National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Acting Chairman Joan Shigekawa announced today that Catapult Design, a product and service design firm based in San Francisco, is one of 817 nonprofit organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Art Works grant. Catapult Design’s grant will support the expansion of its design and innovation education program to the Navajo Nation in Arizona.

In 2012 Catapult Design hosted its first design event, Catapult Labs, in San Francisco with the goal of exposing attendees to new design tools and methods that spark and support positive social change.  With NEA funds, Catapult will host this event on the Navajo Nation in 2014.  The event will bring together designers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and the Navajo Nation to build networks, activate communities, and spark entrepreneurial social innovation.

In 2010, the unemployment rate on the Navajo Nation – which crosses Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – spanned 40-70%, compared to 9.6% across the U.S.  Despite resource-rich land, the largest tribal landmass in the country, and a viable workforce of 180,500 people, the growth of Navajo small businesses is less than half the growth rate for the U.S.

By engaging local partners, such as the Rural Entrepreneurship Institute in New Mexico, Catapult will assemble Native American youth and budding entrepreneurs who want to turn their ideas into realized solutions for community and economic development on tribal lands.

“It’s an opportunity to cross-pollinate methods and ideas in one of the most entrepreneurially thriving places in the world – Silicon Valley – with one of the most entrepreneurially challenged places in the world – the Navajo Nation.  Innovation exists in both places through a completely different lens,” says Heather Fleming, CEO of Catapult Design who is also originally from the Navajo Nation. “We’re eager to help connect and support folks with big ideas for their community.”

Acting Chairman Shigekawa said, “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support these exciting and diverse arts projects that will take place throughout the United States. Whether it is through a focus on education, engagement, or innovation, these projects all contribute to vibrant communities and memorable opportunities for the public to engage with the arts.”

For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov.

“Development is being disrupted,” says Raj Kumar, President of DevEx, a site devoted to helping the international development community deliver foreign aid more efficiently and effectively. Beyond the buzz generated by the “social entrepreneurship” and “impact investing” communities, I’ve seen a significant shift coming from traditional aid agencies in the past two years.

In 2010, USAID, the agency responsible for administering US foreign aid, launched the first-of-its-kind Development Innovation Ventures quarterly grant program. Its funding model is inspired by traditional venture capital and the focus is on scalable and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty alleviation. Similarly, in 2012 the World Bank hired a former Silicon Valley Google.org director to lead their new “Innovation Labs.” UNICEF and the Inter-American Development Bank have also launched their own “Innovation Labs” with similar goals of promoting open-dialogue, new methods, and cross-pollination of models that enable innovative activity.

So with all this talk about “innovation,” where are the designers, the technologists, and the entrepreneurs? The folks behind these initiatives are still folks with international and economic development backgrounds, economics and finance. If they’re serious about innovative approaches, it’s time creative problem solvers are added to the equation. Specifically, here are five strengths designers have that the development industry direly needs:

1. We are systems thinkers.

The problems that plague our world are complex, interwoven, and multifaceted. As designers, we solve problems through a combination of analytic and creative thinking. Many of the best designers I know are themselves multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary. In addition to a design degree, they’re also engineers or MBAs or economists. It takes both sides of the brain to generate solutions to social challenges.

2. Fresh eyes.

Einstein’s “We can’t solve the world’s problems by using the same type of thinking we used when we created them,” couldn’t ring more true. Many of the social issues we’re fighting today have existed for decades and consistently been addressing using old mechanisms—policy, aid, and philanthropy. We are long overdue for fresh thinking to old problems.

3. We have a prototyping culture.

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 the development sector fostered a culture of iteration and refining ideas before rushing to scale. Instead, I see a lot of money going towards untested ideas or worse yet, “solutions in search of a problem.”

4. We focus on people.

Many decisions made today that affect the poor are made by people completely removed from their issues. A designer’s viewpoint, driven by an understanding of the needs of people or end-users, is completely unique and lacking within the development sector. The key to better policy, better products, and better public services is rooted in understanding of the key players and what motivates them.

5. We create capacity.

We build things. We build products, services, websites—and by doing so we are intrinsically building the capacity of those who make, distribute, sell, or use what we create. On a fundamental level, giving people access to tools that enhance their capacity is what drives economic development. We play a central role in creating those tools that are useful, relevant, and meaningful.

$22.8 billion of our projected fiscal budget is earmarked for poverty-reduction activity in 2013. Traditionally, international development agencies use the amount of the money put towards poverty alleviation as a metric for efficacy. I’m hoping the next few years shift that metric towards understanding underlying problems and funding new solutions that address those problems. In order to do that, we need a new breed of development thinkers. The next generation of designers is inspired by careers that provide meaning and impact. Now is the perfect time for the development sector to start connecting the dots.

Photo by Living Goods

To appreciate companies like Living Goods, you have to transport yourself to a world without Walmart, UPS, or a local Walgreens pharmacy. Imagine if in order to purchase an item as simple as soap, you had to spend more money on transport than the cost of the product alone, not to mention the time spent away from productive work. As Chuck Slaughter points out in a recent article in The Economist,  “Distribution is often the missing link between design and impact.”

We couldn’t agree more.  One of the most common hurdles social entrepreneurs with exciting product ideas face is the lack of formal distribution channels in rural markets.  The prospect of creating your own channels, especially without a proven market, is daunting if not impossible.

Since starting in 2007, Living Goods has tackled this challenge in Uganda by training local sales agents to deliver life-changing products such as anti-malaria treatments, fortified foods, solar lamps, clean burning cook stoves, and sanitary pads.  The analogy they use is “Avon ladies”, where CEO Chuck Slaughter worked for a few years in order to understand the franchise model.

“Nothing about what we do is a handout,” says Chuck in a recent interview. “It’s really about empowerment. It’s about giving people the tools they need to improve on their own.”

With more than 1,000 profitable agents in Uganda, Living Goods will expand its service to Kenya this year.  The opportunity is huge.  And with a growing customer base, Living Goods is now in a position to build on their brand through their own product line.  In 2012 they began discussions with a few major packaged goods companies about manufacturing fortified foods for infants to combat malnutrition.  But big business moves slowly. And Living Goods is eager to address this critical human need and fill this gap in the market. Enter Catapult Design.

Catapult and Living Goods have teamed up to develop a new nutritional product for distribution in Uganda and Kenya. Leveraging expertise from entities such as GAIN and Technoserve, Catapult will work with the Ugandan sales agents, Living Goods customers, and East African manufacturers to prototype a packaged food at a price point appropriate for rural households.

The end goal?  Living Goods’ ultimate goal: to show that companies can deliver profits and positive human impact.  “A sustainable distribution platform that can meet the needs of the poor — that’s the holy grail,” say Chuck to The New York Times.

Stay tuned for progress on the partnership with Living Goods.

Photo Courtesy of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

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

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

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

Photo Courtesy of The Golden Hour Blog / Heart Attack Grill

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence tells us that,

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

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

Photo Courtesy of Confessions of a Shopaholic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hulu.com

Raise your hand if you’re familiar with the TV show MacGyver. The main character is truly a phenomenal human being. The plot of the 60-minute show is pretty consistent: He’s a secret agent whose specialty is finagling himself out of the most impossible situations. He had an uncanny ability of taking everyday objects from his immediate surroundings and transforming them to solve problems. He could turn a coffin into a get-away jet ski. He could disarm a nuclear warhead using only a safety pin. In one of my favorite episodes he builds a long-distance bomb using a rubber glove, a gas pipe, a light bulb, and shards from a toilet bowl. He’s a universal symbol for resourcefulness, ingenuity, and creativity.

If you deconstruct his actions in every episode, there are four factors that enable his success. I’ve called them the four enablers of creativity:

1. He is a do-er. It’s easy for teams to sidestep creativity when taking on a new endeavor by quibbling over objectives. Ambiguity is uncomfortable. MacGyver uses action to work through the ambiguity. He could sit and have a discussion about his options, or create a tradeoff matrix, but he chooses to learn by doing.

2. His resources are defined. One of the first things we do at the start of a design project is figure out what we know and what we don’t know. We make constraints. It’s a contrast to what we associate with creativity—which is blue-sky, free-thinking, no rules. But the lack of constraints, or lack of a creative process, is in fact a deterrent to producing innovative results.

3. His goal is clear and a deadline is imminent. For MacGyver, the bomb is always ticking down. He has a defined amount of time. Failure is not an option. It’s similar to that feeling you get the night before a deadline, when the creative adrenaline rushes in at 2 a.m. The pressure is necessary to drive action.

4. He doesn’t have to ask for permission. Imagine if MacGyver had to stop with 15 seconds left on the bomb ticker to get clearance to use a set of pliers. Creating an enabling environment—tools on hand, creative ‘places,’ ‘time’ for creativity, diversity in thought—is what helps him get the job done.

There are a number of websites dedicated to debunking this TV character’s ingenuity, but he’s not entirely fiction. There are real-life MacGyvers throughout the developing world exhibiting the same resourcefulness and creativity, as well as entrepreneurship. This past November I bought a Rwandan-made LED lamp (pictured above) for 800 RWF (about $1.25 USD). It’s simple—some re-purposed wood, spent batteries from a radio, an LED, and some wire. There’s not even an on/ off switch, just exposed wires to complete the circuit.

This isn’t a solution that will produce IP, and yet it’s a prominent source of lighting in rural Rwanda, which makes up nearly 95 percent of the country’s population. It’s a great example of how creative individuals within the local context have ‘MacGyvered’ solutions to their needs.

Between 70-95 percent of the creative economy’s economic output in Africa comes from SMEs, the informal sector. They are local craftsman, operating under the radar, using their creative wits to survive. They are among the most resilient people on the planet.

In my previous career I was a product design consultant in Silicon Valley—the land of abundance. I worked on new technologies for American households, all for companies who wanted to build reputations for innovation. The irony is that I see more innovation, and less volatility, coming from what we call “the developing world” or the informal sector, where innovation is born every day from extreme constraints and necessity. (Just like in MacGyver).

In these places, the landscape is littered with broad meaty challenges like the lack of energy access, cross-cultural barriers, and the digital divide. They’re addressing these challenges in new ways and new models that are poised to leapfrog anything we can imagine in Silicon Valley. And I’m not alone in my thinking. This week at the World Economic Forum 2013 Annual Meeting in Davos, Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola, shared that Coke’s innovation, which he referred to as “frugal innovation” is coming from emerging markets.

With that in mind, how might business leaders leverage the global creative economy to enable the MacGyvers working within their company and perhaps to support economic development in new economies? If you can’t answer the question, you might find yourself struggling to catch up sooner than you think.

We culled our twitter feed and picked out the best of the best from 2012.  Read on for links to new tools, resources, and thought pieces on design and social entrepreneurship.

DESIGN + SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP PIECES

1.  Fast Company asks: “Do Designers Exploit the Poor While Trying to Do Good?” http://bit.ly/zKuQzT 

2.  Niti Bahn identifies what is missing in designing for the next billion: http://bit.ly/KAAAh0  (tools, methods, frameworks)

3.  D-Rev’s Krista Donaldson discusses how to create products for people living on less than $4 per day:  http://bit.ly/OoWlSY

BONUS READ!  Harvard Business Review post on “The Smart Way to Make Profits While Serving the Poor” http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/the_smart_way_to_make_profits.html 

TOOLS

4.  For empathy, check out “Life Without Lights,” a documentary photography project on energy poverty - http://lifewithoutlights.com/ 

5.  For teaching, check out “Wicked Problems: problems worth solving,” a handbook for teaching, learning, & doing disruptive design work - http://bit.ly/zP1NpB

6.  For doing, check out this new site providing free recs for proven, low-cost household water treatment tech based on community need - http://communitychoicestool.org/ 

7.  For researching, check out this list of 46 smartphone apps for conducting ethnographic research - http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/apps.html

BONUS READ!  For empathy, check out GSMA’s new report that gives a glimpse into the lives of women living on less than $750/year - http://bit.ly/PMbil9

DEVELOPMENT THOUGHT PIECES

8.  Esther Duflo & Co reveal their (controversial) research on cookstoves: “Clean Cookstoves Must Be Rethought so They Actually Get Used in Developing World” http://on.natgeo.com/OFQVIw

9.  Stanford Social Innovation Review takes a cue from Esther Duflo and posts a piece on the tricky claims social enterprise and non-profits make when advocating for their work: http://bit.ly/PyNQsj

10.  One of our most retweeted posts comes from The Guardian.  Hugo Slim posts his thoughts on:  “The trouble with aid? Why helping people is always complicated” http://gu.com/p/3cef2 

We’re heading to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2013 in Davos, Switzerland this January 2013.  Not only that, we’re joining:

Jeanne Bourgault, President, Internews
Theaster Gates, Director, Arts and Public Life Initiative, The University of Chicago
Caroline Watson, Director and Founder, Hua Dan
Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art New York

for a session on Friday, January 25th exploring societal adversity and creativity.  We will also participate in a private session on the “Creative Economy” where we’ll talk about building social-benefit design programs.

Do we really need to say how psyched we are?  Expect a blog on a designers perspective of World Economic Forum and “improving the state of the world.”

Ever needed an obscure icon for your infographic? Need to make a universally understandable sign? Only have 20minutes to contextualize your product visualisation with a simple picture? Do you dig Pictionary? Or are you sick of battling with watermarks or creating amorphous stick figure monster icons?

Check out The Noun Project, an iconic phenomenon that is a platform for creating and sharing a global symbolic language. Catapult Design has used their resources on several occasions within our design work and we will go through two clear examples in a sec’, but first a bit of background…

The Noun Project hosts a library of  ever growing and iterated icons on their site that anybody can access, use, and contribute to. You still need to acknowledge their creators through an easy process of attribution (check their ‘usage‘ page for details) but their ethos is ‘open’ and they are all about capturing and continuing a symbolic conversation (pictorially of course). They also host Iconathons all over the place (mostly in the USA so far), group lock-in brainstorm icon hacking mash ups that are run by The Noun Project members to output a new set of icons around a pressing theme (they did some cool stuff after Sandy…check the iconathon.org site for details & upcoming events). I am itching to get to one, as much to meet the crowd as make some symbolic magic happen. The site (and the events) are meant for an audience well beyond designers. Ultimately The Noun Project is opening up icon creation, access, and use to a much greater audience and encouraging a flexible pictorial literacy.

Catapult Design first tapped The Noun Project resources when making a research tool for a project investigating water access and use in rural India. I needed to get an understanding of symbolic literacy in Rajasthan villages. I etched a series of icons onto interlocking wooden tiles (some of them gleaned from The Noun Project) and intentionally left a lot of tiles blank. In each village we visited in Rajasthan, I asked people to experiment with the tiles in 3 ways: first, I asked people to identify what the icons referred to; then I asked people to explain a story using the tiles; finally, I asked them to draw some tiles of their own. The intention was to experiment with ways of discovering symbolic literacy, as well as use those findings to inform any instructions or guides we would have to make relevant to our water project.

The next time around was much more topical. Literacy Bridge, an organization empowering children and adults with tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning, contacted us to help them solve an issue with their Talking Book interface. The Talking Book  is an audio computer that shares locally-relevant knowledge and improves literacy in areas with limited access to literature.  Literacy Bridge interacts with communities in Northern Ghana where there is no word for ‘arrow’ in their lexicon. They needed to be able to instruct the user to press a button relative to a spoken instruction. We experimented with a bunch of different icons and shapes, some of them from The Noun Project site, some of them created by us, and a few lifted from other sources. Thanks to the timezone difference between California and Ghana, the feedback loop was quick. While we slept Literacy Bridge would report back the responses they got from the field, we would adapt the icons according to their suggestions, and the next day they would be tested again. We worked our way through icons that had issues working with the spoken instructions of the device, icons that implied too much of a specific task (‘fish’ = food), that had too much potential religious connotation (‘plus’ = cross), or that even had too much local political association (‘umbrella’ &  ‘rooster’ are local Ghanaian political party symbols). We are continuing to help Literacy Bridge achieve an appropriate interface through their piloting stage (they are testing Talking Books in the thousands!).

image courtesy of Literacy Bridge

We plan to continue developing new research games and other design resources, and to continue using The Noun Project to help us when we need the right icon. It’s an excellent resource even if I still cant find an icon for ‘design’ up there (nor an icon for ‘icon’) but I’m hitting my sketchpad to work on it.  I’m also gonna get in touch with The Noun Project and suggest an iconathon themed around rural life (on all continents)….oh and maybe I can put in a festive wish for a ‘silhouette bank’ as well….?

Thanks Noun Project! Keep up the good work!  We will see you at the next Iconathon!

——————–

And here is thanks and attribution to all of The Noun Project icon creators that unknowingly helped us out!

Pavel Pavlov: Thumbs Up/Approve
Stephen James Kennedy: Auto Rickshaw
Roger Cook & Don Shanosky: Baby,  Train, Person , Ground Transport
Nick Levesque: Cooking Pan
Connor Cesa: Water Drop
Mike Endale: Hut, Community
Udaya Kumar:  Rupee
Adrijan Karavdic: Elephant
Gibran Bisio: Paint Can
Edward Boatman, Saul Tannenbaum, Stephen Kennedy, Nikki Snow & Brooke Hamilton: Childrens Library
Valentina Piccione: Tree
Tak Imoto: Leaves
Michal Stassel: Axe
Jeremy Linden: Knifes
Kyle Scott, Roman J. Sokolov: Glasses

Listed as Unknown on NP: Maize,  Apples, Camel, Bird, Pencil, Umbrella, Flip-Flops, Bell, Speakers, Fuel Pump, Fish, Campfire, Tap, Battery, Bicycle, Drinking Water, Hammer, Spanner/Wrench, Flame.

Last week we kicked off our second program with The Ihangane Project exploring the multifaceted world of access to clean water for a small village two-hours outside of Kigali.  The program took us back to Rwanda where team members Karin Carter and Heather Fleming trekked through the hilly, lush terrain in the pouring rain to spend some time in the homes of families living on as little as $2-$3 per day.  Rwanda’s rural poor, 96% of the country’s population, has access to water through government issued water pumps spotted throughout the countryside, but the cleanliness of the water is a separate issue.

Working through the Ihangane Project’s local staff and the community health clinic, we ran individual interviews, focus groups, and conducted home visits with both community members and community health workers.  Our goal? To build our understanding of the local perspective of “clean” versus “safe” water, how it fits into their lives, and to facilitate discussion on existing market-based and community-driven solutions for clean water in Rwanda.  Check out the first images from the program photo diary here.

Our research also included interviews with a range of organizations supplying clean water systems in Rwanda – WaterAid, Water for People, Manna Energy, The Access Project. – and we witnessed a range of differing solutions and strategies as a result.  Our team will spend the next few weeks synthesizing and summarizing key findings from our research.  Stay tuned for the wrap-up and review of our methodology in the coming weeks!

Image: ISTOCKPHOTO/MATTJEACOCK

As Catapult becomes more established I find us giving more and more talks to larger and larger groups in which we emphasize the value of the skills and methods designers bring to the problems they tackle. And we’re not alone; the design community at large daily espouses such important “methods” as building empathy, listening, and observation. We all talk about identifying values, changing behaviors, and enabling potential. This is all really wonderful stuff and I couldn’t hide my enthusiasm in speaking about it if I tried. In fact, as an engineer with little formal design training, I regularly find myself thinking: these “design skills” we keep talking about could certainly be useful in the rest of my life! Further, if I’m not practicing this in my daily life, how am I supposed to be applying it to my work as an engineer and designer? Even more, how exactly am I supposed to learn these skills?

For example, building empathy for end-users is often touted as critical to socially-conscious design; but how do I learn to build empathy? Do I practice building empathy only for the end-users of the products I create while wearing my designer’s hat? Or do I bring the practice of empathy into my regular interactions with my coworkers, my friends, my family, strangers, and myself? It seems to me that building empathy in the other areas of my life would serve me just as well as it will as an engineer. And if I can learn to be more empathic in my personal interactions, that surely must make my efforts to build empathy for our end-users all that much more effective. My personal life, therefore, can be a training ground and a test bed for the skills I use as an engineer and designer.

Another critical skill that we frequently discuss is identifying the values of your end-users – this, ultimately, is how you discover what you should design. However, anthropologists have highlighted the importance of knowing your own values before you try and interpret those of others. This leads me to ask, am I able to observe myself, my actions and thoughts, and to identify my values? How might I learn to do that and why would it be helpful? Could introspection be an important design skill? I suspect that having a clear understanding of my own values, and resolving contradictions that appear, will not only improve the clarity of my observations but also bring integrity to my life and the products I create.

That brings me to changing behavior. As social-impact designers we talk continuously about how to design our products such that they encourage our end-users to change their behaviors in beneficial ways. But how do I learn to change my own habitual behaviors? Could observing the challenges I face in changing my behavior enhance my empathy when I attempt to ask others to change theirs? Knowing what change I am asking of from others, and how hard it will be for them to accept it, will most likely encourage some modesty in my designs, some understanding in my approach, and increase the likelihood that they are appreciated and used.

As Paolo Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the New York Museum of Modern art tells us, “one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change.”

One of the key concepts underpinning Catapult’s philosophy is that technology can enable human potential. We also speak regularly about the important design skill of listening. I propose that listening to others, our friends, coworkers and family, as well as our end-users, can, in and of itself, enable potential and empower. And if I can learn to listen to people in difficult personal times, imagine how well honed my skills will be when I need to listen to delicate conversations across languages and cultures.

The question I am asking, and which I encourage other engineering and design practitioners to ask, is: how can I, in my daily life, actively cultivate the skills I need as an engineer or designer? And if I recognize how important these skills are to my job as a designer can I also see how valuable they will be to my job as a human? It is by asking these questions that we can ensure that the ethics that guide our design work – creating things that affect the lives of other people – also guide our lives, our decisions, and the actions of the organizations we work for.