Emerging Futures Lab

Lessons for development from the demand driven investment strategies of the informal sector

A theoretical approach to Value for Money in aid & development: Optimizing research and design for ‘best fit’ iterative programming

Last year, I briefly touched upon this concept as an approach to cost effective programme design that was still flexible enough to provide room for iteration for best fit.

Lant Pritchett’s article offers us some food for thought from the design and innovation perspective:

This insight about creating conditions in which local governments were allowed to pursue “directed improvisation” and not strictly limited to what was forbidden and what was mandated reminded me of the old saw about different types of approaches.  In some countries “everything which is not expressly forbidden is allowed”, in others “everything which is not expressly allowed is forbidden”, some in which “everything is forbidden, even that which is expressly allowed” and those in which “everything is allowed, even that which is expressly forbidden.”  

The importance of user agency for good design in the humanitarian and development context

This is a topic that has come up so often on Twitter that I thought to write it out once and for all. A link would be ever so much easier to argue with than to make the case for recognizing the agency of the end user – whether an intended customer or beneficiary – of an innovation.

Lowering the barriers to effective communication is the key to sustainable development

One of the challenges that we discovered during our multistakeholder workshop in The Hague a few years ago was that people tended to fall back on their expertise when faced with the discomfort of empathizing with farmer’s needs. Particularly so when the farmers in question were from Africa, and not from their own regions.

Our design visualization team – Jam visualdenken – captured one element of how this barrier manifested. Experts talked a lot about “Knowledge” being the key to effective agriculture value chain development, and how it was critical to transfer as much of it as possible. It became this big thing shoved at the ‘global South’, with little thought given to how it would be transferred, much less how relevant and appropriate the “knowledge” would be. A silver bullet, or a panacea.

Today I came across this article from Zimbabwe – “Limitations of using documents & reports to share knowledge in Africa” and I could immediately perceive the author’s deep understanding and empathy of their own local context and needs. Here’s a snippet:

While African communities have learnt from each other for generations, the conventional way of trying to spread knowledge through case studies is not yielding sustainable results.

There is an assumption that technical people can get into a community, work with local people, document their successes and share success stories with other communities, leading to adoption of best practices.

This notion misses a thorough understanding of how communities learn from each other. Almost all rural African communities rely on collective sense-making through very patient conversations, observations and learning by doing.

The case of public-private partnerships in sustainable agricultural value chain development

In this paper, we share our experience of developing and executing a user centered design workshop for an interdisciplinary team of policy makers, planners, funders and implementers of public private partnerships (PPPs) for programs on sustainable agricultural value chain development. For an audience who will neither practice the design profession nor tend to apply the user centered design process in their day to day work, what can we offer as the essential takeaways from a day spent immersed in the human centered design experience?

Source: IEEE Xplore Abstract 

What can people centred innovation planning offer?

First, the fundamental premise of human centered design firmly focuses the outcome of the processes on the context and needs of the end users. This orientation offers design a headstart in considering Robert Chambers’ emphasis on putting people first. The entire discipline is eminently suited to take on this challenge for international development, in an empathetic and holistic manner.

Second, addressing complex systems designed for human interaction is another key facet of the field of design, particularly the specializations that deal with computer human interaction of all types. This means there is a vast body of work created over decades meant to consider exactly this point.

Third, rather than wasting time and money on “trying on different suits” for ‘best fit’, there are proven approaches developed to minimize the failure rate of innovations introduced in the consumer market, and maximize the adoption rate by the end users. In particular, the areas of design thinking, design planning and design innovation have years of expertise in considering exactly this.

I recently put down in writing some of my thoughts from our practical explorations in adapting methods from the field of human centered design and innovation planning in the context of international development needs.

An introduction to the pivot from ‘best practice’ to ‘best fit’ in international development, and what lessons private sector can garner for entering the African consumer market.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to “Best Fit” for International Development: Process and Tools (Part 1)

Elements in a Paradigm of Adaptive Pluralism

"Participation" has three uses and meanings: cosmetic labelling, to look good; co-opting practice, to secure local action and resources; and empowering process, to enable people to take command and do things themselves. Its new popularity is part of changes in development rhetoric, thinking and practice. These have been shifting from a standardised, top-down paradigm of things towards a diversified, bottom-up paradigm of people.

This implies a transfer of power from "uppers" - people, institutions and disciplines which have been dominant, to "lowers" - people, institutions and disciplines which have been subordinate. The many labels and schools of participatory approaches in research and development tend to hide underlying changes in philosophy and practice.

Rapid rural appraisal leading to participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is one example of a shift from data collection to data sharing and empowerment. With PRA, poor people have shown far greater capabilities to appraise, analyse, plan and act than professionals have expected. Empowerment of the poor requires reversals and changes of role.

Some of the new approaches and methods, especially of PRA, make reversals less difficult and improbable than they used to be. PRA faces many dangers. For it to be used on any scale in an empowering mode implies widespread changes in bureaucratic procedures and cultures, including more participatory management.

Citation Chambers, R. (1994) Paradigm shifts and the practice of participatory research and development. IDS working paper no. 2. Brighton: IDS.

#InformalEconomy - Borderland Biashara Ecosystem Mapping project at the Kenya/Uganda border

Nov 2015 – Inception report Informal Economy, Kenya/East Africa/Uganda Jan 2016 – Literature Review on Informal Cross Border Trade in the East African Community (EAC), the DRC and South Sudan May 2016 – Final Report, General Public – Borderland Biashara, by Emerging Futures Lab

Emerging Futures Lab has been immersed in design and development of pioneering methodology for mapping the informal trade ecosystem – henceforward known as biashara, at the borderlands of the East African Community, since November 2015.

Trade Mark East Africa recognized the need to understand the traders, their business practices, and their aspirations, as the first step necessary for the design of interventions that are not only people-centered, but cost effective and impactful.  We were granted creative license to colour outside the box of the terms of reference with our designer’s empathy and exploratory mindset, and frame this project as an exercise in developing the understanding necessary for the design of human centered methods, tools and frameworks for development programming. 

We’ve been looking through the recent literature on the shift in development thinking towards design for best fit, in context, rather than best practice and/or top down fully fleshed out models with little recourse to adaptive tweaking or even prototyping. Here are some that I found useful:

How to use ‘Systems Thinking’ in practice: good new guide

Development organizations frequently face and overcome challenges in programme delivery. But what happens when the proposed solutions fail? How can organizations adapt to changing conditions and ensure the benefits of programmes are shared as widely as possible? This paper introduces the concept of ‘systems thinking’ for Oxfam staff and the broader development community. Systems thinking encourages development staff to understand and analyse the contexts within which they operate, and to design programmes that can adapt as conditions on the ground change. It helps staff to bring together many different stakeholders – especially those with radically different backgrounds and perspectives – to identify problems and solutions to challenges, increasing the possibility of transformational change. Crucially, it proposes that programme staff should have the freedom to experiment and ‘fail safely’ in order to get the best results.  

The report contains case studies and questions for staff to consider, as well as useful tools and links to resources on systems thinking.

The Idea and Practice of Systems Thinking and their Relevance for Capacity Development

Human-centered design is perhaps the most important of these new developments. It is a process, one that requires a deep understanding of people. It starts with observations and then a rigorous attempt to use those observations to determine the true underlying issues and needs, a process that might be called “Problem Defining” (as opposed to problem solving). Then, these needs and issues are addressed through an iterative, evidence-based procedure of observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing, with each cycle of the iteration going deeper and deeper into the solution space. The result is a form of incremental innovation, optimizing the solution through a hill-climbing process.

Human-centered design, at least the way I define and practice it, has at its core several fundamental principles.

The end product is intended to enhance the quality of life of the people who will use it.

It does not rush to a solution. Given a problem, it stops to observe and study the issues to ensure that the correct problem is being address, namely, the fundamental causes and needs, not surface symptoms.

It is evidence-based, using careful observations and analyses to determine needs and experimental deployment of potential solutions in an iterative cycle of observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

It is action-oriented, learning by doing, through repeated iterations of making, testing, and observation.

Modern HCD applies the findings of many fields. It is the bridge between technology and people, applying the findings of the cognitive, behavioral and social sciences through a process of doing and making, testing and probing, experimenting to make things better, working with the specialists from the relevant disciplines as well as the people for whom the designs are intended. HCD designers do their research by continual designs, carefully analyzing the situation, using each design as a way to test their ideas in small, controlled ways, using the resulting evidence to guide further, continual refinement.  

Human-centered design moves us away from designer as guru. It moves us into an important profession where we have systematic methods for discovering true needs of people and society, for developing proposed solutions, testing and refining them. We used to be an opinion-based field: today we are an evidence-based field. We have become human-centered.

Introducing Exploratory Prototyping