into play to compliment your toolbox and meet your desired ends. My kit has a lot of sticking, cutting, melting, sculpting, binding and gripping bits in it, but still I always find myself looking for little pieces in my environment to help hold our work together and get the job done. Every designer has their favorite set of tools, and their equally favorite solution for containing them. My essential tools include a Sharpie, an exacto, and ample 3M products. But my favorite tool: a $10 folding bamboo saw. This thing could cut through cement,  slices bamboo like butter,  and on this trip served as my polyethylene sculptor.

But, as i discovered, it is not the tools you’re packing before you fly that make or break your prototyping capacity in the field…

welding the impossible

welding the impossible

In San Francisco as a member of TechShop I was blessed with a multitude of quality digital and manual tools to precisely achieve my desired results. However, on this job I was on the outskirts of Udaipur, Rajasthan, with no FabLab in sight, and a very fickle power supply. I had to rely on my little toolkit, and whatever else I could get done in the busy street market. This seemed like quite a challenge at the time, but in retrospect, I would rather have the bounty of these markets and the skilled craftsfolk and their nifty digits at my disposal than any amount of lasers and multi-axis marvels. I would even give up my precious toolkit for a knowledgeable moto-rickshaw driver to weave the backstreets to find the masters and magicians of working the material at hand. I was able to purchase roll, bend, weld, cut, (drink chai), sew, source, glue, plumb, weave, fold  and repeat, all within an hour and one small block, and still  get back to base for dinner. This would have taken me a week in my fancy SF streets and workshops, and it would have cost me a whole lot more time and cash to outsource as much as I did.

perfect bending by eye

perfect bending by eye

I have never been so grubby in my life as I have when knee deep in protoypes in a hot dusty ad hoc workshop with crafty new friends. I was amazed at how little injury I witnessed in the chaotic workshops of the streets, among some very questionable methods and multitasking not a burn or any blood drawn. Luckily I was just covered in dirt and prototyping detritus, and also avoided any injury myself. I even found plastic shavings in my passport upon leaving India, and I’m glad that HDPE is inherently inert as I’m sure I accidentally ate some too.

local rubber master weaving his magic

local rubber master weaving his magic

Although significantly inspired by the prototyping capacity in the streets, we also made use of some high tech trickery on this trip. Down in Mumbai we found a 3D printing firm and promptly organized a scaled prototype to take into a local community to glean response. Once we were over the communities jokes of “It might need to be a little bit bigger…ha…haha….ha,” it was very useful tool for discussing specific features and design intentions, especially when we had a full size, somewhat cruder, version by our side to relate it too. The fact that it was high tech 3D printing straight from a virtual CAD file did not inspire as many wows as I had expected, but it was a little tricky to relay the wonders of the method without having a pocket 3D printer (Santa?…). I was impressed by the critical design language used and the confidence it was delivered with, the community really had a lot to say and had no qualms about ripping the designs to bits.  Their feedback sent us straight back to the drawing board with fresh perspective and some dissolved assumptions.

Using scaled 3D printing in the community for feedback

using scaled 3D printing in the community for feedback

Be it modeled on the streets or in some distant fancy lab, there is no better communication tool than a well crafted prototype…and there is literally nowhere where you can’t prototype. As long as you have your wits about you (which along with good doses of persistence & patience are the most important tools to pack) you can successfully prototype in the starkest of places.

Stay tuned for more prototyping stories in the field, next time from our World Bank Project in Yogyakarta Indonesia.

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Current Projects | Comments (0)
June 22, 2011 - By Noel Wilson

Health on demand

Catapult Design recently payed Living Goods a visit in their SF offices to see what they were up to and extend our comprehension of the latest implementation innovations in under-served markets.

Living Goods are offering an integrated solution to improve the access to & diffusion of simple but essential products. With a synchronized door-to-door delivery service, they have established a network of hundreds of agents all over Uganda. The agents sell a broad range of products at affordable prices within their own communities, making for a trustworthy ‘on demand’ source of  life-saving and life-changing products. With this distribution model and their range (from malaria medication to sanitary pads, LED lighting and even stoves) they have created an avenue into a market hungry for health products with integrity and honest pricing (see here for the full list) . Their product areas virtually make up a mantra for their mission; Prevention, Treatment, Personal Hygiene, Save Money-Make Money, covering what isn’t relayed by an already indicative name.

Living Goods Product Range in their SF office

Living Goods have been framing themselves as an ‘Avon-like’ service but with a focus on health, but I think their impact potentials could earn them much greater analogies. I’m sure they will have to create canned responses for big pharma, maybe even get a restraining order on Amazon, and hire a room full of staff just to deal with all of the interest from potential providers and partners. Their sales data alone will be a well sought after contribution to addressing the implementation gremlins rife in health interventions, but don’t be surprised if their model also attracts some healthy competition (pun unfortunately intended) from fresh similar organizations convinced of its potential.  So stay tuned…there will be plenty more to come from Living Goods as they step up into the thousands of agents, and millions of customers…

Living Goods in action

photo: Living Goods

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Recent Blogs | Comments (0)
May 30, 2011 - By Noel Wilson

Radically Affordable Solar Energy

 

Simpa Regulator & Family

Image: Simpa Networks

 

The need for financial innovation in technology access is clear, and within the labs of innovators like Simpa Networks fresh perspectives are brewing on how affordability of other empowering technologies can be realized. Their model may very well offer a hand up out of the poverty trap, but with many other hands reaching up  there are is a need for further creativity and action in this space. Mobile money, alternative purchasing schemes, microfinance, gifting, and even new currencies (see bitcoins) have their potentials, impressive results, and sometimes bitter aftertastes/side effects…but the exploration continues…and it is making everyone from the mightiest corporation to the greenest startups take a step back and question the economic paradigms that create our existing boundaries of distribution. It may not require the blatant economic revolution that some predict (see Zeitgeistthemovie), but it will require a sidestep rather than one back, a lateral take to how we all (not just distant markets) buy, own, and share. Simpa Networks are not framing themselves as revolutionaries (not yet anyway) but like they say their approach is radical, and we expect that this is just the beginning of their ventures into access innovation.

Simpa Networks sells high quality solar energy systems on a progressive purchase basis to underserved customers in emerging markets through a network of authorized dealers. Consumers take home a system for a low down payment, then purchase energy service (kWh) in small user-defined increments using a mobile phone. Each payment also accumulates towards the final purchase price and once fully paid, the system unlocks permanently and delivers free solar energy (taken from Simpa Networks).

Simpa Networks commissioned us to assist them in designing their pilot, and in creating a kit that could be used to train and guide their staff  on data collection techniques, with a strong emphasis on Human Centered Design methodology.  We imbued the same HCD principles, that Simpa Networks wanted to train it’s staff on into the design of the pilot itself. We mapped the people, hierarchies, environment, constraints and agendas involved to get a grasp on how to simplify, streamline and optimize the pilot process.

Simpa Pilot Kit

Pilot Kit Prototype

`The documents that framed the approach had to be useful and legible to all levels of staff and stakeholders, and had to work in both digital and printed state. The training tools were designed to work as guidance for the Simpa Networks staff throughout the process, helping them stay consistent in their methodology, and synchronized in their deadlines and duties.

'Meeting of the Minds'

The ‘Meeting of the Minds’ session…discussing Pilot methodology

Catapult collected insights from a broad range people experienced in the challenges of piloting, and have compiled this wisdom into an open resource (Pilot Planning Words of Wisdom) which is soon to be available on our publications page. Having access to a rich network of professionals experienced in the testing of innovation really benefited our process.

Simpa Staff at work

Image: Simpa Networks

The Human Centered Design element was custom fit to the requirements of the Simpa Networks pilot, and the desired quality of data that they would ultimately collect. Decades of literature helped us inform this, as well as our own experiences of observation and user connection techniques. For more info check out our project page.

 

Simpa SHS

Image: Simpa Networks

Simpa Networks have now  begun their pilot, our relationship continuing deeper into the process, to help them communicate, prototype and gain insight to ensure their data is as rich  as possible, to properly inform their next steps.

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Current Projects | Tagged , | Comments (2)
May 9, 2011 - By Noel Wilson

Design process blown wide open by Global Village Construction Set

The Open Source Ecology crew are pointing towards an open-source revolution in the design process, and well beyond it, into autonomous economic alternatives that side step current paradigms of scarcity in our society.  But before the revolution must come the experiments that exemplify its necessity; enter the Global Village Construction Set, 50 co-created open source machines to build and maintain a small autonomous village community.

 

Global Village Construction Set Tractor

Image: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/File:Lifetrac2.jpg

 

Picture a modular set of appropriate low cost but high-tech machines parked next to a workshop capable of not only fixing but making all of them, with a laptop in the middle of it offering an online live portal to all 50 machine plans and their successful adaptations, all evolving daily through a global network of grass roots user communities, and each set being used daily to sustain a village worth of people.

The design of these devices has been kicked off by OSE, but is open to contribution from the world of specialists and enthusiasts that are wiki and tech savvy. To avoid too many cooks spoiling the broth OSE have set precise guidelines (check them out) for project protocol, user input & feedback to contain the chaos and keep the open-source open. Leadership through action, task responsibility and realistic time commitments are all requested from potential contributors before they join up, to further promote quality & timely work. They work with open-source software as much as possible, use the wiki platform for documentation, conduct most all communications are online (email, wiki, forum, project management platform), and have just launched opensourceecology.org.

The nature of their open-source design approach has the potential to create families of adaptations (dependent on user environments) fulfilling a level of ‘appropriate’ technology beyond the capacities of most contemporary commercial products. This design process requires patience and organization, but welcomes the magic of a many mentors and the skills and experience of many more. Patience and deadlines are not easy bedfellows, but OSE have set themselves the challenge of having the 50 machines ready for production by 2012 with a budget of 2.4 million US$ (dubbed the 50/2/2 goal) so that they can then test the set as a whole. By this time hundreds if not thousands of people’s ideas and visions will have been infused into the GVCS, becoming a pretty damn impressive example of crowd sourced design methodology put into practice.

I didn’t get much response when I offered up my analogy of ‘burning man meets biodome’ when I spoke to Nikolay (OSE Media Officer), but he said that the ‘Lego set’ for humanity has stuck, giving reference to the aspired modularity of the GVCS collection, one of the many requirements that are thoroughly laid out in the GVCS development strategy. The set of 50 Machines have been determined through many criteria: not currently having adequate open source plans, having immediate significance to a village economy, having production power, and the obvious: having the ability to be produced locally (they also share a longer list of attributes which capture the OSE ethos well). The machines also fall into one of two categories: they are task specific (e.g. brick maker), or they can contribute to making other machines (e.g. torch table).  Whilst there may be machines beyond this 50 it gives a solid goal to reach this priority set to facilitate the GVCS experiment.  I was curious to the absence of wheelbarrows, bicycles and other such tools, but discovered they are a level up from the base manufacturing infrastructure that GVCS aspire to, their plans already being open source, and them being but future children of the GVCS rapid reproduction tools.

Although resource acquisition (steel etc) and tool reliance (laptop etc) can be taken as opportunities to highlight holes in GVCS’s autonomous label, this first experiment is only a step towards complete independence from the commercial global industry monster (this has been considered and documented in their methodology). OSE seem to have total transparency in their actions, and although carrying strong ideals they have humble posture and are comfortable and versed in debating their theories. The air of revolution and economic liberation may have attracted some resistant commentary to the GVCS, threatening to overshadow its experimental value, but it has also attracted a global following of input and support, catching the attention of TED, BFI, and many other big guns in the game. Good work I say, but dive in and check it out for yourself at opensourceecology.org & openfarmtech.org.

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Recent Blogs | Comments (1)
January 15, 2011 - By Noel Wilson

Catapult gets carted off to Kilimanjaro

Rugged Trails in Golden Gate Park

Catapult Design have been absorbed in all things ‘cart’ as our project with Anza Technologies moves on to the next step.

With a little help from our friends we have designed, made and broken a bunch of early prototypes and constructed a set of sturdy detailed prototypes ready for testing on the rugged trails around Marangu. We have had access to some wonderful minds and facilities, from Martin Fisher’s contextual wisdom to San Francisco’s brand new Techshop (and it’s lasers). We’ve also used the famous topography of our wonderful city to test the physics and usability of our designs, from Golden Gate Park to Russian Hill.

Testing By Night

Now we are off to the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania to work with our client to determine the potentials of the prototypes, and to discover first hand the contextual realities of our end user, their community, economy, and landscape. Through respectful inquiry we will uncover the local demands related to the mobility of resources, determine how they inform our design, and assess how well the prototypes are satisfying them. We will also be hunting for unexpected considerations,  disguised assumptions and insightful stories, with our ears and eyes hopefully doing more work than our mouths. In preparation for our trip we are collecting appropriate methods of inquiry to uncover this valuable information, and any input and ideas to help us on our way are welcome!

Tyler Welding

Stay tuned for updates as our trip progresses…We will return in early February to implement our discoveries into the design in preparation for pilot testing.

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Current Projects | Tagged | Comments (3)
December 22, 2010 - By Noel Wilson

Catapult pays a visit to Leslie Speer

Catapult recently took a short trip down to San Jose to visit Leslie Speer in the SJSU Industrial Design Department.  We originally hunted Leslie down for her rural mobility insights relevant to the Anza Handcart Project, but also managed to learn about her professional history, and her role as Chair of the IDSA Design for the Majority Professional Interest Section.

Leslie recently ran a rural mobility project with her students at SJSU, catering to the people of Lebialem, a mountainous rural region of Western Cameroon, where it “rains more than Portland” and where personal mobility is a constant challenge (to say the least). Leslie got the designers at Specialized Bikes involved, as well as LECDA-USA (Lebialem Cultural and Development Organization), and an international collection of mentors with contextual experience. The project evolved to become a mobility device made from a locally manufacturable bamboo joining system, involving a core group of students, and supported by an NCIIA grant (check out their blog). We discussed mobility and manufacturing nuances and resources, as well as our own experiences in similar contexts, our meeting being of great help in tuning Catapults approach to the Anza project.

Leslie Speer in her office at SJSU

Leslie continues to lecture in Design for Sustainability, with obvious passion, having initiated, facilitated, and been involved in international social innovation projects for 20+ years.  She has also conducted a lot of work with functional crafts, initially in Mexico, with textiles and woodwork and candle makers etc, going through the whole process from collecting resources, to making, to marketing and selling.  In Costa Rica she has been collaborating with the Ministry of  Culture, the Government  Tourism Agency and the Museum of Contemporary Art & Design to promote and preserve local design (such as the Sarchi cart industry) and to create design education opportunities. Leslie is teaching Sustainable Furniture Design next year and will be taking the results to Milan furniture fair. She will also be involved in a collaborative student project to build a 100sq foot zero emissions house on SJSU campus, incorporating design, architecture, marketing, and business students.

Her belief is that “small changes make the biggest difference” and that increasing individual income potentials is the most realistic way of prompting change in community dynamics and markets …but that this requires patience. On that note she also commented that perceptions of time and the associated assumptions around this can cause a lot of confusion with design interventions, and ultimately lead to their demise. As the Chair of IDSA Design for the Majority Leslie is charged with sensitizing the IDSA design audience to such realities within ‘Majority’ contexts, and  ultimately encourage a perception shift that embraces a deeper consideration of these realities in the design process, rather than a default ‘fix-it’ or ‘fly-by’ approach.  Through the IDSA Design for the Majority site Leslie conducts down-to-earth reporting of relevant design happenings, people and organisation, and hosts complimentary Webinars, and we can expect an exciting new series in 2011. The IDSA D4M membership is spread broadly throughout the USA industrial design community and gains its fair share of international attention as well, creating quite a powerful audience.

Quite an impressive resume, spanning from the villages of Costa Rica to the offices of Frog Design and IDSA, and it is all humbly presented as a blessing.  We have invited Leslie to visit us at the Catapult Design Studio to continue our conversation into 2011…stay tuned…

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Latest News | Tagged | Comments (0)
November 22, 2010 - By Noel Wilson

Pushing forward with Anza

Catapult Design and Anza Technologies put our heads together this week to get the ball, or wheel in this case, rolling true on their handcart project. 

Anza’s CEO Drew Durbin and Lead Engineer Alex Surasky-Ysasi came to the Catapult Design Studio for a one week intensive brainstorm and strategy session. We covered as much as possible (including a mile of  whiteboards) from intense stakeholder analysis, existing product reviews, usage cases, contextual issues, business strategy, through to wheel  technologies and concept generation. Catapult involved a wide range of consultants, including the Whirlwind Wheelchair team, a select brainstorm panel, a handcart guru, as well as Zack the tyre guy, and Brian the ‘caster master’, with over 160 years of dealing in carts and wheels between them all!  Thanks to all for sharing your knowledge and investing your time and minds into the success of the project.

Anza and Catapult put their heads together, along with some friends. 

Anza’s visit has allowed for a much deeper understanding of the project, enlivened our working relationship, and provided a map to lead our next step. We are now solidly set on designing Anza an low cost handcart frame for rural Tanzanian farming families, and as there is literally a lot riding on these wheels, making sure that they fit the bill is our biggest challenge. Stay tuned for more.

 

By Noel Wilson | Posted in Current Projects | Tagged | Comments (1)