Helping Farmers Grow: Design and Social Change in Haiti

Design with the other 90%: Cumulus Johannesburg Conference Proceedings, 2014

This paper critically describes a design methodology for achieving socially important goals through design. Such a methodology combines the best of human-centred and participatory design methodologies with critical social science and action research. This paper describes how design can be used in a multi-stakeholder context that attempts to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a changing food system. The paper describes a method that integrated urban farmers, industrial designers, development practitioners and government officials in the design process. It describes how designers and social scientists should immerse themselves in the lifeworld of their participants, how they should engage with them and what can be done to reflect critically on the process of designing with the other 90%.

Strategic Design Research Journal, 2019

Community Design is the result of a natural and healthy evolution in the broader sphere of design. While on the one hand design today still directs significant attention, care and resources to the design of objects, services and consumer products, sometimes useful and sustainable, sometimes neither useful nor ethical, on the other hand youngest designers invest in virtuous cultural, environmental and social processes of mediation, reconfiguration and interaction between communities and the territories they belong to, with a more humanistic than technocratic approach. A field in which the designer cooperates closely with local residents in multidisciplinary groups, enriched with new experts in the humanities such as philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. Through some comparative case studies of projects run in Lebanon and Italy, the paper wants to discuss the importance for designers to use an experiential and anthropological approach for the development of new items, using the narrative tool to embrace the entire symbolic and rhetorical form of rural traditions in their projects. Man as part of the ecosystem, man understood as an organism within organisms, immersed in a continuous and swirling morphing that can shape our work in a reciprocal relational interaction with the things themselves.

Strategic Design Research Journal

Community Design is the result of a natural and healthy evolution in the broader sphere of design. While on the one hand design today still directs significant attention, care and resources to the design of objects, services and consumer products, sometimes useful and sustainable, sometimes neither useful nor ethical, on the other hand youngest designers invest in virtuous cultural, environmental and social processes of mediation, reconfiguration and interaction between communities and the territories they belong to, with a more humanistic than technocratic approach. A field in which the designer cooperates closely with local residents in multidisciplinary groups, enriched with new experts in the humanities such as philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. Through some comparative case studies of projects run in Lebanon and Italy, the paper wants to discuss the importance for designers to use an experiential and anthropological approach for the development of new items, using the narrative tool to embrace the entire symbolic and rhetorical form of rural traditions in their projects. Man as part of the ecosystem, man understood as an organism within organisms, immersed in a continuous and swirling morphing that can shape our work in a reciprocal relational interaction with the things themselves.

Research in Engineering Design, 2018

Design is essential to fulfil unmet or under-served needs of resource-poor societies, supporting their social and human development. A great deal of design research has been undertaken in such low resource settings, and is discussed under different names, such as 'community development engineering', 'humanitarian engineering', 'appropriate technology', 'design for development', 'design at the Base of the Pyramid', etc. This has created an important need to know what has been examined and learnt so far and to plan for further investigation. To address this, we review a broad range of literature, with close examination of 30 design studies in this field. This reveals a multifaceted picture, showing a great diversity in investigation and reporting of attributes of context (income, rural and urban, design sectors, countries, and gender), the roles of poor people (consumers, producers, and co-designers), characteristics of research methods employed (e.g. descriptive and prescriptive, data collection methods, qualitative and quantitative aspects, and unit of analysis), and design topics. Based on the review results, we offer recommendations for further research, identifying concerns that researchers ought to have about this field and suggesting ways in which research in this field can be undertaken and reported. Keywords Poverty • Design process • Design research • Developing countries • Frugal innovations 1 Introduction Forty percent of the world population subsists on less than 2 dollars a day, and twenty percent on less than 1.25 dollars per day, living in extreme poverty (World Bank 2010). Although poverty is decreasing, it is still a widespread and tenacious problem with causes, effects and potential solutions at individual, institutional, and structural levels. Whilst Mahatma Gandhi called the problems faced by these resource-poor people as 'the worst form of violence', Amartya Sen defines them as lack of freedom and inability to make life choices (Sen 2001). Others again define them in terms of high mortality rates, ill-health or as a monetary issue (e.g. Jönsson et al. 2012). These marginalised people generally cannot change their living conditions and livelihood opportunities, as their access to financial and other resources is weak, with pressing need for immediate consumption (Karelis 2007, Jerneck 2014). They often face significant challenges to satisfy basic needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing, and lack access to basic facilities, such as public health (Maxted 2011; Zurovcik et al. 2011), education (e.g. Gordon 1997; Gustavsson 2007), safe drinking water (Baumgartner et al. 2007; Matlack et al. 2011), sanitation (e.g. Chaplin 1999; Burra et al. 2003; Lopes et al. 2012), infrastructure (Prahalad 2004), and security (Jerneck 2014). Design is imperative to satisfy unmet or under-served needs of marginalised people living in resource-limited societies (Papanek and Fuller 1972). Appropriately designed products have the potential to create significant impact, contributing towards social and human development of disadvantaged societies (e.g. Schumacher 1973). Such products include, among others, smokeless cookstoves, incomegenerating products, medical devices, educational devices, communication products or any other products that support development of resource-poor individuals or enhance their capabilities (e.g. Jerneck and Olsson 2013; Aranda Jan et al. 2014). Such design is undertaken, for instance, by

The Design Journal, 2017

Design for social innovation is the emerging movement of the 21st century. Nonetheless, the socioeconomic impact of social design projects is conditional upon their multifaceted conception and upon their array of influence. In Turkey as elsewhere, sustainability is one of the main issues of social design projects in urban/rural territories. Generating innovation at the local level and for individual people also rely on design teams’ persistency on penetrating on local communities’ lives. This paper will focus on the design workshop series implemented on Gökçeada/ Imbros Island between 2014 and 2016. By expanding the problematics of sustainability in social design projects, the paper will propose a three years’ experience with academic purposes, based on benevolent participation and unfunded co-design. Finally, this paper will aim to contribute to the social design literature by illustrating a model of “designing on the spot” concept, for the sake of sustainable, long run design projects.

Designers are often impatient to get down to ‘designing solutions’ before the fundamental problem is identified and the situation sufficiently explored. In this paper, we do not approach ‘socially engaged design’ by asking ‘what should be designed?’ Instead, we argue for the necessity for designers to spend time gaining an understanding of the circumstances in which they seek to design and that bear upon the possibility of taking action. The aim is to contribute to more effective modes of socially engaged design by attempting to better understand its contexts and challenges. This is done via a ‘problem- nding’ exercise related to a village in Egypt’s Nile River delta, interwoven with critical discussion of certain forms of socially engaged design and the theories of economic and social development that frame it.

2018

This thesis argues for an alternative methodology in social design to counter existing approaches to development work. It is based on a field study conducted in a handcraft pottery community in Cambodia over twenty months. From a cross-disciplinary perspective that combines design culture, development studies and sociology, the thesis Table of contents List of diagrams………………………………………..……………………………8 List of figures………………………………………..………………………………9 List of tables………………………………………..………………………………12 List of boxes………………………………………..……………………………… 13 List of maps………………………………………………………………………..

International Journal of Design, 2016

This article presents social design as an alternative to designerly approaches in developing countries, based on a field study conducted to improve the ceramic production and trade of a handcraft community in Cambodia. The study points out that existing interventions tend to impose modernist approaches with technological fixes and have attitudes which reflect cultural imperialism, often resulting in weak continuity and the production of inequalities. Instead, the study demonstrates the ways in which social design practice can respond to the challenges of complex social problems, and to the discontinuity and cultural barriers that are often faced in the development context. Based on Latour’s notion of the social (2005), social design and social designers might be used to reconfigure and create better social-cultural- technical relations, thereby constructing sustainable social infrastructures grounded in local participation and indigenous knowledge. The fieldwork reported in this paper illustrates the narrative process of a participatory action research based Social Design Workshop, which highlights the significance of the problematisation process that revealed kilns as troubling actors, and devised inventive approaches for capacity building. The research suggests that successful social design practices are based on the notion of situatedness and the agency of designers as catalysts, which results in the creation of mutual relationships between the people, the community, the sociocultural context, technology, and artefacts, which together encourage sustainable development.

2009

This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research project on titled; Value Creation through Sustainable Design intervention; A case study of Indigenous bamboo cane products in Botswana. Through its practice and manifest, design cuts through the core of human life, and its impact is intricably woven into and reverberates through our daily activities. Whilst there may be an agreed set of definitions and processes for design amongst professionals, there is a plethora of interpretation of design by the everyday person, depending on their context of interaction and understanding. This is more evident in the rural communities of the world, far removed from the glitz of the advanced technological trappings, where simple, but focussed design interventions make a big difference and add substantial value to the everyday life. In this context design manifests itself as a strong economic and social conduit, with a balanced sustainability platform. This paper reflects on and documents the curre...

Social innovation is a form of systemic change to society, and designers are key proponents of this approach. This paper describes how design interventions were used in the Izindaba Zokudla project that aims to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system in Soweto. The creation of the Soweto Imvelo Market by designers and researchers from Izindaba Zokudla, a local farmers’ organisation and other stakeholders identifies two aspects of social innovation that were instrumental in developing this alternative in the Johannesburg Food System: The creative contribution that designers can bring to social innovation and the need to socialise design into broader coalitions for change. The paper describes the socialisation of designers and their artefacts and technologies in terms of the theory of social capital which leads to specific recommendations on how methods should be used and how we should understand the interaction of design with social movements. The creative contributions designers make disrupts and transforms the ways we think of food, and this facilitates the socialisation of design in social innovation interventions. The paper makes recommendations from this analysis in order to guide further interventions by designers for social innovation.