Yesterday, via Twitter, I came across this interview on Engadget where Nokia’s new head of Design talked to journalists about the mobile company’s future plans. Regular readers know I have not only tracked Nokia since 2006 but held it in high esteem as a company that has, until now, done well in emerging markets. This was the company that exemplified the core values of the emerging market customer – that demanding one at the ‘base of the pyramid’ – simple, easy, endurance, survival and commitment.  You could drop one of their phones in the swimming pool and it continued to work (as a flooring specialist from a township in South Africa once told us as he held his Nokia close, joy lighting up his face) or run a truck over it (as Indian TV commercials inspired many to do as a test of “proof of performance”).  This was a company that believed implicitly in sustainable solutions and upheld the eco-design principles so espoused in Northern Europe.

When did you wander off your path and fall into the abyss? Wither your core values that made you who you are and touched the hearts and changed the lives of billions of people?

Here’s the snippet that wrung my heart, as I mourned the demise of a formerly inspirational giant:

We had to also poke and prod on a couple of pet peeves of our own, starting with the integrated battery in the N8. If you’re going to take cues from the iPhone, that’s really not the one we’d advocate following, but Marko was categorical that the overall design concept took precedence in that case. He seemed to imply that the N8 just wouldn’t have been as good, structurally and aesthetically, if it had to have a door for battery access.

Cliches spring immediately to mind – “style over substance” was never a glorified part of the engineering culture… so, it makes me wonder, why not simply put the gun in your mouth as you pull the trigger? It will hurt less that way.

The challenge to address the issues faced by the significant proportion of the world’s population who live on less than £ 1 a day has been taken up eagerly by many in the global design industry. The INDEX awards regularly nominate some of the best in the world, and others are frequently seen in the news. Recently the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in the USA held an exhibition of products developed particularly for the developing world on themes such as health, potable water and renewable and affordable energy sources.

The designers are primarily from leading universities, well known design consultancies or non profit organizations based in the developed world. Few have spent significant time in the environment or conditions under which their designs will be used or actually collaborated on the products with the people for whom they are meant. How do these solutions fare when held up against the design criteria that they be affordable, durable and sustainable? Are they easy to repair and maintain? Does the investment being made make sense in context of the customer’s daily life?

The Mightylite is a longlife solar powered LED light developed for the bottom of the pyramid and first launched in India for the equivalent of £ 25 – that is almost a month’s wages for a populace that earns a meager sum daily and must first spend it on necessities such as salt, rice and cooking oil. It is currently being redesigned to be more affordable. The same goes for the Lifestraw, an ingenious device that provides instant potable water in even the most unhygienic of conditions. It too is considered beyond the reach of the majority for whom it is meant. And the $100 Laptop is currently hovering at $200, however well designed, innovative and advanced it may be.

Price is not the only factor, albeit the most significant one, when looking at the many ways these well-meant solutions have fallen short of the mark. In a recent critique of the Cooper Hewitt’s “Design for the other 90%” exhibition, David Stairs highlighted three common errors he felt that designers made when working on such solutions – first, they were working from remote experience rather than in the field, second, they tended to believe that technology would always have an answer, and finally, they fell prey to gargantuan thinking i.e. instead of addressing the water problems for a village or region or even a country, the current thinking tended towards “erasing worldwide poverty”, “housing 3 billion people” etc.

We believe that the simplest and most effective way to create real solutions that can make a real difference to everyday people’s lives would be to promote local designers and innovators, enabling them to design and build local solutions that fit their local needs. Take Africa, for example, where there is a dearth of design schools across the continent and few formally trained designers, even a cursory observation of the streets of any large city or a village would show numerous makeshift solutions cobbled together with recycled materials or junk. Innovation and ingenuity exists – it is simply not as polished or sophisticated as our aesthetically trained eyes are accustomed to and hence overlooked or considered primitive.

But these solutions – the jugaad of India’s villages where diesel generators built to pump water form the basis of handcrafted vehicles that take vegetables to market or the sheer persistence of the now famous Nigerian who built a working helicopter from scrap – work. And they work within the constraints and conditions of the environment in which they must operate. Furthermore, they are cheap to build and maintain. When there are no formally designed and mass manufactured artifacts to fill the gap between necessity and requirement, one can be conceived of and created by hand in order to meet the need. There’s a farmer in India who welded his handheld pesticide sprayer to a pole fixed to his motorcycle for fields that are too small for a tractor but too large to walk through carrying the heavy load. Or the young man in Africa who designed and built his own windmill, to be feted at the TED conference, without any engineering or design education.

So why do we still believe that the solutions designed in airconditioned offices in New York or London will better serve the needs of the bottom of the pyramid? And why are they developed in isolation? And why not share your expertise when on that field trip to understand the needs of the local populace? The challenge is to design the programs that can transfer the appropriate skills required to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the end products developed but also suit the learning ability, literacy levels and existing capabilities of the student.

An example that has been successful has been Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College in the northwestern Indian desert state of Rajasthan. There, illiterate village women are proud graduates of the ‘barefoot solar engineering’ program that teaches how to build, install and maintain solar powered cookers and panels in their villages. This scheme has the manifold benefits of providing a sustainable income source for these women, a sustainable solution that replaces the use of firewood stoves while minimizing exposure to smoke and soot, improving their overall health as well.

Workshops to transfer skills to locals – such as the inventors and innovators covered in Afrigadget’s website of ingenious contraptions that recycle, reuse and repurpose materials – are one way that designers can make a real difference in the lives of those they seek to serve. The other would be consider the users as cocreators, meaning that rather than bringing in an entirely new and manufactured solution which may not always be required, the design team observe in what ways the challenge or gap is being addressed at present and consider it a working prototype for a potential solution or product. The designers then look at what value they can bring to improve on it or to make it reproducible affordably and sustainably, working with the local designer or inventor to arrive at a final product that actually meets the need and can be used by many.

The biggest lack is information – without access to knowledge of what has been done, how many different villages attempt to solve the same problems of potable water or energy sources by continuously reinventing the wheel in so many different ways? What if we could share this information easily and in a manner accessible by all – if a cost effective rainwater harvesting solution has been designed using recycled materials and uses no power at all and is easy to build and maintain – can that not be shared so that the next homegrown innovator can build one for his own village instead of starting from scratch? This type of information share is the simplest thing that we take for granted in our broadband world where Google provides you with an answer at the touch of your fingertips.

Sam Ladner, PhD writes extensively on design research. Her latest post Designing a design-thinking organization is a well-written, cohesive and insightful take on the challenge of imbuing traditional organizations with the free-flowing interdisciplinary cross-pollination that effective design thinking requires by virtue of its nature.  Here’s the snippet on what inspired her to write this post:

Roger (Martin of Rotman School of Business) explained that some organizations are better able to embrace “design thinking,” which he defines as the ability to think both analytically and intuitively. He pointed out in his presentation and in his book that 20th century corporations have perfected the analytical frame of mind, but fail continuously to embrace the abductive leaps of logic that innovation requires.

Audience members repeatedly asked how to equip their organizations to embrace design thinking. Roger advised designers to “empathize” with their analytical peers, and business managers to “empathize” with their intuitive colleagues.[...] Roger’s advice fell short because he could not explain the social dynamics of organizational change. Just like Booger, he simply described; he failed to explain.

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The Economist ran a special report on innovation on emerging markets in their April 15th 2010 issue. Covering a variety of topics from “breaking all the rules” to “business models in the emerging world“, its a worthwhile overview of some aspects that may influence our emerging future strategies.  Earlier this year, design magazine and resource Core77 published 5 case studies on disruptive innovations from emerging markets – products or platforms that begin by questioning our conventional wisdom for design and development.

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Chris Pacione discusses what does it mean to be design literate in the latest issue of Interactions magazine. After covering the recent visibility of design – both in the mainstream media as well as its embrace by numerous organizations, he gets down to the brasstacks of making a case for design literacy for everyone, not just those formally trained in one of the recognized fields of design. A short excerpt:

Similarly, I think we can use this same line of reasoning to clarify what is meant by being design literate, as opposed to being an expert in design or a design professional. We are talking about basic skills in inquiry, evaluation, ideation, sketching, and prototyping. We are not talking about mastery of more specialized forms of knowledge that a graphic or industrial designer might employ, such as typography, color theory, or CAD, but basic skills that are well within the full range of everyone’s cognitive and kinesthetic capabilities and serve our everyday needs.

Another way to approach what it means to be design literate is to ask the question in a slightly different way. Something like this: If an individual, team or organization is good at design, what, exactly, are they good at? To date, Figure 1 is the best way that my colleagues and I have come up with to answer this question. It is our attempt to define the praxis of design thinking. We use it to identify what competencies we aim to develop in people and what methods we should teach in order to foster these competencies. It bears resemblance to other design-method taxonomies for sure. And those of you who are familiar with systems thinking, pattern language, and ethnography will be the first to acknowledge that many of the methods outlined have been present in the fields of system engineering, the applied arts, and anthropology for years.

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Finally, for today, I’d like to leave you with an extract from Umair Haque’s HBR blogpost,  The Wisdom Manifesto – words which we believe have much meaning to all of us here at the factory:

The scarcest, rarest, and most valuable resource in the world today is wisdom.  The countries, companies, and people that possess it will prosper.  In many ways, wisdom is the opposite  of strategy — and today, it is strategy, bought by the dozen from legions of be-suited, back-slapping consultants, that is cheap, abundant, and worth little.
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Strategy is the application of force. Wisdom is the application of love.  Strategy suppresses, but Wisdom evokes.  Its test is the ability to spark new ideas, concepts, and solutions.  That is how to be valued by people, communities, and society…

Until next week, when we return with another edition of Thursday’s thoughts…

If necessity is the mother of invention, is prosperity the father of consumption?

Industrial design as a profession emerged from the roots of the first Industrial Revolution, and flowered into full force during the post war (WWII) boom of consumption and productivity in the 50′s and 60′s – thus it has always had its foundations in highly industrialized nations, where the infrastructure of modern life such as electricity, water, housing etc was fully established.

Kerosene lamp in Rajasthan, India January 2009

But the makeshift solutions in the liminal space where poverty meets high technology – which may seem very primitive, raw and crude to our eyes, accustomed as they are to gleaming automobiles,  iPods and shiny shops full of premium consumer goods – have their own criteria for existence. They could be said to be ‘design for survival’ – one comes up with solutions for problems with only the materials at hand when there are no resources available to get the best that may be available in markets elsewhere.  In fact, in a recent interview,  Professor Anil K. Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, stated:

When you combine a scarcity of resources with an abundance of knowledge, sustainable solutions are a common result. Those at the grassroots inherently look for ways to co-opt nature and conserve energy. Our Shodh Yatra explorations demonstrate that rural innovations tend toward sustainable solutions with frugality, durability and multi-functionality being part of the mix. Re-purposed technology, such as bicycles, feature often in transformed roles to meet a variety of needs. From agricultural innovations to the gas-powered iron or pressure-cooker-driven coffee maker, we find that solutions developed by producers who are also users reflect the concerns of both the production and consumption environments.

Taken in this context, I would like the posit the following criteria,  not just for the low income or developing world markets,  also as a worthwhile lens through which to look at an emerging form of design in general.  Meaning, can these constraints be considered a “given” or  “first principles” for future product development?

1. Durable and sustainable
2. Reusable and recyclable
3. Affordable and appropriate

Your thoughts?