If we were to solve the energy challenge you are thinking about, could we improve the livelihoods of rural Indonesians by improving health, increasing incomes, fostering greater literacy and access to education, or improving the environment of their community? We’re not asking for the solution (not yet…that comes later). We’re asking for your help to let us know what you think are the most important challenges that need innovative solutions. 

 
Our team will carefully evaluate all the challenges we receive – both from our on-line call for challenges as well as our local work interacting with people in the communities we’re targeting. Our selection of the challenges we’re going to pursue will be announced in late March. After that, watch our blog to contribute to the call for solutions we’ll be launching next.
 

 
The goal of this World Bank supported project is to generate demand-driven innovations in clean energy that address critical challenges faced by the resource-poor in rural Indonesia.

Together, INOTEK Foundation, GATD Foundation, The Apex Consulting Group, Catapult Design, and the World Bank Group are working to define specific challenges in rural communities that may be addressed with technology- and/or knowledge-based solutions. The project will subsequently develop demand-driven solutions and supporting business models, as well as seek implementing partners to enable the solutions to have impact in local communities.

If a product is going to succeed, it needs to be made.  That seems obvious, and it is.  However, I would argue that for a product to succeed in any social impact sense it also needs to be M.A.D.E.

What do I mean by that?  Simply put, if a product or services is going to help people significantly impact the problem it is meant to address it needs to have the four following attributes:

Meaningful:

The product fits into the lives of the people who will use it and helps them meet a need they currently have, in a significant way.

Example: I don’t have any lighting built into my home but I still need a way to light my living space after dark.  A solar-powered, portable lamp that could light my home would be meaningful – it has a utility I can easily understand and apply to my life.

Accessible:

People can afford, purchase, understand, maintain/repair, and use the product.

Example: If that lamp was priced so that I could afford it; if it was available in my local shop; if I could intuitively grasp how to both charge it and turn it on/off; if I could buy replacement bulbs when the originals burnt out; and, if I was able to consistently light my home, then the lamp would be accessible – I am able to get my hands on one and make use of it.

Desirable:

People want the product and are willing to go out of their way, and make sacrifices, to get one.

Example: I really like that lamp.  It’s size/shape/color/utility really appeal to me.   In my community it would certainly not be an embarrassment to own one and it might even be a status symbol.   That lamp is desirable – I want one.

Effective:

The product does what it was intended to do.

Example: My lamp works great.  It fills my home with light, recharges with the solar panel provided, lasts as long as I expected on a charge, and generally solves my lighting problem.  This product is effective – it helps me meet my needs and I am happy.

While this perspective might be a bit simplistic, it can still be immensely helpful when we are thinking about developing a product for social impact.  So keep this in mind: before you proceed too far down the path of introducing a product into the world, make certain it very clearly and positively meet these requirements – otherwise it will never get M.A.D.E.

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…

We arrived in the village of Matala, Tanzania, with three substantially different prototypes ready to assemble with villagers – in this photo you can see Noel instructing the villagers in how to drive the cart prototypes we had brought with us.

The following two weeks were chock full of design exercises, ethnographic research, iterative prototyping, community meetings, and endless cups of chai. The insights garnered from our two weeks of working closely with the villagers proved invaluable. The villagers were able to use the carts daily to perform their regular work (e.g. collecting water for family and farm use) and the carts were passed from family to family on a daily basis so that we might get as many perspectives as possible. It was a real joy to walk around the village and hear the familiar rumble of the carts as they rolled by, full of water cans and driven by women and children going about their lives and finding the carts extremely useful.

After three days of fetching water, chatting with mamas, surveying carts, visiting homes, taking photos, and meeting villagers, we attended a community meeting in the local school where the carts were discussed in-depth. The villagers were asked to recount their experiences and provide input on how to make the carts better. We spoke with the 26 villagers for almost an hour and walked out of the meeting with an excellent idea of how to make the carts better.

That weekend we spent two nights with a local family, participating in their daily lives – observing and taking notes all the while. We learned about their family, work, religion, chores, habits, routines, expectations, joys, aspirations, and struggles. This up-close-and-personal interaction with our end-users enriched our understanding of the people we were designing for and will ultimately allow us to produce a more refined and tailored hand cart that will integrate more easily and, most importantly, usefully into their lives.

The second week we spent working in the nearby town of Himo with local artisans to modify and improve the carts – integrating the villagers suggestions. After two days of impromptu design sessions, haggling with welders, and running all around town we returned to the village with three dramatically improved carts.

The rest of the week was spent visiting families, going to markets, sitting around the water tap watching people collect water, surveying water carrying vessels (mostly plastic jugs and buckets), and chatting with anyone we could find about how they transported water and other materials from place to place.

At the end of our time in Matala we attended one final community meeting – led by Noel – in which we asked the villagers for feedback on the carts we had modified. They were delighted with the changes we had made and felt that the final carts were serious improvements on the ones with which we had arrived. As we expected, there were still suggestions and critiques of the modified carts – all which will prove useful when we return to our studio in San Francisco and begin work on a final cart design.

We then left the carts with the villagers and began the long journey home, full of ideas and enthusiasm for how to make the best possible cart for the villagers of Matala and, hopefully, the rest of eastern Africa.

“Remember the two benefits of failure.  First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.”

-  Roger Von Oech

Earlier this month Catapult attended SOCAP2010 and hosted a one-and-a-half hour open forum to discuss what is often a taboo subject in philanthropic and social impact work – failure. Our reason for selecting such an unpopular topic was the simple truth that we often learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. It makes sense, then, that we all have much more to learn when people share their failures openly rather than attempt to keep them under wraps. Furthermore, we believe that by encouraging people and organizations to air their dirty laundry we can ultimately make failure less something we are afraid of and more a tool of learning that will help foster a social impact community that is more open, innovative, and effective.

Taking inspiration from FAILFaire, we modeled the forum after the instructions compiled by MobileActive, the originators of the first FAILFaire in May 2010. Individuals were encouraged to stand before a packed room and share an experience of failure working in the social impact and social entrepreneurship space. Specifically, they were prompted to explore the following:

• What was the project?
• What were you trying to do?
• What was the fail/where did it go wrong?
• What would you do differently next time?
• What lessons can be learned?

Despite the fact we were all at a venue teeming with investors and potential funders, there was no dearth of people willing to stand up and share tales of failure with the rest of the attendees. The stories were insightful, informative, and often humorous and left all of us in awe of the challenges of working in this space and of the resourcefulness our colleagues showed in addressing their failures. Jane Chen, CEO and co-founder of Embrace Global, kicked off the session with her story about her troubles prototyping her company’s low-cost baby-incubator.  Sara Joy Pond, the Executive Director of Tipping Bucket, shared a memorable story regarding the launch of their site for the first time.  (The untested — oops! — code multiplied all donations by a factor of 10!)  And Rachael Chong, CEO of Catchafire, as well as several other attendees highlighted the difficulties of building the right team for their venture.  Some of the other key insights we collected from the discussion were:

• When starting up, keep your options open (vendors, design, partners, etc)…
• Social businesses need to have an actual “business” component to it.
• Embrace humility. Know when to admit the path you’re going down might be the wrong one.
• Find the right people and/or partner to start your business.  Get rid of people who don’t fit and keep searching.
• Paper (a contract) isn’t enough. Protect your assets.
• Co-develop solutions to problems with the people or organizations causing the problem.
• Less is more.
• Do a couple of things really well instead of multiple things poorly.
• If people don’t understand the questions or concepts you’re presenting, you can’t trust their answers.
• Make sure your goals are in-line with your partners’ goals.
• Don’t expect the first launch/trial to be a commercial success.
• Beware the solution in search of a problem.
• Question assumptions.
• Think strategically. Don’t partner for the sake of partnering.
• If you’re a mission-driven organization, make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Listen to the community, your users. Don’t assume you understand the full context of the problem on your own.
• Live up to your commitments. Transparency is key.
• Make sure the technology works.
• When presented with new opportunities (and you will be!), ask yourself if it is something you’ll still be working on in 5 years. If not, don’t do it.

Ultimately, we found the format helpful in promoting a frank and friendly discussion among peers. We left the room feeling that this was an important subject that deserves increased exploration and that future conferences should consider incorporating a FAILFaire into their programs as a means of providing a supportive environment in which we can all learn from each others’ failures.

Happy failing!

Photo courtesy of Anza Technologies.

In rural Tanzania, as in many developing nations, farmers struggle to move the heavy loads necessary for their work: carrying water from a reliable source to their fields for irrigation is difficult and moving crops from their fields to sell at the market is also a challenge. Consequently, the output of the farmers’ land is often poor and they are frequently unable to make a livable wage from their work. Nearly half of the world’s poor living on less than $1 per day are rural subsistence farmers.

If these farmers were able to more easily transport water (both for irrigation and family consumption) and to carry heavy loads to the market, their ability to generate income for their families would increase and ease their work burden. To this end, Catapult was recently hired by Anza Technologies to assist with the industrial design and in-country pilot testing of their new pushcart. This cart is being designed with the rural Tanzanian farmer in mind and will allow him to carry more than 120 liters of water, or loads of more than 250lbs, for a retail price less than half that of competing products.

Watch our site for more info as this new project unfolds!

One way to begin developing the requisite understanding is to conduct a Rapid Community Health Assessment (often called Rapid Rural Appraisals or some variation of these names). This is a general and very adaptable method of collecting and organizing qualitative community health data that can later be distilled into insights that will form the basis of a design solution.

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While sitting among the crisp, open pine forest in the high country of the Navajo Nation outside Sawmill, we discussed the concepts behind Rapid Appraisal methods and worked through this workshop, generating questions that we would attempt to answer after spending time on the reservation and visiting a local hospital and speaking with physicians.

Visiting the Chinle Hospital (left to right: Heather, Dr. Cabrera, Dr. Rand, Tyler, Kenneth, Emily, Morgan)

The next day we spent an afternoon visiting the hospital in Chinle, AZ, speaking with Drs. Rand and Cabrerra. Their specific knowledge and experience proved incredibly useful in allowing our team to develop a much more robust understanding of the health issues facing the people living in the Navajo Nation.

For example, we learned that, in recent years, dustbowl-like conditions prevail in Chinle during the spring, scraping many a cornea and destroying young crops, decreasing the availability of locally grown vegetables and contributing to the prevalence of diabetes on the reservation.

Another contributor to diabetes, a major scourge of the Navajo on the reservation, is the lack of refrigeration in rural areas. When families don’t have the ability to keep food for extended periods of time they are forced to buy non-perishable items, like processed meats or potato chips.

Understanding that these health-related issues are present, the factors that contribute to their existence, and current attempts to address them allows a designer more effectively create potential solutions.

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To learn more about Rapid Community Health Appraisals, download our Rapid Community Health Assessment Workshop.

Hardware store in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

Understanding this environment, the array of technologies present and the interactions people have with them, can not only provide great insight as to potential product opportunities, but also increase the likelihood that whatever product you design is readily incorporated into it.

This is the basic premise of our Technological Environment workshop (file download: 128 KB).

Virtually anything created by people can be considered a technology: language, tools, homes, transportation, etc. Learning to identify technologies and their uses, to notice when something stands out, and to realize when something is missing is a valuable skill that all field researchers and designers should cultivate. As one begins to notice technology they start to understand the technological world in which people exist: What are they accustomed to doing with tools? With what technological sophistication are they accustomed to interacting? What might easily integrate into their daily lives without requiring dramatic behavioral change or difficult education?

Hardware store in Ruli, Rwanda

The next step, beyond identifying technologies, is being able to identify what devices are made of and how they were fabricated. This is particularly applicable to artifacts produced regionally, as the observation can provide insight as to local manufacturing capacities and maintenance and repair capabilities. Additionally, recognizing what materials are present in a community’s technological environment allows designers to develop products that can either blend in or stand out, as the situation warrants.

Taken together, these observations can give designers a grasp of how foreign a technology, material, or assembly might be. They can provide a point of reference regarding how much consumers are able, or willing, to spend on a product. And they can steer the design team towards a solution that is more likely to be adopted and effective – the end goal of any product design effort.

If we were to work only on those projects that could pay for program costs and operating expenses our hands would be tied with regard to project selection. We would be unable, as an organization, to consider those promising and worthwhile projects that were not well-funded enough to pay our rates as set by our hard costs. But, with the addition of a second revenue stream, charitable donations, we have more latitude in our ability to select mission-critical project work and to increase the likelihood that promising products come to fruition.

For example, for the last few years we have been working on a small-scale, open-sourced, wind turbine with the San Francisco Professionals chapter of Engineers Without Borders – USA (EWB). The goal of the project is to develop a low-cost turbine that could be used to bring a modest, if meaningful, amount of electricity to a substantial number of the 1.6 billion people living without regular access to electricity.

Currently this project is unfunded beyond prototyping costs, which are covered by EWB. All work that happens on the turbine is performed by EWB volunteers and Catapult personnel operating at a loss. As a result, the project, though promising, moves ahead slowly and uncertainly. If Catapult were able to dedicate a full-time engineer and design fellow to the project for three months we would be able to drive the design to completion, build and test a functional prototype, and travel to Guatemala to install a turbine for field-testing. The cost of this three-month program is only $25,000 but stands to benefit tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. If that’s not leverage, I don’t know what is.

Another potential project we could work on is also energy-focused. The client, a small renewable energy generation company that uses agricultural waste products to power generators, would like to increase their operations from the 3,000 individuals they currently serve to the 50,000 potential customers they have identified. Part of their efforts to scale-up their operation involves finding a way to monetize the waste byproducts produced in the process of generating electricity. For $12,000 Catapult could conduct the material and technology research they need to evaluate this sustainable and environmentally friendly opportunity. While our potential client is able to afford $7,500, they cannot afford the rate we must charge. With a relatively small contribution from donations, Catapult would be able to leverage the limited resources of our potential client and to help them dramatically increase the scope of their operations.

While the type of products on which we work ranges from energy generation to medical devices and water sanitation, all are focused on the effort to realize the promise and opportunity that technology offers to dramatically and positively transform lives. With the addition of money we collect from donations, such as we have been raising during our Startup Campaign, we are able to work with idea-rich but resource-poor organizations to leverage the resources they do have to do an amazingly disproportionate amount of good. So the long answer to the question of, “What does my donation buy?” is the simple response of, “leverage”.

The end of September saw a major milestone completed on the wind turbine project – we finished our wind tunnel testing at the NASA-Ames research center! The experience was fantastic and so far we have been blown away by the quality and quantity of data we collected. While it is still a bit too soon to publish our complete test results here (we still have a lot of analysis to do), I nevertheless wanted to get started by explaining our test set-up and posting a few photos from the tunnel.

Test Set-up

Since the beginning of this project we have focused on two vertical-axis turbine designs: Savonius and Lenz (see photos below). The major purpose behind our wind tunnel testing was to characterize the performance of these turbines, allowing us to select the most promising design and move forward with developing the alternator that will generate the electricity. In order to characterize the turbines, we needed to collect data on how they perform in different wind speeds while under different loads.

The end result of this testing will be a series of power curves (see chart below) describing the mechanical energy generated by the turbine as a function of wind speed and turbine speed (rpm). We also explored three different angles of attack for the turbine blades on both turbine designs to see how they impacted turbine performance.

The theory behind our turbine test is this simple equation:

Power = Torque x Rotational Speed

When the wind blows it hits the turbine, causing it to spin. In spinning, the turbine converts the energy contained in the wind into mechanical power. In order for us to figure out just how much wind energy is converted into mechanical power we needed to place the turbine in a flow of wind with a known speed and then apply a known torque load to the turbine while measuring the effect of the load on the turbine’s rotational speed. Referring to the equation above, we would supply a known torque and measure the rotational speed, thereby allowing us to calculate power.

The way we mechanically applied the torque load was relatively straightforward. We coupled a DC motor to the bottom of the turbine shaft and tried to turn the motor opposite the direction of the turbine rotation (see image below). Since the torque produced by a DC motor is a function of current, we could apply a known load to the turbine by applying a known current to the motor.

This test set-up, while elegant, nevertheless proved problematic as the motor we sized proved unable to resist the amount of torque the turbine was generating and we quickly overheated the motor. Another way of applying torque to the turbine was needed, fast. Thankfully, the NASA-Ames facility is full of advanced testing labs, many of them working on rotating equipment. The day after we identified our problem we had a torque cell in-hand and connected to the turbine shaft (see image below).

This torque cell contained a strain gage mounted on a shaft that output a voltage based on how much stress was applied to the shaft. One end of the shaft was attached to the turbine and the other end had a mountain bike disc brake attached to it that could apply a drag load that would slow the turbine and provide the strain that the gage would measure. This set-up allowed us to apply our known torque load as desired and the testing went on as planned. The only downside was that we were unable to maintain a steady torque and were forced to take our readings dynamically as the torque applied and turbine speed varied. This scenario was less than ideal, but we still managed to collect a copious amount of data that should allow us to compensate for any dynamic and inertial effects.

Ultimately we collected all the data we wanted and, at first blush, the results look great! My next blog post will focus on that data and our resulting analysis. Many thanks to Malcolm Knapp, Jeremy Kimmel, Sarah Felix, and Charlie Sellers who all devoted many days to the wind tunnel testing. Other Engineers Without Borders volunteers that played an important role are Jerry Pugh, Matt McLean, and Ann Torres. Finally, none of this would have happened without the help of Jose Navarette, Nili Gold, and Farid (all of whom work at the NASA-Ames facility), the technicians running the tunnel, and the generous donation of the facility by the US Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (which leases the tunnel from NASA).

To see more images of our wind tunnel tests, check out our Wind Tunnel album and watch the video below: