Design Meets Development
IDEO just released version 2 of it’s Human-Centered Development Toolkit.
It’s essentially a free downloadable toolkit using Ideo’s design processes, as applied to the social development world. This was made possible through a collaboration with the Gates Foundation, IDE, ICRW, and Heifer International.
This intersection of design and development is really a combination of two of my most passionate interests.
And while I’ve followed both fields in parallel these past couple of years, the impending synergies are about to reach a tipping point.
My initial exposure to this was the crossover of development and engineering/invention. I was totally blown away by MIT Professor Amy Smith’s talk in TED, as she narrated her d-Lab and the crazy things they were inventing there.
In the same way that CK Prahalad started a revolution in getting businesses to consider the ‘fortune at the bottom-of-the-pyramid‘, I personally think that Amy Smith’s talk opened the floodgates for engineers to develop products for those who live on $1 to $2 a day.
Another important milestone on the design-meets-development path was the creation of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), spearheaded by technology visionary Nicholas Negroponte. While it’s currently a debate whether the program is a success, nobody can argue with the mission of democratizing computing to the developing world’s children :
But during the course of OLPC’s technological development, more design skills needed to be brought into the fray. In fact, Negroponte would eventually turn to Yves Behar’s fuseproject – an industrial design firm – to bring the One Laptop Per Child into reality. This move I feel proved that not only engineering skills were needed to create the OLPC, but a designer’s mind as well.
In fact, the designer’s input into development work has become so critical that it has become a field of expertise in itself. One particular thought leader in this space is Niti Bahn from the emerging futures lab, who also wrote a very interesting article on ‘The 5D’s of BOP Marketing’.
Examples are now abound on products designed for the BoP, one just has to google. My personal favorites include Kickstart’s moneymaker pumps, VisionSpring glasses, and Tata’s Nano. Here in the Philippines, Hapinoy has been talking to entrepreneurs and organizations who want to bring in products designed especially for the BoP, and we are thinking about the best ways to introduce them into the market.
It’s a huge market, a huge need, and a huge opportunity – both to profit and to help. And hopefully, with IDEO’s new toolkit, more entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, and development workers can collaborate and create more products that will not only be sold t0 – but also serve – the base-of-the-pyramid.
