What Leonardo could mean to us now : Systematic variation 21st century style, applied to large-scale societal issues
The problem: Design challenges are becoming increasingly complex, amongst others because real lif... more The problem: Design challenges are becoming increasingly complex, amongst others because real life is getting more complex. Society is more interconnected than before and most problems occur in a variety of -quickly changing- shapes and forms, i.e. in different contexts. These contexts pose different requirements and often have interdependencies as well. How can design engineers respond to this rise in diversity of requirements and the likely interdependencies? To reduce the complexity and increased diversity the common response is simplification, e.g., choosing one context as scope of the design task. In a highly interconnected society this no longer suffices. The initially optimal solution creates a path dependency and lock-in that delays or hinders achieving impact on a large scale beyond the initial context. Research focus: The thesis focuses on the question what evolution in design engineering might be possible to address this problem. As a starting point, the oldest design cha...
It seems relevant that designers who are dealing with complex societal issues need to be able to ... more It seems relevant that designers who are dealing with complex societal issues need to be able to assess whether the complexity of the design task has been captured sufficiently. We put forward that assessing the “richness” of intermediate results of a design process can be used for this. We explore the introduction of richness as a multi-level defined construct to create a shared language for this assessment. We created a three-part definition and tested its workability and value for designers. The results demonstrate the workability of considering richness as a multi-level defined construct, and value of using it to assess the richness of an intermediate result of a design process, to inform the decision whether to continue the design process. This exploration can be built upon in various ways.
Working Paper Systemic Context Variation v 2.0 (04/2014)
Note for interested readers: If you are interested in this paper, please download the new version... more Note for interested readers: If you are interested in this paper, please download the new version with THE UPDATED NAME: Context Variation by Design It supersedes all versions of this document.
Many global sustainable development issues affect large numbers of people, e.g. clean cooking. Mo... more Many global sustainable development issues affect large numbers of people, e.g. clean cooking. Most current projects focus on a specific use context, therefore do not scale well to new contexts and consequently do not reach enough beneficiaries. We present an approach, Context Variation by Design (CVD), in which insights from different contexts are intentionally combined early on in the process to develop solution directions. This creates a richer solution space than when contextual variations are developed sequentially. The rich solution space is then the basis for these contextual variations which might include connections and synergy between them. We discuss several real-life project examples that demonstrate that this approach indeed creates a basis for better solutions. In particular, confronting insights from different contexts at an early stage reveals new solution directions. To fully capture the potential the approach needs to be applied throughout the design process.
Initial working paper on the design approach called Context Variation by Design. By now much deep... more Initial working paper on the design approach called Context Variation by Design. By now much deeper investigated and documented in a range of other papers and upcoming PhD dissertation (2020Q1)
Sustainable Development drivers: The role of leadership in government, business and NGO performance
Contents: PART I: THE CORE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 1. Sustainable Development: Taking Responsi... more Contents: PART I: THE CORE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 1. Sustainable Development: Taking Responsibility for the Whole Kees Zoeteman 2. A Short History of Sustainable Development Kees Zoeteman and Jaco Tavenier 3. The Mission Reflected in the Sustainable Development Concept: Uplifting Society Kees Zoeteman and Hans Mommaas 4. Can Sustainable Development be Measured? Kees Zoeteman PART II: LEADERSHIP AND INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT 5. Leadership and Sustainability Attitudes in Personal Life Kees Zoeteman 6. Individual and Organizational Development Phases towards Sustainability Margarete van den Brink PART III: NATIONS, BUSINESSES AND MARKETS 7. Ranking of Nations Kees Zoeteman 8. Drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility Johan Graafland and Hugo Smid 9. Understanding Differences in Business Sectors Kees Zoeteman 10. Sustainability Attitudes in Local Area Development in the Netherlands Jules Hinssen PART IV: NGOS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 11. NGOs and Sustainability Attitudes Wouter Kersten, Elena Akadanova and Kees Zoeteman 12. The Sustainability Community Paul van Seters 13. The Case of the Center for Human Emergence Netherlands Lisette Schuitemaker, Peter Merry and Anne-Marie Voorhoeve PART V: PAST AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS 14. Building Consensus for Sustainable Development Larry Susskind and Mattijs van Maasakkers 15. Trends, Crises and Sustainability Kees Zoeteman 16. The Conflict of Our Time Otto Scharmer Index
Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking... more Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader "cooking eco-system". In terms of technology, (biomass) gasifier stoves look promising on all three sustainability dimensions (people, planet, profit) but have not been adopted on a substantial scale across cultures and regions either. We therefore used a design approach that takes multiple contexts (target groups) into account and compared the performance of a gasifier stove that was developed following this multi-context approach with four previous gasifier versions. With the comparative assessment using criteria well beyond mere technological performance we found that it performed better than these versions as well as than what could be expected based on historical learning, while providing additional systemic advantages. These results encourage verification of the value of the multi-context approach in more settings while providing clues for refinement of the assessment method.
The world is complex. Amongst others, this means that many elements are interconnected. When desi... more The world is complex. Amongst others, this means that many elements are interconnected. When designing solutions, this complexity is often seen as cumbersome, resulting in (over) simplification of the issue at hand. This leads to solutions that are optimised for one specific context. Especially when these solutions are aimed at tackling large scale development issues, redoing the process every time when a new context is entered is very resource intensive. A multi-context design approach that was recently developed, takes another premise: if multiformity of a design challenge is acknowledged from the start, this encourages to intentionally bring together insights from multiple contexts. This collective intelligence results in design solutions with higher quality that also allow for quicker scaling and adaptation to multiple contexts thereby achieving more impact against lower overall costs. The first intended result, higher quality, has been tested in various set ups. The most elabor...
A Scalable Clean Cooking Stove Matching the Cooking Habits of Ghana and Uganda
2018 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
A wide range of Improved Cook Stoves have been developed, designed to maximize efficiency and to ... more A wide range of Improved Cook Stoves have been developed, designed to maximize efficiency and to minimize emissions. Nevertheless, successful adoption failed in many cases, due to a lack of proper understanding of people's actual needs and instead (too much) focus on technical functionality (efficiency & emissions). The aim of the project described in this paper is to develop a new cook stove for urban households in Africa, which matches with local cooking habits and which at the same time is scalable which means it should match with multiple cooking habits and cooking ecosystems. In order to address both issues, two design approaches were combined: People – Technology Matching (PTM) and Context Variation by Design (CVD). The objective for the PTM part was to map the characteristics of cooking by measuring and observing preparation of the most typical local food dishes. At the same time, in order to overcome the tension between context specific solutions and scalability, we applied the Context Variation by Design (CVD) approach. Via this approach insights from different contexts are intentionally combined early on in the design process to design a stove-architecture that can be adopted in and easily adapted to multiple contexts. For this purpose, PTM research was done in two contexts: Uganda and Ghana. The insights collected from the two contexts were brought together and resulted in a stove architecture that is adaptive to both contexts. The resulting prototype performed well in technical tests. We illustrate and discuss some notable features of the adaptive design in the paper.
In dit artikel introduceren de auteurs een term voor het fenomeen van de onderneming die zowel in... more In dit artikel introduceren de auteurs een term voor het fenomeen van de onderneming die zowel in fi nancieel als in maatschappelijk opzicht waarde creëert, met het laatste als expliciet onderdeel van het bestaansrecht: issuegedreven ondernemerschap. Ze betogen dat issuegedreven ondernemerschap ondernemen is ‘zoals het bedoeld is’. Ook bespreken ze specifi eke uitdagingen waar dit type onderneming zich voor gesteld kan zien.
Form Akademisk - forskningstidsskrift for design og designdidaktikk
Today, most challenges designers face are complex. One way industrial design engineers have learn... more Today, most challenges designers face are complex. One way industrial design engineers have learned to deal with this complexity is to simplify the problem early on—for example, by focusing on one particular context, e.g. user group. Variations are typically addressed, but preferably inside the simplified design task or even after initial success has been achieved and a path has been set out. A range of authors have suggested ways to address variations during the design process. This paper contributes to exploring this notion of variation by presenting an approach that emphasises contextual variation early on, clarifying the design task before the design process, in a narrow sense, begins. This enables designers to seize opportunities that reveal themselves before a final path is set. Based on real-life cases and discussion of existing literature, the value of this approach for an industrial designer’s arsenal is explored and guidance for next steps is offered. Keywords: context v...
Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking... more Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader “cooking eco-system”. In terms of technology, (biomass) gasifier stoves look promising on all three sustainability dimensions (people, planet, profit) but have not been adopted on a substantial scale across cultures and regions either. We therefore used a design approach that takes multiple contexts (target groups) into account and compared the performance of a gasifier stove that was developed following this multi-context approach with four previous gasifier versions. With the comparative assessment using criteria well beyond mere technological performance we found that it performed better than these versions as well as than what could be expected based on historical learning, while providing additional systemic advantages. These results encourage verification of the value of the multi-context approach in more settings while providing clues for refinement of the assessment method.
What Leonardo could mean to us now : Systematic variation 21st century style, applied to large-scale societal issues
The problem: Design challenges are becoming increasingly complex, amongst others because real lif... more The problem: Design challenges are becoming increasingly complex, amongst others because real life is getting more complex. Society is more interconnected than before and most problems occur in a variety of -quickly changing- shapes and forms, i.e. in different contexts. These contexts pose different requirements and often have interdependencies as well. How can design engineers respond to this rise in diversity of requirements and the likely interdependencies? To reduce the complexity and increased diversity the common response is simplification, e.g., choosing one context as scope of the design task. In a highly interconnected society this no longer suffices. The initially optimal solution creates a path dependency and lock-in that delays or hinders achieving impact on a large scale beyond the initial context. Research focus: The thesis focuses on the question what evolution in design engineering might be possible to address this problem. As a starting point, the oldest design cha...
It seems relevant that designers who are dealing with complex societal issues need to be able to ... more It seems relevant that designers who are dealing with complex societal issues need to be able to assess whether the complexity of the design task has been captured sufficiently. We put forward that assessing the “richness” of intermediate results of a design process can be used for this. We explore the introduction of richness as a multi-level defined construct to create a shared language for this assessment. We created a three-part definition and tested its workability and value for designers. The results demonstrate the workability of considering richness as a multi-level defined construct, and value of using it to assess the richness of an intermediate result of a design process, to inform the decision whether to continue the design process. This exploration can be built upon in various ways.
Working Paper Systemic Context Variation v 2.0 (04/2014)
Note for interested readers: If you are interested in this paper, please download the new version... more Note for interested readers: If you are interested in this paper, please download the new version with THE UPDATED NAME: Context Variation by Design It supersedes all versions of this document.
Many global sustainable development issues affect large numbers of people, e.g. clean cooking. Mo... more Many global sustainable development issues affect large numbers of people, e.g. clean cooking. Most current projects focus on a specific use context, therefore do not scale well to new contexts and consequently do not reach enough beneficiaries. We present an approach, Context Variation by Design (CVD), in which insights from different contexts are intentionally combined early on in the process to develop solution directions. This creates a richer solution space than when contextual variations are developed sequentially. The rich solution space is then the basis for these contextual variations which might include connections and synergy between them. We discuss several real-life project examples that demonstrate that this approach indeed creates a basis for better solutions. In particular, confronting insights from different contexts at an early stage reveals new solution directions. To fully capture the potential the approach needs to be applied throughout the design process.
Initial working paper on the design approach called Context Variation by Design. By now much deep... more Initial working paper on the design approach called Context Variation by Design. By now much deeper investigated and documented in a range of other papers and upcoming PhD dissertation (2020Q1)
Sustainable Development drivers: The role of leadership in government, business and NGO performance
Contents: PART I: THE CORE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 1. Sustainable Development: Taking Responsi... more Contents: PART I: THE CORE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 1. Sustainable Development: Taking Responsibility for the Whole Kees Zoeteman 2. A Short History of Sustainable Development Kees Zoeteman and Jaco Tavenier 3. The Mission Reflected in the Sustainable Development Concept: Uplifting Society Kees Zoeteman and Hans Mommaas 4. Can Sustainable Development be Measured? Kees Zoeteman PART II: LEADERSHIP AND INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT 5. Leadership and Sustainability Attitudes in Personal Life Kees Zoeteman 6. Individual and Organizational Development Phases towards Sustainability Margarete van den Brink PART III: NATIONS, BUSINESSES AND MARKETS 7. Ranking of Nations Kees Zoeteman 8. Drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility Johan Graafland and Hugo Smid 9. Understanding Differences in Business Sectors Kees Zoeteman 10. Sustainability Attitudes in Local Area Development in the Netherlands Jules Hinssen PART IV: NGOS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 11. NGOs and Sustainability Attitudes Wouter Kersten, Elena Akadanova and Kees Zoeteman 12. The Sustainability Community Paul van Seters 13. The Case of the Center for Human Emergence Netherlands Lisette Schuitemaker, Peter Merry and Anne-Marie Voorhoeve PART V: PAST AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS 14. Building Consensus for Sustainable Development Larry Susskind and Mattijs van Maasakkers 15. Trends, Crises and Sustainability Kees Zoeteman 16. The Conflict of Our Time Otto Scharmer Index
Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking... more Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader "cooking eco-system". In terms of technology, (biomass) gasifier stoves look promising on all three sustainability dimensions (people, planet, profit) but have not been adopted on a substantial scale across cultures and regions either. We therefore used a design approach that takes multiple contexts (target groups) into account and compared the performance of a gasifier stove that was developed following this multi-context approach with four previous gasifier versions. With the comparative assessment using criteria well beyond mere technological performance we found that it performed better than these versions as well as than what could be expected based on historical learning, while providing additional systemic advantages. These results encourage verification of the value of the multi-context approach in more settings while providing clues for refinement of the assessment method.
The world is complex. Amongst others, this means that many elements are interconnected. When desi... more The world is complex. Amongst others, this means that many elements are interconnected. When designing solutions, this complexity is often seen as cumbersome, resulting in (over) simplification of the issue at hand. This leads to solutions that are optimised for one specific context. Especially when these solutions are aimed at tackling large scale development issues, redoing the process every time when a new context is entered is very resource intensive. A multi-context design approach that was recently developed, takes another premise: if multiformity of a design challenge is acknowledged from the start, this encourages to intentionally bring together insights from multiple contexts. This collective intelligence results in design solutions with higher quality that also allow for quicker scaling and adaptation to multiple contexts thereby achieving more impact against lower overall costs. The first intended result, higher quality, has been tested in various set ups. The most elabor...
A Scalable Clean Cooking Stove Matching the Cooking Habits of Ghana and Uganda
2018 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
A wide range of Improved Cook Stoves have been developed, designed to maximize efficiency and to ... more A wide range of Improved Cook Stoves have been developed, designed to maximize efficiency and to minimize emissions. Nevertheless, successful adoption failed in many cases, due to a lack of proper understanding of people's actual needs and instead (too much) focus on technical functionality (efficiency & emissions). The aim of the project described in this paper is to develop a new cook stove for urban households in Africa, which matches with local cooking habits and which at the same time is scalable which means it should match with multiple cooking habits and cooking ecosystems. In order to address both issues, two design approaches were combined: People – Technology Matching (PTM) and Context Variation by Design (CVD). The objective for the PTM part was to map the characteristics of cooking by measuring and observing preparation of the most typical local food dishes. At the same time, in order to overcome the tension between context specific solutions and scalability, we applied the Context Variation by Design (CVD) approach. Via this approach insights from different contexts are intentionally combined early on in the design process to design a stove-architecture that can be adopted in and easily adapted to multiple contexts. For this purpose, PTM research was done in two contexts: Uganda and Ghana. The insights collected from the two contexts were brought together and resulted in a stove architecture that is adaptive to both contexts. The resulting prototype performed well in technical tests. We illustrate and discuss some notable features of the adaptive design in the paper.
In dit artikel introduceren de auteurs een term voor het fenomeen van de onderneming die zowel in... more In dit artikel introduceren de auteurs een term voor het fenomeen van de onderneming die zowel in fi nancieel als in maatschappelijk opzicht waarde creëert, met het laatste als expliciet onderdeel van het bestaansrecht: issuegedreven ondernemerschap. Ze betogen dat issuegedreven ondernemerschap ondernemen is ‘zoals het bedoeld is’. Ook bespreken ze specifi eke uitdagingen waar dit type onderneming zich voor gesteld kan zien.
Form Akademisk - forskningstidsskrift for design og designdidaktikk
Today, most challenges designers face are complex. One way industrial design engineers have learn... more Today, most challenges designers face are complex. One way industrial design engineers have learned to deal with this complexity is to simplify the problem early on—for example, by focusing on one particular context, e.g. user group. Variations are typically addressed, but preferably inside the simplified design task or even after initial success has been achieved and a path has been set out. A range of authors have suggested ways to address variations during the design process. This paper contributes to exploring this notion of variation by presenting an approach that emphasises contextual variation early on, clarifying the design task before the design process, in a narrow sense, begins. This enables designers to seize opportunities that reveal themselves before a final path is set. Based on real-life cases and discussion of existing literature, the value of this approach for an industrial designer’s arsenal is explored and guidance for next steps is offered. Keywords: context v...
Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking... more Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader “cooking eco-system”. In terms of technology, (biomass) gasifier stoves look promising on all three sustainability dimensions (people, planet, profit) but have not been adopted on a substantial scale across cultures and regions either. We therefore used a design approach that takes multiple contexts (target groups) into account and compared the performance of a gasifier stove that was developed following this multi-context approach with four previous gasifier versions. With the comparative assessment using criteria well beyond mere technological performance we found that it performed better than these versions as well as than what could be expected based on historical learning, while providing additional systemic advantages. These results encourage verification of the value of the multi-context approach in more settings while providing clues for refinement of the assessment method.
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Papers by Wouter Kersten