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.

How can we use design to positively impact society?

That’s the question we’ll answer at Catapult Labs this Saturday, May 19th in San Francisco.  Over the years we’ve assembled a compelling network of designers, technologists, and entrepreneurs using design tools and methods to drive positive social change.  We’ve selected NINE of them to lead 90-minute hands-on labs covering topics such as:

• Game mechanics and behavioral change
• Creating and sustaining a movement
• Integrating impact evaluation into the design process
• Visualizing data to communicate your message

Our esteemed Lab Leaders are joining us from Google, Autodesk, Stamen Design, See Change, MooreDesign, Gargani + Co., and Designers Accord and includes:

• Valerie Casey, founder of the Designers Accord movement and TIME Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment”
• Nadya Direkova, Senior UX Designer at Google and prominent speaker on game mechanics for web applications
• Dawn Danby, Senior Sustainable Design Program Manager at Autodesk and one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”

In addition to learning, Catapult Labs will allow you to engage with other professionals and students interested in social impact as well as three amazing social ventures in search of design assistance who will be pitching the audience on their missions.

We have only 125 seats at Catapult Labs — buy your ticket today and reserve your spot!

Thank You to our event sponsors:
Autodesk, California College of the Arts, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Bay Area Green Printing, Speck Design, and TechShop

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.

In the past two years we’ve worked with some amazing organizations worldwide — Villgro Innovations, The Unreasonable Institute, StepOne Ventures, Nuru International, Peace Corps, and more — to develop training and learning material centered around design and how it impacts development.

Based on the success of these sessions, we’re announcing a new line up of Learning Labs for 2012 that tackle common challenges organizations face in each phase of development.  We’ve grouped Labs into the Learn/Explore, Play/Experiment, Implement/Evolve phases and incorporated hands-on activity that support both product and service design methodology.  Each Lab runs 90-min in length and is facilitated by a design team member.

We looked to twitter, Open Studios, and individual emails to single out topics that are relevant to designers interested in social impact as well as companies implementing designed solutions in marginalized communities.

‘Empathy + Immersion’ allows you to spend 60-min in the shoes of another…

‘Participatory Design Intro’  showcases successful case studies in participatory design around the world…

‘Designing a Customer Experience’ is an exercise in viewing your business from the viewpoint of new customers…

For a full description of each lab, download our Learning Lab Guide (415kb, PDF).

Ready to try a Lab?  Visit our Learning Labs page and submit a request.  We look forward to hearing from you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaningful:

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

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

Accessible:

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

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

Desirable:

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

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

Effective:

The product does what it was intended to do.

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

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

We’re excited to announce that Catapult’s design team will assist INOTEK as they initially select target communities for the pilot program and issue a “call for challenges” to local organizations and individuals in order to find unique clean energy opportunities. Catapult will then work with partners on-the-ground to conduct field research exploring user needs and opportunities and to define and generate potential solutions. Selected concepts will be prototyped with market partners with at least two designs further refined into viable market solutions.

“We are going into the pilot completely technology agnostic and allowing the development process to focus on the needs of the people who will use the final solutions. That’s the benefit of a multi-partner project with increased capacity,“ says Heather Fleming, CEO of Catapult Design.

Catapult will provide counsel to the project partners throughout the 2012-13 pilot and incorporate design methodology and consideration into the program.

Click here to download the official press release. [PDF]

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