Photo Courtesy of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

Imagine this: You wake up early, as always, to prepare breakfast for your family. Wiping the sleep from your eyes you shuffle to the kitchen and light the stove—out comes billowing black smoke that immediately fills the room. Business as usual. You put on a pot of water to boil porridge. Your 3-year-old is now awake and comes over to watch you cook. They lean against soot-blackened walls and cough chronically as you continue cooking, learning how it’s done. You try to keep low, below the acrid smoke, as you feed the stove and stir the porridge, eyes watering. Breakfast should be ready soon, which is good because the rest of the family is waking up. As the porridge simmers, your mind turns to the day ahead—fetching wood, carrying water, going to market, preparing dinner… Overhead the coal-black thatch roof crouches over you, suspended on a pillow of smoke, but you pay it no mind. After all, it’s been that way since before you were born.

Smoke is known to be toxic. It kills young children around the world at a rate exceeded only by the drama and trauma of childbirth. The negative impact on adult heart disease and life expectancy from cooking in kitchens such as this is well documented. To those who understand the ramifications of breathing smoke and who, importantly, have exposure to other cooking methods, the harm is literally written on the soot-covered wall.

But that’s just the point. You, and the billions of other people who routinely cook their meals in this fashion, don’t know any other way. Your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all cooked like this. And even when you and your peers are informed as to the harm of your approach, you persist. It seems far-fetched to think that a pervasive and ancient cultural practice could be such a vicious killer. Besides, it’s what you know and are comfortable with—it’s what everyone does. So you continue, and the lungs of your family continue to fill with smoke.

Photo Courtesy of The Golden Hour Blog / Heart Attack Grill

Unfortunately, people are not rational actors; we are trained creatures of habit, molded and formed by our culture and personal experiences. Whether you’re a recent heart attack survivor who continues to live on a diet of Big Macs, or an overweight office-worker who watches hour after hour of television, you, and the rest of humanity, persist with habitual behaviors that are illogical and clearly damaging. It’s obvious to an outside observer, and maybe even to yourself, but that doesn’t stop you. Despite infinite public service announcements and articles about the harms of a poor diet or inactivity (to name only a couple of common issues) people resist changes to their accustomed behaviors almost as if their lives depended on it. Which, in a fashion, they do. Their way of life depends on their habitual patterns. And it is this habituated behavior that we, as designers and engineers striving to address social issues, must overcome.

But how do we do this? How do we attempt to tackle millennia of culturally instructed behavior? Contemporary psychological theories of behavior change, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior, tell us that people’s behaviors are based on attitudes, beliefs, and values and that changes in behavior rely on changes in these underlying attributes. Interestingly, the field of human-centered design also emphasizes understanding human values as an integral part of the design process. As David Kelley, founder of IDEO, tells us, “The way to do it is to go out and figure out what humans actually value.” In the field of design for social impact the theories of behavior change and human-centered design converge and they both clearly indicate that an understanding of values is key: successful designs appeal to people’s values and so do successful behavioral change campaigns.

So how do we understand peoples’ values? Again, David Kelley clues us in:

“At some point by observing these people and building empathy for them you start to have insights about them. “Oh, they really do value this.” It’s not obvious at first that that’s what they really value. They say they really don’t do something but it turns out they actually do when you observe them.”

If the way to understand values is through empathy, how do we build empathy? I touched on this subject in my last blog post, Design Skills and Life, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these questions because they are central to all of our work at Catapult. So I’m taking you with me as I chip away at understanding the process of empathizing.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence tells us that,

“Self-awareness is the first component of emotional intelligence – which makes sense when one considers that the Delphic oracle gave the advice to “know thyself” thousands of years ago. Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives.”

Self-awareness, being the first component of emotional intelligence, forms the foundation for the other components (self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill). Without self-awareness we struggle to empathize, if we can’t empathize we will find it difficult to understand people’s values, and if we can’t understand peoples values we won’t know how to design meaningful products for them in such a way that their behaviors change.

Photo Courtesy of Confessions of a Shopaholic

Do you, like the Indian mother in our example, understand why you persist in behaviors or beliefs that are unhelpful? Do you understand why you keep smoking, struggle with direct communication, judge people who are uneducated, and all of the other myriad things that you do that you would love to change in your life but don’t? If you understood why you can’t stop eating, might it help you relate to people who can’t stop shopping? If you understood why tradition keeps you cooking the same gross holiday dish even though no one likes it, might it help you understand why a mother might continue cooking over a smoky fire?

Let me take an example from my own life. I live in San Francisco, one of the best cities in the US for public transportation. I also own a car despite being an ardent believer in global warming, that the world is headed toward serious environmental catastrophe, and that by regularly driving my car I am directly contributing to the problem, threatening the lives of millions. But I can’t bring myself to ditch the car. Why? What am I valuing that is holding me back? It has something to do with comfort (it’s convenient and easy) and familiarity (my family has always had automobiles). If I was to get rid of my car I would have to plan much more (requiring significant extra effort to plan bus routes or rent cars for both routine errands and long trips) and it would require a non-trivial reworking of my lifestyle (how would I get my weekly groceries or go for weekend hikes?). I would also have to explain to my friends and family why I am making the change and that would require confrontation, something with which I perpetually struggle (another family trait).

So, how can I relate to the Indian mother in our example? Can I understand that it might be easier to just keep doing what she has always done? Can I relate to the fact that change takes effort (modifying cooking habits) and involves confrontation (explaining to her family why she needs to get a different stove)? Can I take that relating and integrate it into the products on which I work? Maybe we can design a stove that can fit into her life in such a way that her cooking habits don’t have to change. Or perhaps we can design a program that reduces the family confrontation by making it more affordable. This is where things can get creative as we explore ways of building our products around the values of our end user.

By attempting to look inward at my own experience in order to see what I have in common with a low-income Indian mother, I hope this post has opened a door to you finding your own personal way to connect with her. This is how we uncover the values that will give rise to solutions.

To paraphrase Daniel Goleman, it is by understanding yourself that you begin to understand others. By feeling how your own hindrances are active in your life you can start to empathize with other people who struggle to make changes. Through understanding and empathy you can see what might be holding others back (their needs, wants, values, capabilities, beliefs, fears, etc.) and what they might require in order to change their behavior. Cultivating these capacities of understanding and empathy will allow you to work with others in an appropriate, considerate, and effective fashion. And that’s what design is: working with people to create tools that serve them in a meaningful way.

So I ask, all of you would-be designers and change makers, how well do you know yourself?

At Catapult, we often don’t know what we’re doing.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have a clue, just that we frequently find ourselves doing things that haven’t been done before. At least not by our clients or us. But that is the hallmark of innovation – experimenting, exploring, pushing the boundaries of what we do and how we do it. And no place provides more fertile ground for the seeds of innovation than does design – creatively trying to solve a problem to achieve a specific goal. So how do we continue to push the boundaries?

Design firms the world over tout their proprietary “design process” as a veritable secret sauce to innovation, treating their particular flavor of design thinking as a patented method replete with branded stages. This is understandable. After all, we are all just trying to differentiate ourselves. And to the uninitiated it works. But, if you were to take a quick survey of all the different design processes, they all follow the same general flow. Something that goes like: explore -> create -> produce.

image via www.mountvernonschool.org

And that’s all well and good. But there’s only so much innovation that can go on around the branding of a well-established process for tackling difficult challenges. Our feeling is that one of the areas in which designers can deeply innovate is not by simply following a tried-and-true process and repeatedly applying the same methods; but by also devising new methods and approaches to fit into the process.

The way is not always clear. In fact we’ve found that it looks different for nearly every client with which we work. And that is the bedrock of innovation – discerning what is called for in this instance – asking not what you’ve done before or what others are doing, but what this situation, right now, is calling for. And then doing it.

Here are four ways we’ve pushed our design process beyond the original, and traditional, model we adopted when we were just starting out. (Keep in mind that our work typically involves designing for end-users very far afield, both geographically and culturally.) Perhaps our readers are already building on these methods in their own practice?

1. Design mind-meld – Think of creative ways to integrate your expertise into the world of your clients.

Instead of doing your own independent research and preparing a report or delivering a prototype, insert a designer into your client’s team for an extended foray. By including a mind steeped in design thinking into their efforts to develop and implement a product, your client will be able to leverage the power of design much more broadly and deeply than they would have through a typical consulting agreement.

2. Extreme co-creation – Integrate the voice of the users into the products you design.

Co-creation has become a conventional talking point among design and innovation firms – as any quick search on the subject will show. If you can find these articles on co-creation in The Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Businessweek you know it’s mainstream. But instead of paying it lip-service, ask, how seriously involved can we get our end-users in the development of our product? Can we take prototypes to the field in order for them to provide feedback? Better yet, can we modify those prototypes in real-time based on their responses? Even better than that, can we create and modify prototypes in concert with our end-users there in the local context? Can we include them in our concept generation as active, not just passive, participants? Can they be a key component of our iterative design->test->design->test cycle?

3. Design destabilization – Consider how to challenge the assumptions that underpin design directions.

Sometimes the best way of serving a client is not to do what they request, but to instead ask them hard questions and suggest possible options that aren’t necessarily in keeping with their original direction. Such questions or suggestions can dramatically change the course of a project or even lead to it being cancelled altogether (clearly not your desire). This can be intimidating, and should not be done lightly or without serious thought, but it is central to the integrity of your designs and for looking out for your clients’ best interests.

4. User-originate design – Ask how to turn the whole process on its head; instead of user-centered design, how about user-originated design?

image via imusa.org

Here I am borrowing a phrase from Ralf Hotchkiss at Whirlwind Wheelchairs, where they are looking not to designers but to the users themselves for the inspiration behind their designs. This is stepping even beyond co-creation and is asking, “What if, instead of designing a wheelchair for disabled people, you instead taught them to design wheelchairs themselves and then supported them in doing so?” Can we remove our designers from the process altogether and let the users design their own products? Could they, perhaps, come up with better, more finely tuned, more considerate designs? This is a question Whirlwind is asking and, to me, is what innovation in design is all about.

In the course of our work, we meet a lot of aspiring social enterprises committed to developing a product to help disadvantaged people meet their needs. These organizations are always energetic, aspiring, and inspirational. They have a vision for how to help people improve their quality of life and a sincere desire to see their products into the hands of those who can benefit from them. Their enthusiasm is infectious and I am almost universally excited at the prospect of working with them – until they tell me that they want to produce their product locally in-country.

There are a number of reasons people want to make their product using locally available skills and materials. Many of these reasons are very compelling, particularly to a person motivated by positive social impact:

• Producing products locally allows one to employ local artisans, providing employment opportunities, building skills, and contributing to the regional economy.
• Local fabrication enables one to avoid excessive import taxes and cumbersome customs, lowering the price of the product.
• Sourcing components locally allows one to support the local economy while ensuring that the end product can be easily repaired and serviced using available skills and materials.
• Operating locally frees one from the necessity of managing complicated and costly supply chains that span the globe, decreasing the size, complexity, and cost of the organization, and decreasing the cost of the product.

Unfortunately, the reality awaiting these organizations in-country will inevitably lead them to reconsider their initial intention. Why? One basic fact: most developing countries around the world simply do not have the manufacturing capacity required to make products of any complexity.

image by chinadigitaltimes.net

In contrast, factories in China can, and already do, make everything. From iPods to wheelbarrows, the Chinese mega-factories can make virtually anything. With their currently operating factories, contract manufacturers in China already have all the required tools, infrastructure, and experience in-place and ready to make products. Alternatively, if an organization wants to make a product in a developing country, they need the expertise and capital required to build factories, infrastructure, and supply chains all their own – a costly, difficult, and time-consuming proposition.

This is not to say that enhancing the local economy, avoiding import taxes, ensuring ease of maintenance, and simplifying the complexity of an organization are not excellent goals; it simply means that a more nuanced understanding of the global economy, and what is currently possible, is required. Organizations working to develop a product need to think deeply about how to best leverage the manufacturing juggernaut that is China while also looking at local opportunities for innovation.

This is why, when organizations tell me that they want to make their product locally, my inclination is to tell them to come back to me once they’ve realized that they will be making their product in China – at least to start.

image by practicalaction.org

Now clearly this isn’t an absolute rule: if you are intending to train people to make clay stoves or mud bricks – then I’m totally wrong. Or, if making plastic buckets or other less complex products is your aim, then you could possibly build a factory or hire an existing one in-country (or the on the same continent) to make your product. Alternatively, and most promising, you could import all the components from China and assemble them in-country. But if you have a product of any complexity, if it requires specialized manufacturing procedures or advanced assembly, and you don’t have the capital to build your own factory – you will have to start in China and go from there.

To explore this further, the following are what China has and developing countries struggle with – if an organization wants to make its own products in-country it has to develop and manage all these various, complex pieces themselves instead of conveniently hiring a Chinese manufacturer that will take care of all of it on their own (a very appealing proposition, especially to a small start-up).

Infrastructure

Efficiently producing a product requires reliable infrastructure: electricity, water, roads, rail, etc.

Raw Materials

Many raw materials are processed in China, meaning that steel, copper, plastics, etc. cost less in China than anywhere else in the world due to import tariffs and transportation.

Supply Chains

Raw materials and components are required to make products and they must arrive at the factory efficiently, timely, and reliably.

Factories

Factories, or advanced workshops, are required to efficiently make products in large volumes. They manage inventories, quality control, tools, personnel and all the thousand-and-one things it takes to make a product.

Built Space

Assembling products require built space (i.e. big buildings) to maintain inventories, set up tools, assemble and test products, and package items for shipping.

Inventories

Managing inventories can be complex, requiring logistics expertise, efficient communications, and timely delivery of components.

Tools & Assembly Lines

Products require tools, machines, reliable power, replacement parts, and efficient assembly lines if they are to manufacture products in large volumes at a reasonable cost.

Trained Personnel

Parts fabrication, product assembly, assembly line planning, inventory logistics, quality control, and equipment maintenance all depend on having trained personnel, with the necessary skills, on-hand.

Quality Control

Testing products to ensure quality requires specialized equipment, optimized testing plans and procedures, and trained personnel.

Clearly the manufacture of products is an elaborate undertaking and organizations attempting to start from scratch in-country can easily be overwhelmed by the effort of setting up their own fabrication infrastructure.

As in most aspects of our life, building local capacity will be an incremental process but if our aim as impact-driven organizations is to help people improve their lives, then simply assuming that everything will always be made in China, and shipped abroad, is a bit fatalistic. Instead, embracing the manufacturing powerhouse that is China while looking to intelligently build local capabilities is the surest way to ensure that a product succeeds and social-impact is maximized.

Nevertheless, this begs the question: how? I don’t have any easy answers, but I suspect it begins with the following:

• Train local maintenance and repair service people to build local skills.
• Incorporate simple, locally fabricated components or add-ons wherever possible to support existing industry.
• Build in-country assembly and packaging warehouses (for simpler products) in order to expand local infrastructure.
• Design products so that they can be customized locally by trained technicians, provide skilled local jobs.

I look forward to the day when factories in less developed countries churn out the products their citizens need, but in the mean time, I am eager to hear your ideas for how to build local capacity while acknowledging the fact that virtually everything I own, here in the US, was also made in China…