Last week Cooper-Hewitt and the National Endowment for the Arts hosted a “Social Impact Design Roundtable” with the gracious support of several foundations.  The premise for the day was defined by the three questions:

1.  Where are the gaps in socially responsible design?  What are the biggest challenges?
2.  What are organizational models of successful and sustainable ways of working in socially responsible design?
3.  How can we effectively prepare future generations of designers for this growing area of design?

So what were some of the outputs from the roundtable?  Expect a whitepaper synopsis by Julie Lasky available on the web in the next few months.  But in case your expectations are high, there wasn’t any particularly new information revealed at the session.  In the past four convening I’ve attended, we’ve identified more or less the same challenges:

• the struggle to communicate the “value” of design to funders, to risk-averse clients, to aid/development agencies.
• the difficulty in effectively engaging constituents and participants in other parts of the world.
• the notion of design imperialism and the fact that most design-speak is top-level, intangible, and inconsistent.
• and so on, and so on.

Has the industry made progress in the past four years?  I really couldn’t say.  We still struggle with just the name – social impact design vs. public benefit design vs. design for social innovation vs. BoP design – much less a common language.

We’re still missing the voice of the constituents. The summit is one of the few I’ve attended that actually included international representation with what appeared to be 3 out of 40 representatives from actual developing nations.  Progress, but still well below what’s necessary.

We have a growing number of opportunities for junior and volunteer designers who want to work in this space, but almost zero opportunities for senior, experienced designers – is an inexperienced workforce really a benefit to the industry?  Or a benefit to the communities being served?

And we still have very few firms who know a thing or two about implementation of solutions.  Multiple voices at the table said, “Design is the easy part,” throughout the event.  Implementation is the hard part, and perhaps the ripest area for intervention.  There are maybe one or two firms I can think of that focus purely on implementation – neither was represented at the event.

Also notably missing from the table was (I think) the largest award-winning firm devoted social impact, Proximity Designs in Myanmar, as well as the innovative approach of Participle in the UK.  And students!  One of our questions was devoted entirely to students but other than one recent grad in the room, none were represented. (Design for America anyone?)

Cooper-Hewitt invites your answers to the three questions on their blog and is making an earnest effort to document the trials and successes from the industry.  (Check out their “Design for the other 90%“ and “Design With the other 90%”).  Check back in a few months for the more thorough notes from the session and hopefully some good starting points for action.

Despite my grumblings, I’m glad the conversations are happening and that funders are willing to facilitate them.  But now that we have years of general consensus around the challenges, how can we start the process of improving the industry?

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.

I read every question, many of which are pretty similar.  They resonate with the most popular discussion topics and inquiries in our Open Studio hours.  Based on this, I feel there are a few myths that need to be debunked in order for this industry to continue to grow and prosper.  Here are five of them:

MYTH #1:  “’Design for the BoP’ (is a specific sector).” 

The vast majority of the emails we receive simply state:  “How do I ‘design for the BoP’?”  It seems that by simply labeling our work with “social impact” or “BoP”, we are communicating that the processes and methods we use to design for people who are poor are different.  They’re not.  Before Catapult, I worked in the corporate design world for close to six years. One of my clients was a power tool company and I spent time “in the field” with construction workers, specifically drywall installers, on a re-design effort of drywalling tools.  I observed the installers’ technique, training of new crew members, the language they use for tools and processes, and even had a go at installing drywall myself (with the tool to the left).  After weeks of immersing myself within their world, I achieved some clarity in how the drywall installers sub-culture fit within the larger culture of construction workers, both of which I knew little to nothing about.  Approaching different cultures and sub-cultures around the globe is not much different – as outsiders they are worlds we know little to nothing about.

As a general rule, a good designer never assumes and always employs good methodology, whether your customer is a drywall installer from Mexico or a mother of five in Rwanda.  So to address myth #1:  there are no secret design methods you need to learn in order to work in social innovation.

MYTH #2.  “Designing for needs warrants success.”

One of the core product design courses taught at Stanford is “needfinding”, a description of the process used to identify design opportunities.  As designers, we’re trained to base our work on a defined need statement and user group.  There’s a good chance you’ve seen at least one headline this year about a solar cookstove or a group of students’ installation of a water purifier in a community.  I read most of these articles with a healthy dose of skepticism because this industry is inundated with hero stories. What’s rarely reported on are the follow-up stories on these projects.  Most of them fail, even those based on a compelling need statement.  They fail because many of them have not thought about the ‘walk away’ test, meaning that after implementing a program and leaving a community, the program continues to grow and thrive.  The misconception is that handing off a well-designed solution is enough.  It’s not.  User-adoption, distribution, and maintenance (or continued use) of these solutions require a long-term sustainability strategy.

Good design or a strong need statement is not a guarantee of success; it’s also about how well you’ve anticipated what happens once the project is out of your hands.

MYTH#3:  “We impart Western knowledge to communities to better their lives.”

There is a tendency to view this work as humanitarian and philanthropic because we can’t help but think that any work in developing countries is anything but.  The assumption is that we’re there to implement systems based on Western schemas and knowledge.  Not true. In fact, many countries are completely leapfrogging the West in spaces like green innovation. With cell phones and mobile banking, they’re bypassing telephone pole infrastructure and paper-based monetary systems.  While we struggle to get our fellow Americans to separate paper and plastic, the concepts of “re-use” and “recycling” have been ingrained in most non-American cultures for decades. India and Nicaragua are pioneering innovative pay-as-you-go finance models for home-scale renewable energies.  Guatemala and Tanzania have Netflix-like services for household items like batteries.  We’re using our iPhones to tweet about our amazing ham sandwich and the rest of the world uses their dumb phones to make money transfers, purchase goods at the store, check market prices in a neighboring country, and also, apparently, to topple regimes.

So to debunk this misconception, there is equal opportunity in all cultures to cross-pollinate the best ideas that create a more sustainable world.

MYTH#4:  “The objective is clean water/better healthcare/etc.”

We love stories about how a community in India living in darkness now has access to LED lights. We love stories of how a simple clean water device made a sickly community healthy.  It’s easy to assume that our objective is that immediate change. But it’s the tip of a bigger objective, the ultimate objective of development:  to build capacity.  There’s a good quote about creating social change by Ezio Manzini that says: “You don’t ask what you can do to make people behave differently.  You ask what you do to recognize people’s capabilities and help use those to solve the problems they face.”  He goes on to say that the term for designers who are ultimately looking to create change should be “design for capabilities” or “design for empowerment.”  This really does change your outlook of a problem statement.  Enabling people to meet their potential, whether they are rich or poor, is what creates social change.

MYTH#5:  “As a designer, I’m not as valuable as _________________.”

I meet a lot of people who know they have something to contribute, but they are just not sure how their skills translate to development.  As a designer, here are five strengths you bring to this industry:

1. You’re a systems thinker.  The problems that plague our world are complex systems problems.  As a designer, you’re expertise is problem solving through a combination of analytical and creative thinking.  It takes both sides of the brain to generate solutions to social challenges.

2. You’re a creative thinker armed with design process and principles.  Einstein said, “We can’t solve the world’s problems by using the same type of thinking when we created them.”  Many of the social issues we’re fighting today have existed for decades.  We are long overdue for fresh thinking.

3. You have an iterative process. We make a lot of mistakes in development – mistakes that sometimes negatively impact people with everything to lose, mistakes that could potentially be avoided if our industry fostered a culture of prototyping and refining ideas instead of throwing millions of dollars into doomed ideas.

4. You’re user driven.  Many decisions made today that affect the poor are made by people completely removed from their issues.  Your viewpoint, driven by your understanding of the needs of people/end-users, is completely unique and lacking within the industry.

5. You create capacity.  By building things – products, services, a website – you are intrinsically building the capacity of those who make, distribute, sell, or use what you created.  That’s what economic development is all about and we need more people doing that in a sustainable way.

Why it’s important to debunk myths

If “Design for Social Innovation” or “Design for the BoP” is going to move beyond a trend into a standard, then we need to quash this idea that only a few “specialized” designers engage in this kind of work.  Because in reality, as a society every day we create the social challenges of tomorrow with the buildings and objects we design, with the systems we put in place.  Poverty, homelessness, unemployment – they’re all a testament to those failed systems.  Now more than ever we need creative thinkers, people like designers working within the social sector, to unravel the complexities and re-think how we approach these challenges.

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…

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 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…

photo: Living Goods

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.

We can always ask people any old question and hope for the best, but how do we ask in a way that does not suggest to them what answer we might like to hear – what should we expect when we ask someone whether they need a new cookstove?  Or whether the smoke in their kitchen is the very worst of their daily challenges?  Whereas Western cultures favor bluntness, many others have a natural tendency to want to please and will often provide you with the answer they think you want to hear, even if is an untruth (or more politely, a bending of the truth).  Developing good interviewing techniques that account for those cultural differences is an important early step in working with a community.  For example, you might focus on using more open ended questions or discussions – “Can you tell me about how you cook?” or “Please teach me how to cook with your stove.”  Better yet, try to create your own learning opportunities.  For example, I sharpen peoples’ knives and offer to cook for them (any way to get to spend time in their kitchen), while someone else may knit socks in public in order to engage people.  Go collect firewood with someone to see how they interact with their environment; chop wood with them to see why their pieces are the size they are.  Spend more time listening than asking questions and you’ll get a better picture of the problem you are trying to solve.  One author comments that we should make the process as enjoyable to all as possible – “share genuinely of yourself, be prepared to grow together with people, and develop your sense of humor”.

Worth considering regularly is the inherently odd relationship between the foreigner and the local, and if we examine it even a little we see that there is a very strong tendency for observer bias to exist.  Our research is not “value-free,” we all have personal and institutional values which can’t help but shape our work.  Even our opinion of the meaning of “poor” or “poverty” comes from who we are and where we have come from culturally – the people we work with may not have much disposable income, so the choices they have are reduced compared to yours. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the basics required for a happy and fulfilling lives.  To us, a state of impoverishment means not having a job/money and suffering because of this, but in some parts of the world this might mean more time that can be spent with family and is not viewed as negatively.  When we devise ethnocentric and probably arbitrary metrics and opinions (such as “earning less than $1.25/day is always a bad thing, invariably resulting in misery”) we risk drawing inappropriate conclusions instead of learning from our experiences.

People want to know why we want to wander about in their villages, and even live in them – an alien concept to people who may never leave their village, and often have little desire to ever be separated from their family.  We must be prepared to be continually explaining to people (individually and collectively) why we need certain kinds of data.  People also appreciate some back-story – what other studies have shown, what people are saying now, what is happening in this research area in the greater world, etc.  All this is part of the general process of forming genuine relationships and making your work a collaborative effort.  We also need to explain what our constraints are – e.g. we are not a charity so we cannot pay for everything or distribute gifts constantly.  Gifts, if we are not careful, can take a relationship from one of equality to one of patronage.  Most places we visit will have already had some experience with NGOs and their presents of candy/toys/electronics, so we have to regularly examine what we want to accomplish with them, and whether other ways of sharing might be more productive (music, demonstrating your talents, entertainment, etc.).

Finally, the process of preparing for a trip is never easy – you want to be ready, but don’t know what you need to be ready for.  Have you done your literature review and contacted experienced people who might be able to help you in this geographical area or field of expertise?  Don’t try and re-invent the wheel!  If you are using a questionnaire, have you thought it out so that it hopefully results in reliable answers?  What other formats have other people used (there are often examples online)?  Are you ready to modify it in the field, once you have done a small pilot survey to make sure it is an effective communication tool?  Role-playing exercises before you leave can often help you anticipate problems, so enlist friends to help you practice probable conversations.  And it’s always good to prepare a vocabulary list, with local translations of words that relate to your project (sometimes I’m worried that I speak mostly cookstove oriented Spanish, since that is what I use most).

When we are introducing new technology and would like to persuade people to spend their hard earned money on things that provide “future benefits” – LED lights, solar panels, items related to health care or the education of their children – how can we determine how much they are willing to pay?  How do you assign a time and cost value to an improved cookstove that reduces a household firewood budget?  Are you prepared to ferret out how much people really value your new idea or widget?  I recently attended a economist’s talk on financial incentives in the health field and it changed the way I look at how I ask people about what they can afford – I advise investigating ahead of time concepts like present bias (why the future is less important than right now) and incentive compatibility (and even the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method, for determining willingness to pay) so that you can design your approach appropriately.  For those of us who tend to be too technical, learning from those outside our narrow field – like from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. – is hard work, and you have to do it before you reach the field.

One of the first tasks in new product development is to research prior art.  What exists in the space, what works, what doesn’t, and why.  It’s a task that is frequently skipped within the development community to the detriment of funders, organizations, and those who were supposed to benefit from the product.  A frequently used (but poorly credited) statistic states that 95% of technologies intended for developing countries fail.  This 95% represents hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money wasted annually.  Many of the organizations that make up that statistic fail because they are reinventing (unsuccessful) wheels.

You can blame these organizations for not doing their research, but to their credit, few tools exist that bridge the knowledge gap between the realities on-the-ground and development professionals.  Appropedia and Practical Action do a wonderful job of documenting a wide variety of open-source appropriate technologies.  Kopernik does a great job of showcasing existing products and technologies in the market.   And a variety of specialized organizations developing technologies in the areas of food processing (e.g. Compatible Technologies International) or agriculture (e.g. Open Source Ecology) offer free how-to guides for each technology they develop.  But it’s challenging to find these sites and an aggregated database doesn’t exist.

Enter Engineering for Change (E4C).  In 2009 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) invested in a website that would attempt to bridge the gap by aggregating information, hosting a technology library, and providing tools to enable collaboration amongst teams worldwide.  The beta site was released in early 2010 to select users.  IEEE and EWB-USA then joined as partners for the public launch of the revised site on January 4^th, 2011.  Users can search for general information on specific sectors:  water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, structure, and info systems.  They can search for projects in their region or sector of interest.  Or search the solutions library for an overview of established products and technologies.  Anyone anywhere can create a workspace and engage an international audience of users for new ideas, technical information, or concept feedback.  A low-bandwidth version is in the works to facilitate engagement in places where accessibility is challenging.

Eager for input, E4C is touring select cities hosting feedback sessions in an effort to get organizations and individuals aware of the site, engaged, and to provide users a voice for a tool that is ultimately intended for them.

Call it a catalog, database, research or collaboration tool – with the accessibility of the internet worldwide, a tool of this capacity is what the design and development sector has needed for decades.  You can anticipate the launch of similar sites later this year from prominent non-profit and for-profit entities in the design and development space.  But now the challenge lies in ensuring the “success” of these sites.  Will people and organizations join?  Add to the databases?  Will they attract the host of multi-disciplinary professions involved in the development of these solutions?  And will the rise of too many sites at once negate the impact of the efforts?  Stay tuned.

Engineers and designers interested in social impact work all want to use their skills to do good in the world.  After all, there are billions of people in need and over a million worthy causes to work with. But “doing good” does not necessarily correlate to impact.  You, as an individual or as an organization, could be the best at what you do and spend thousands of hours on the world’s most innovative solution to a problem.  But if that solution is never implemented or implemented poorly, your time and effort are futile.

There are millions socially driven organizations around the world with limited or no access to needed technical and design expertise, yet few have the capacity to effectively use that expertise.  Over the years I’ve witnessed several NGOs, big and small, flub technology and product initiatives due to a lack of product development and implementation knowledge.  So if you’re interested in the BOP design space, consider this:  success isn’t about completing a defined scope or work, it may not even be about sales or revenue, it’s about impact.

After five years I’m just starting to figure out what that means.  Tim Prestero, the Executive Director of Design That Matters, has a four-year head start on me and has it drilled down to a science.  We compared notes recently and distilled our thoughts.  So here it goes – if you’re an individual designer, engineer, or a design firm thinking of taking on client work in the BOP sector, here’s our list of 9 things that will increase the probability of impact:

1. Adopt the mindset of an investor. Vet the project and financial viability thoroughly as well as organizational capacity, impact, and the team behind the organization.  You want to make sure the organization you place your bet on can and will fulfill its objective.  Tim’s rule of thumb:  an organization must have been in business for 10 years and pushed products before.

2. The organization has previously demonstrated innovation capacity.

3. The organization has a solid, trustworthy reputation with their user base.

4.  Put special consideration and extra due diligence when considering working with international clients.  Tim points out that business development costs are significantly higher due to travel, language and cultural differences, and the extra time spent on partnership-building, due diligence, and need-finding.

5. Your lead contact is the CEO.  Meaning, you have access to and support from decision makers.

6.  Avoid pro bono project work.  This is hard, but free labor is often valued as such.  To get the information, time, and skin-in-the-game you need to get the job done, charge a fee or find a way to get your client emotionally committed.  Catapult Design also requires a minimum of 33% of the project budget up front.

7. The end product of your efforts will impact a minimum of 10,000 people, but preferably in the millions.

8.  Before taking on a design thinking or research proposal, develop concrete outcomes. For example, if your research results spare a client from investing time and resources into a misguided idea, how would you show that?

9.  Ensure the design accounts for failure.  If you’re assisting with the development of a water sanitation project within a community, could project failure leave the community in a worse situation?   Failure on part of the design or implementation should not be to the detriment of the end-user.

Of course, we would love to hear from others who have their own pitfalls to contribute to this list.   Drop them in the comments below!

[This blog was co-authored by Heather Fleming of Catapult Design and Tim Prestero of Design that Matters]

Wood for heating, and re-used milk jugs for daily water collection

Needless to say, Lena and Nelson, both in their forties, have never had access to electricity or running water.  An outhouse 50 yards from Lena’s home serves as their bathroom; a local stream provides the water they need for cooking, bathing, and cleaning.  Ironically, a high voltage power line buzzes overhead about five-minute from their house.

The Native American population is the most poverty-stricken community in the United States and continually plagued by health and environmental issues, gang activity, and political drama that overshadow efforts to retain and strengthen tribal culture.  After decades of sovereignty, many Native American communities mimic the conditions you would find in developing countries.

I made a second trip to Lena and Nelson’s community a few months after meeting them, long after the snow melted and this time with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the entity responsible for providing Navajo reservation residents with electricity, water and natural gas.  The NTUA is turning to off-grid, renewable solutions for its most remote customers.   We drove one hour to a home just west of Monument Valley with an 880W (not enough for most US homes, but respectable) hybrid wind-solar energy system.  The distance alone makes servicing the system a huge time-commitment and requires a heavy-duty truck to take on the precarious “roads.”

Hybrid wind-solar system near Monument Valley

For Navajo families waiting for electricity, basic math reveals that their chance of receiving a grid connection in their lifetime is slim to none.  The NTUA estimates the cost of a power line at $20,000 per mile.  Even if each of the 18,000 people without electricity lived a mere five miles from the nearest line, that’s an estimated $1.8 billion dollars to electrify all remaining homes.  The NTUA collects approximately $50 per month from each electrified home – at that rate, payback for grid connection is on the order of 1000 years.

The Navajo Reservation has the largest landmass of any tribe at 27,000 square miles and housing roughly 175,000 people.  Urban areas are sparse and the number of people living in them and paying for utilities is not enough to effectively subsidize the infrastructure development for those living remotely, as it did in the rest of the country.  Which means that on the Navajo Nation, off-grid renewable sources of power are less about dependence on oil and more about necessity.  But beyond that, it’s also about alleviating poverty.  De-centralized energy systems hold great potential for rural, impoverished areas worldwide.  The tangible effects of electricity include refrigeration of vaccines, powering of small electronics (radios, cell phones) that create a virtual bridge to the rest of the world, and lighting that doesn’t spew black carbon into the home.  $1.8B is not a trivial amount.  But it prompts the question:  what is the price tag on health and well-being here at home and abroad?