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

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

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

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

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

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.

1. Review the Peace Corp’s existing training materials in Costa Rica;

2. Develop and conduct a three-day workshop in Costa Rica around financing models for a host of renewable energy technologies (e.g cookstoves, flashlights, solar home systems, biodigesters);

3. Develop and deliver two online training courses focused on photovoltaic and hydroelectric solutions appropriate to Peace Corps communities.

For more information on the Peace Corps, go to www.peacecorps.gov.

Last week the World Bank launched a new approach to fostering green innovation called the Indonesia Green Innovation Pilot Program. Its aim is to learn how open innovation principles can foster the generation of market-based solutions to clean energy.  A core team of designers (Catapult and Inotek) will work  with rural communities, the public and private sectors to design clean energy solutions that can be adopted by the market.  Keeping in line with open innovation, its first activity is to identify challenges or “problems” that will be addressed by the program through a crowdsourcing approach. So if you are in any way familiar with rural communities and energy issues in Indonesia, the program invites you to submit a challenge here until March 17.

But, if you think coming up with the kind of technology required to tackle climate change will require something akin to a Manhattan Project, rest assured, you’re not alone. Googling “climate change” and “manhattan project” returns a whopping 1,540,000 results. But what does creating a “Manhattan Project” really mean? Besides uncomfortable thoughts of human-inflicted destruction, sheer scale is the first thing that comes to my mind. At its peak, during World War II, the US government employed 130,000 people in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The project’s size together with several other features made it a classic case of what I would call “brute-force innovation”: it was centrally-planned, closed, and science-driven. Even though the project included research teams across different universities, public research labs and companies across the United States, nothing was leaked in or out and each team had a very specific assigned task and plan. Through the Manhattan Project the government spearheaded the research, developed, testing and deployment of a revolutionary technology from start to finish over a span of four years. And there were no startups, spin-offs, royalty incentives, public-private-partnerships, venture capitalists, crowdsourcing, first-mover advantage, standard-setting or IPOs. Basically none of the buzzwords we associate with disruptive innovation in the 21st Century.

So the question is, can we just revert to classic World War II state-led innovation to tackle climate change? The answer needs to be nuanced. A key feature of the Manhattan Project was that commercial viability was not an issue. The market consisted of a single producer – the government – and a single buyer  – again the government. The project’s objective was clear and well defined. In that sense, climate change presents a very different challenge. Not only do we not know what mix of technologies will be the most effective in the future to help the world tackle climate change, but many aspects of climate change (e.g. energy efficiency or transportation) entail diffusing technologies across a huge number of private and public entities around the world. Hence, the challenge is not only technological.  Many superior technologies often never make it to the market because they lack an effective business model. In that sense, putting the private sector in the driver’s seat is likely to be more effective for taking new green technologies to the market, than a centrally-planned approach.

But there is also an important fundamental difference between the way new technologies were in the mid 20th Century and the way they are developed now. The closed, centralized and internalized R&D of the Manhattan Project reflected the logic of the times where the most transformational innovations, such as the transistor and the copy machine, came from the large corporate labs of the likes of AT&T and Xerox. The work of Henry Chesbrough and of his school of “open innovation” tells us that sticking to the “closed innovation” paradigm is no longer possible in the 21st Century. The increased availability and mobility of skilled labor, the rise in information and communication technologies, the rise of venture capital, shortening product life cycles, more sophisticated external suppliers and the rise in funding of public research have two implications. First any knowledge developed in-house will easily find its way to other firms and be exploited by new and better business models. Second, the pace of change and amount of knowledge contained outside a single organization is now so great and so accessible that anything developed in a closed environment is bound to lead to inferior results. In sum, creating incentives for the private sector through financing and regulation is likely to yield more results than a Manhattan Project-like approach for many green innovations.

That said, for research that is still at its early stages, massive amounts of government financing for green technology are required. And here we don’t just need one Manhattan Project but many. In 2008 dollars the Manhattan Project cost about $22 billion, or a mere $5.5 billion per year . Estimates for increased investments in energy R&D call for $100 to 700 billion per year.

 
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.

In January, Catapult kicks off a new design project with Wello in Rajasthan, India to explore the challenge of reliable water access. More than one billion people in the world lack regular access to safe water, and many more that haul water and other liquids such as milk or diesel fuel on a daily basis for their livelihood or business.

Building upon existing research such as IDEO and Acumen Fund’s Ripple Effect  project, Catapult and Wello will spend the next few months prototyping, observing, and testing ideas and new features with partners, with users, business owners, and local manufacturers in Rajasthan. Our goal? “ To create reliable tools which enable people to efficiently access and distribute water,” says Lead Designer, Noel Wilson.

This isn’t the first time Catapult and Wello have joined collaborative forces. In 2009, Catapult did a brief feasibility study around incorporating water sanitation technologies into Wello’s famous WaterWheel. (Check out the results here.) Needless to say, we’re excited to kickoff another design project with this amazing organization! Watch our twitter feed and newsletters to see how it goes –

CONTACT:
Noel Wilson, Lead Designer, noel@catapultdesign.org   @noelgaelwilson

The importance of considering product branding and experience has found its way into the BoP design space as an increasing number of social ventures recognize the significance and opportunity it presents in building a customer base. A recent survey on on-line shopping indicated that 70% of surveyed consumers would turn to a competitor after a negative on-line experience.  Moreover, results also suggest that customers are more likely to share a negative experience with their friends and family. In the BoP product and service industry, where marketing strategy depends on positive word-of-mouth between potential customers, building a reliable brand and experience is critical.

This week Catapult launches its first project with EcoZoom, a product manufacturing and sales company focused on making mass distribution of cookstoves possible.  The EcoZoom management team has a long-standing relationship with Approvecho Research Center and StoveTec and within the past 12 months has already sold thousands of products to entrepreneurs, social ventures, aid organizations, and governments around the world.  Catapult’s task:  to strengthen the product brand by marrying the EcoZoom product family as a recognizable, desirable, rugged and affordable line.

Stay tuned to see the results of this collaboration!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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’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.