Adam Little @ CIID

Photo by Jefe Chapin

I originally posted this on a blog for PEPY - a grassroots NGO in Cambodia that I spent 2 months working for.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a blog by a group of Dutch Industrial Design students documenting their work on a portable, solar powered lamp for use in rural Cambodia. As a design student and a former PEPY volunteer (which I mentioned here), I got a lot of pleasure from looking back at their notes. Besides working in partnership with a Khmer solar energy company, the students were able to conduct user research directly with Cambodia’s rural residents. It was great seeing them conduct interviews in people’s homes and ride their motorbike through pitch black villages.

Now I have another blog I would like to share and since this one is just beginning, I am looking forward to following it’s development. It is  Wandering Jefe by Jefe Chapin, an IDEO designer who is taking a three month sabbatical (or a “walkabout” as he refers to it) in Cambodia to work on a low cost latrine with International Development Enterprises (IDE). IDEO is an international design consultancy that we follow very closely at the school I attend. Several of our instructors have worked for IDEO and the company’s founder, Bill Mogridge, is credited with coining the term interaction design — my field of study.

IDE on the other hand is an international nonprofit that helps farmers in countries throughout Africa, Southern Asia and Southeast Asia. Unlike many international nonprofits, IDE says they are not interested in giving handouts but creating “profitable enterprises and value chains that deliver sustainable social and economic benefits to the rural poor.” Sounds similar to the stuff I heard at PEPY and I am especially reminded of our visit with Micky Sampson at RDIC. In Cambodia IDE have done this by developing products and services to improve agricultural productions and water sanitation.

According to Jefe’s blog, IDEO and IDE first got together to create the Human Centered Design Toolkit.  This toolkit is a guide for applying IDEO’s successful method of design to developing world contexts. The toolkit can be download for free here. Here is an excerpt from it:

It contains the elements to Human-Centered Design, a process used for decades to create new solutions for multi-national corporations. This process has created ideas such as the HeartStart defibrillator, Cleanwell natural antibacterial products, and the Blood Donor System for the Red Cross—innovations that have enhanced the lives of millions of people.

Now Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of smallholder farmers. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear the needs of smallholder farmers in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

Jefe’s project, which he promises to document on his blog, will apply IDEO’s human-centered design process to IDE’s work in the field of water sanitation in the form of a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings. Jefe summarizes the problem in this way:

Cambodians are relatively poor. A five-person family at the national poverty level earns about 900USD per year, and rural Cambodians cite cost as the number one reason that they don’t invest in effective latrines. A lot of NGOs are working in Cambodia trying to assist the poor, and a number of these NGOs have historically given away latrines. They tend to build what is, in fact, quite a nice latrine (including an offset tank, pour-flush pan and solid walls and roof: I’ll explain latrine options in a later posting. . .) that costs about 150USD to build. This has caused two problems. First, this latrine is now seen as the ‘ideal’, and people don’t want to build anything lesser. Yet they can’t save up enough money to build it. So, the second problem . . . they wait and see if an NGO will just build them a latrine. Yet, the NGOs can only reach a very small segment of the population so very few get built (of the latrines existing in Cambodia, only 17% of them are provided by NGOS. . . the rest are purchased by the users).

More background information about the problems of sanitation, the need for affordable and desirable latrines and how they propose to do this are already on Jefe’s blog. I hope that he continues to update it with photos, videos, observations and notes in the same way that the Dutch students did. And given that Jefe is an experienced designer from IDEO, it should be a great read. I wish him luck!

http://www.wanderingjefe.blogspot.com/

I am really feelin’ 8tracks. Upload your favorite music, make mixes of 8 or more songs and share them with your friends. It’s pretty simple which is good because I always drive myself crazy trying to make mixes.

Here’s my first one, an homage to film maker Michael Mann… http://8tracks.com/nonlocal

Social Mobiles by IDEO with Crispin Jones

Social Mobiles by IDEO with Crispin Jones
Various designs that address the social impact of mobile phones in playful ways. While working with IDEO, Crispin Jones created 5 mobiles phones that change the users’ behavior to make it less disruptive. For example, one phone induces a shock depending on how loudly the person at the other end is talking. As a result this forces the people to speak more quietly.

Keep reading for more inspiring projects related to networked objects, personal informatics and tangible user interfaces.

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Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Presentation, part 1 0f 8)
This is part 1 of a speech by Adam Greenfield that outlines the ideas in his book Everyware: The Dawing Age of Ubiquitous Computing — a detailed survey on the implications of ubiquitous computing. The rest of the speech can be found here.

The Web in the World
A slide show presentation by Timo Arnall which has many great examples of physical interfaces, networked objects, etc…

Also by Timo Arnall is Touch, a website and research project about Near Field Communication (NFC) which enables connections between mobile phones and physical objects. An ongoing archive of interesting applications and technologies.

Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
A highly informative slide presentation about Personal Informatics — “services that surface information about you and your network to your advantage.” And here is a recent article on the subject from the Wall Street Journal.

Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things

Written by Julian Bleeker, this paper looks at what it means when objects, animals and other things start to contribute to the social web and the value that holds. More notes from Julian here: Networked Objects and the Internet of Things.

The Coming Age of Calm Technology / The Computer for the 21st Century
Both of these papers are by the man who coined the term Ubiquitous Computing back in the 80s, Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC. Required reading on the subject.

Team Lumen workstation and the flag of Cambodia

I enjoyed reading the blog of Team Lumen tonight. Team Lumen is a group of four Industrial Design students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who a working on a (thesis?) project to develop an affordable and quality lighting solution for people in rural Cambodia. As you know, because of my experience in Cambodia last year, I am always interested to hear about what people are doing to address the needs of Khmer people, especially when it involves students and sustainable technology! But what I find really relevant is Team Lumen’s blog which they have been updating since they first flew to Phnom Penh last April. During that time they have shared many great photos, notes and videos about the evolution of their project and their process as a team — insights from user testing, first hand observations and facts about life in rural Cambodia, concept development (which they let people vote on through their blog!), prototyping, etc…

What they finally developed is called the MoonLight, a portable, solar powered lamp designed to be assembled locally. Thanks to a few awards they picked up and a partnership with Kamworks (a solar energy company in Cambodia!), it looks like this student project may reach the people of Cambodia. Well done and thanks for the inspiration!

“With the stock market in turmoil and housing in a slump, appliance manufacturers are taking the long view and retooling their offerings for aging baby boomers.” Wall Street Journal

Thankfully we did not have to go this far for our project dealing with elderly. But it looks like a fun day at the office.

Via Core77

Students at the PEPY Ride School in Chanleas Dai by Jeff Kennel

I remember very clearly when I was accepted to the Pilot Year program at CIID. I had just arrived in Siem Reap after a 50km trip along a dirt highway with 20+ plus people and some ducks in the back of a pickup truck. I had been visiting a school in Chanleas Dai, a small community in Cambodia where access to electricity was difficult enough, let alone the internet. So immediately after disembarking from the pickup truck in Siem Reap, I went to an internet cafe to send my parents a message… and there was the email from Isabel!

So now I am in Copenhagen and I just read a blog post on the PEPY website about some computer programs created by students at the school in Chanleas Dai, the one I visited less than a year ago where water came from ground pump and electricity from solar panels. With help from OLPC’s Give One Get One program, PEPY has managed to equip the students of Chanleas Dai with 100 XO laptops, along with satellite internet access. Even though I knew the children were now using XOs, I was really astonished to see them creating their own computer programs and sharing them online. And the best part is, these programs are actually pretty cool!

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