Farewell IDDS

Although on July 7th I left Arusha and the friends I made at the International Development Design Summit (IDDS), I still look forward to remaining an active member of the International Development Innovation Network (IDIN). This network of innovators around the world makes IDDS a very small part of a larger community of 300 entrepreneurial leaders. I feel so fortunate to have access to mentorship, venture support, and grants as a member of IDIN. Thank you for following my adventure in Tanzania. Feel free to listen to my lessons learn from participating in the International Development Design Summit.

If you are interested in continuing this project, applying to an IDDS, or engaging with the IDIN, please contact me at dhines2 at babson.edu.

A photo taken of the two teams working in Orkilili, Education and Livestock Fodder Production, after our final community presentation.

A photo of the Education and Livestock Fodder Production teams alongside the community leaders we invited back to our Arusha campus. Those leaders were the Ward Executive, a Village Chairman, a Candidate for a Bachelors in Livestock Science, a secondary school Principal, and the Chairwoman/Founder of the Orkilili Womens' Finance Group.

Our last moments together. I was one of two participants selected to speak on behalf of the participant experience at the closing ceremony. I shared some insights into what I thought might be 'side effects' of post-IDDS life.

Continuity Boot Camp & Regional Agricultural Fair

The last days of the International Development Design Summit were spent alongside five community members of Orkilili who we invited back to our campus in Arusha. Each community member expressed interest in piloting the hay baler.

We develop a plan for piloting the hay baler.

We make last-minute adjustments to our final prototype.

Our smiling Mtendagi and one of a well-bound bale of hay.

When asked to generate a representation of 'resources we had' and 'resources we needed,' I was overwhelmed by all the resources I would have if I decided to create a venture after the summit based on the hay baler.

The Livestock Fodder Production Team demonstrates the hand baler to the director of the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN), an initiative of USAID.

It was inspiring to see so many ideas and concepts related to fodder production at the regional agricultural fair. This design is a drying-fence for cut grass.

This may be the most sophisticated fodder storage system we saw in Tanzania. Storage unites need to cover the fodder from the top and allow ventilation on the bottom.

It was incredible to see designs we had seen online come to life at the agricultural fair. This is a box baler, an alternative design for hay baling. The user simply compresses cut grass a four-sided box to form a bale.

 This machine served the same purpose as one prototype which we chose not to pursue. It chops the maze stems into small pieces. Without such a processor, maize stems go uneaten by livestock. It was fascinating to see such an industrial machine after our experience in rural areas. It cost approximately $2,000 whereas our prototype cost less than $20.

This was our nonindustrial prototype made from a motorcycle wheel and scrap metal.

Relative Innovation

From our perspective, our innovation-impact matrix was mediocre. None of our ideas after gathering information and synthesis were especially new.

Throughout the process of developing a product, my team questioned our ideas fundamentally. Through the innovation-impact matrix we saw that our ideas were not particularly new. We did not think a hay baler in itself was not 'innovative.' According to us, a hay baler was not new or interesting. What was even more frustrating: good designs were readily available on the internet. How could we 'develop' something that already existed in other parts of the world?

My team's final prototype: a simple hay baler.

We were frustrated that our synthesis process did not lead to other more 'interesting' and 'innovative' ideas. However, all of these observations were from our perspective as designers. During one team meeting, our design facilitator stated the obvious but poignant statement: what is innovative to you is not necessarily innovative to the community. Our values as participants in the International Development Design Summit led us to want to develop something new. However, that was not necessarily what the community of Orkilili needed.

The community was aware of advanced mechanized grass cutters and hay balers they had seen in nearby cities and markets. However, the community needed a simple technology that appropriately suited their scale.

In retrospect, it seems a lot of the innovation in the developing world does not need to be around the product. Products exist. The real innovation is around the dissemination and delivery of appropriate technologies. Why is Coca Cola the most accessible and ubiquitous product around the world, yet simple agricultural machines are scarce? The problems surrounding affordability and accessibility rely on strong implementation and business leadership.

Interdisciplinary Design Challenges

In the final days of IDDS as my team built our final prototype to present at the regional agricultural fair, my team experienced conflict during a meeting which I attribute to our different disciplines. 

As we shared two strengths and two weaknesses for one another, the electrical engineer made comments directed at the industrial designers. The electrical engineer said, "You have 20 designs. You keep things open. You don't close things, and we don't come to a decision." He stated that he did not think some design tools were helping us reach a final prototype. For instance, he felt an hour of sketch modeling with foam and glue the previous day was a waste of time. In reference to the industrial designer's sketching, he commented "because you show so many options we cannot move forward."

As another way to stimulate our brains before my team converged on a final prototype, we made low-fidelity sketch models supplies supplies such as band-aids, paperclips, and wooden dowels.

The industrial designers shared in response on sketch modeling, "When developing a product, you can't go straight to a product. It's about the small steps." About her sketches the industrial designer shared, "For me sketching is a way to get to a solution. Maybe I should not show you my process because you think these are different designs." "Although I am the only designer, it is not my responsibility [to design the entire product]. I haven't seen one sketch of how to improve [our hay baler from anyone else]," she added.

I felt in awe that I was able to witness such a rich debate so rooted in different disciplinary customs. From this conversation, I took away that industrial designers, engineers, and business people are accustomed to contributing to teams in different ways. On my team, the industrial designer may not have felt that other members were committed to finding a solution because they were not sketching.

Different expectations on contributions: 

designer: sketches, concepts (object)

engineer: functional representations, technical drawings (object)

business: slide decks, ideas, market research, networking (opportunity)

This debate also gave me insight into how different disciplines are accustomed to working. From the conversation, it seemed that industrial designers are more comfortable converging (deciding on a concept or prototype design) and diverging (sketching all the different possible designs) simultaneously. It may have felt unnatural or unnecessary to the engineer.

When I thought about how unnatural sketching feels to me, I remembered something Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO once said. In his book Change by Design Brown writes, “[Interdisciplinary collaboration] requires ... individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it.” Interdisciplinary product development is hard. Especially for novice interdisciplinary collaborators, it requires individuals to do things so fundamental to their discipline (such as making a contribution) in fundamentally different ways.

Adapting Design Practices to non-North American Cultures

At many points during the summit, certain design methods which worked when I was designing for farmers in New England did not fit the context of tribal Tanzania.

For instance, it was difficult for my team to gather information in Orkilili. Community members were accustomed to convening large meetings. Men sat in a large circle. Women sat outside the circle and listened. In such settings, my team could only ask questions to the men. However, designers know that only so much insight can be gained from asking questions. Observing users in their environment in addition to trying what users do are equally important. Observing, asking, and trying enable designers to gain deep insight into lives and build empathy.

At our first community meeting, we succeeded in gathering information by communicating through images. The industrial designer on my team illustrated the translated responses of community members on topics such as seasons, breeds, and livestock fodder. The drawings seemed to build trust and understanding despite the language barrier.

Our presentation to the community at the end of community visit. We squatted during the community presentation to give community members a greater sense of self-determination and responsibility to provide feedback.

For our community presentation at the end of the first community visit, my team identified strategies to gather feedback effectively in a large community meeting. My team planned to give each attendee a colorful sticker which he and she would use to vote on the need they felt was important. As my team was assigned to work on livestock fodder production, we wanted community members to vote for three areas of opportunity: fodder storage (preserving what was already there), fodder processing (increasing what was available), and fodder growing (more of a long-term educational project).

As we confidently explained our innovative community strategy, one design facilitator told us that dot voting would not be an appropriate method to engage the community members. Dot voting might disrespect the hierarchy of local leadership. We needed to respect the place of the Mtendagi, or Ward Executive. Despite our enthusiasm for engaging women and men simultaneously, we ended up following a less exciting communication strategy. We intentionally sat during our community presentation to lend power to the community members while sharing our findings with the community using a translated problem-framing tree poster.

The second instance of overcoming intercultural dynamics was during our home stay in the community. As 'guests' of the community it may have been more difficult for the community members to criticize the objects that we created. We may have had a different experience soliciting feedback on prototypes if we had not lived with the Mollel family in Orkilili.

The father of our host family (in bright blue on the left) informally gave us overwhelming positive feedback on our first prototype.

Designing for Wicked Problems

During my team's first community visit to Orkilili, we took every measure to soak up information about the community. Although our primary objective was to gather information about livestock fodder practices, we remained aware of other community events and issues. It was a challenge for my team to meet with farmers individually as community meetings were such an integral part of the culture, however, we did collect a sufficient amount of information. My team was able to generate a problem framing tree.

Just an aside: a problem framing tree is a tool used in design practice to break up large, ambiguous problems into smaller ones which can be chosen and designed for. For instance, my team's 'trunk' was "increase availability of livestock fodder for Maasai." We chose to pursue the branch of "ensure adequate supply of livestock fodder" over branches such as "improve breed selection, or "improving farming education."

As we ideated on the community's major challenges, we saw a larger macro-structure taking shape on the framing tree. Many of our ideas addressed long-term challenges such as education and breed selection and access to quality seed. Nevertheless, we were able to identify other shorter term challenges. However, when we matched our brainstorming ideas with the problem framing statement we realized that our ideas paled in comparison to the large scale challenges. We questioned: how can we design a product for such a specific issue as feeding cattle when such larger issues like how to farm exist?

In 1972 Hoerst Rittel first used the term "wicked" to describe the nature of design problems. Rittel argued that design problems are characterized by high uncertainty. In other words, linear obvious solutions found from analytical approaches are unlikely to successfully resolve design problems such as the one my team and I faced. We faced a wicked problem.

As my team and I argued and discussed our concept conundrum, a quote from a TED Talk popped into my mind. Sami Nerenberg the founder of Design For America posed the poignant question in her TED talk, "What is the smallest change you can make that would have the greatest impact?" At that moment, I lept into the discussion and shared my break through.

It was perfectly acceptable for the team to develop a prototype that only partially addressed the large and unwieldy issue of livestock fodder and prosperity. How could any one product possibly solve all the community's problems?

Following that conversation, my team successfully narrowed our prototypes down. We chose to move forward with a hay baler, a maize stock chopper, and a urea fermentation process.

Cape Town: Planting Days & Wrapping Up

As it is my final week in Cape Town, my time with Heart Capital is coming to a close this Friday...but first an update of the last few weeks.

Cape Town at Night From Lion's Head Full Moon Hike

We finally had the planting day for one of the Techno Park companies as well as some other planting purchases that were made. This was combined with a day where about 20-30 University of Stellenbosch students came to help build, plant, and dig at our Kayamandi site.

Volunteers, Interns, and the Sandbag Boys in Kayamandi

Techno Park Company, CompuScan, Planting Spekboom in Kayamandi

CompuScan and Me Planting

 We ended up planting about 30 Spekboom trees to create a sort of garden perimeter in the middle of the sites. In the middle is a huge tree that was left in the middle and will look really great when it is summer here and the plants start blooming.

There has also been an increase in sales from the Techno Park promotional campaign which is great. We've sold about 75 trees at this point and its fantastic to see this business come into a revenue earning state.

Last week was focused on building and creation of the other space we have in the Kayamandi area known as the corridor. This consisted of one day of me and another girl cleaning out a building and then one day painting the space with the help of other inters - still a lot of work left but a really good start!

Before

Before

After

After

 Another highlight of the last few weeks was getting to spend some time working with a great businessman in Kayamandi, Songo. I had met him once before last year during my trip to Stellenbosch where he graciouslly gave a presentation about his work to our group. He created a BMX park / running area for the kids of the township. There they have a facility to do their homework then the chance to ride the bikes, learn tricks, participate in competitions, and even competitions in other cities and countries. Our Food Pods site is directly above (on a hill) the BMX park and we were building an access road between his park and our site.

http://www.songo.info/

Songo and I

Kids Riding at the BMX Park

As a second highlight from Friday - a team of interns and I got the chance to see a traditional Xhosa show with singing, dancing, and dinner called Amazink in Kayamandi later that night. It was an amazing show and to top it off one of our Food Pods growers is the manager and another the chef for the show. :)

Amazink Show in Kayamandi

The next week will be focused on collecting some of the plants and the payments from the Techno Park companies. I will also be mentoring the two new interns who will be taking over Wonder Plant once I leave so it will be a lot of transitioning, moving around final documents, and wrapping up the work that I have done here.

Ahmedabad, India: Week Four

This past week was filled with a lot of work and a lot of fun. At the beginning of the week our team had two possible approaches to the project, but by the time Wednesday came around we had consulted with multiple faculty members and decided to pursue a path that involved heavy programming. Once this decision was made it was time to just sit down and crank away at a computer. This is the time when I was thankful for the people on stackoverflow.com who had experienced all of the debugging issues that I faced and posted fixes for them.

This week Professor Rakesh Pandey was also visiting Ahmedabad University. He is the link between Ahmedabad University, Olin College and the ADE (affordable design and entrepreneurship) program. It was good to give him an update on the work that I have been conducting here at the Institute of Life Sciences and get his input in regards to how to approach challenges that we were facing. Thanks to him, I also got the opportunity to meet with previous ADE students from Ahmedabad University and get insights into their experiences. It was great seeing the different viewpoints and hearing about their experiences. These discussions also opened my eyes in regards to the Indian education system and how different the mentality is here compared to the US. Professor Pandey also spoke to students at a variety of the Institutes under the Ahmedabad University umbrella. The talk was focused around his life experiences, innovation, and ADE. One of the most inspiring thing that he said was that there is one thing that is common between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, and that is 24 hours in a day. This really emphasized the importance of time management and the fact that some people can complete 2 years worth of work in one year, while others can spend 40 years doing just one year of work.

This past week we also explored one of the larger developmental projects in the Ahmedabad area, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. The Sabarmati River, which divides the city of Ahmedabad in half, is now being developed into a 10 km walk way, which at completion of the project will also house gardens, amusement parks, golf courses, and even water parks.

The Sabarmati River Front

Enjoying the rains with my good friend Tilak. 

Visiting a local art gallery located near ILS. 

500 year old architecture at the Adalaj stepwell. 

Cape Town: Campaigning

So over the course of the last week the big focus for me has been to create and implement a campaign to promote the Spekboom plant that I have been working on in conjunction with a fundraising campaign in a specific office park found in Stellenbosch. The goal has been to raise funds that would sponsor all ventures that Heart Capital has going on. With that I had to put together the product design and the plants that we have been giving away. One other intern and I have been delivering the plants as guerilla marketing to initiate first contact as well as follow ups with certain companies in the office park. Basically showing up, telling them about Heart Capital, leaving these plants with promotional material, saying we will follow up to set a meeting with someone in charge, and hopefully also initiating sales for the plants. In two weeks time we will be returning to collect the plants but possibly just collecting money for the sale of the plant that they will want to keep and possibly buy more of.

The other main thing is that last Friday, once again, it was down pouring so the planting event has been rescheduled for this week and will not have to be pushed back again. We have gotten a few sales between individual ones and company planting ones so the project is going very positively. Other than that I have also started working on creating a functional finance layout of orders, invoices, order forms, and creating income statements and such as the business is launching off with sales. It has been a very hectic time of putting things together and making deliverables but so far I am very happy with the way that sales, marketing, finance, etc. have been going.

On a funner note - I also had the opportunity to go bungee jumping at the highest site in the world.

Ahmedabad, India: Week Three

The main course of action this past week was prototyping. Rajan, a third year engineering student from IET who joined me on a project last week, took me to the closest electronic hardware store. Shantinath Electronic Parts is the go-to for all local engineering student, for it is one of the only places that sells electronic components. After making our requests for some ICs (integrated circuits), the attendant pulled out a large metal container which was filled with hand labeled ziploc bags, each with its own variety of IC. He quickly sorted through the mess, found the part we were looking for and sent us on our way. We made our way back to the electronics lab and spent the remainder of the week testing our hypothesis.

Hole in the wall electronics shop, Shantinath Electronic Parts

The electronics lab at IET

Rajan soldering some wires

One of the biggest challenges this week was interfacing with the available microcontrollers. I spend a good part of the week trying to establish communication with a variety of off brand arduinos. With no success, I found an online Indian store that stocked the original arduino. As I made my way around the Robokits website, I found that Ahmedabad is the company’s distribution center. With some luck, I was able to order the microcontroller from their website and pick it up locally the following day.

One of the off brand arduinos that I attempted to interface with

A building near the Robokit distribution center where we stopped to grab a quick lunch

Now as I had stated in my earlier blogs, the main mode for transportation for local students is by moped. This becomes challenging during the monsoon seasons, for the roads start filling up with water. On Thursday night we were all invited to a friends house for dinner, but it was pouring outside. Out of the group of seven people one person owned a car, so with the true Indian mentality we all crammed in.

Mandatory car selfie

During the weekend we made an early morning trip to Old Ahmedabad’s shopping area. The area surrounding Relief Road is one of the busiest and crowded places in the city. In this area you can purchase anything and everything, ranging from clothes to electronics.  This is also a place with a lot of culture and history. In just one block you can find traces of Roman, Greek and Islamic architecture. This is also the location of one of the most famous mosques in all of India, Jama Masjid.  

Second hand electronics being sold on Relief Road

Architecture around Jama Mosque

Inside the Jama Mosque

Heavy rains flooding the streets outside our apartment complex