Design in Africa

Design for Social Wellbeing/BoP design

Edan Weis is working on  his PhD research project; Design for Social Wellbeing: A Case Study of Normative Design Thinking, see the work in progress here.

“This research is a comparative study of the design process accross several organizations designing for/with the poor, specifically the early concept/ideation stages of product development. I’m interested in the way designer’s “frame” their problems according to their individual perspectives, and how this affects their design process. In “social design”, perspectives are often as contested as the development theories they are associated with. The aim of study is to devise methods and practical approaches for design focused on alleviating poverty by examining the design process itself, rather than through external discourses of development economics, sociology of technology, or innovation studies. The research assumes that such discourses—while still important in understanding social design practices—exert a greater influence at the practical level of designing than has been previously recognized.”

“This study investigates industrial design practice which aims to contribute to poverty alleviation and economic development in poor nations. The practice of “Design for Social Wellbeing” (DSW) generally operates in four capacities: 1) product/service design consulting for/with local businesses and individuals; 2) commercial product/service development for low-income markets; 3) education for formal/informal manufacturing or crafts sectors; 4) implementing national industrial and economic policy. “Edan is currently looking for BOP product developers / inventors / design firms interested in participating in a case study for his PhD research project.

Via BOP Source, @bopsource. Image from Edan’s Research Proposal (PDF).

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The travels of a plastic cup in Indonesia

From Stealth of Nations;

“The Jakarta Post offers an excellent chronicle of the recycling supply chain in Indonesia, as a plastic cup, once thrown away, moves through layers of the informal economy into the formal economy.

Moh. Darmadi, a self-employed plastic-waste collector, roams the streets of South Jakarta’s Setiabudi neighborhood equipped with a metal picker and a plastic sack on his back. He sells his takings to a lapak — a term for businesses that buy waste material from trash collectors. The price: Rp 900 for a kilogram of plastic cups and bottles; half that amount for plastic bags.The lapak, which employs laborers to clean, sort, and prepare the plastic, earns perhaps Rp 10 million a week per truckload of recycled materials.

The purchaser more carefully sorts the plastics, and then runs them through a shredder which chops the raw material into fine pellets. This business sells to formal sector manufacturers, for a weekly turnover of Rp 45 million.Only about half of the plastic waste produced annually is being recycled. While plastic accounts for 13.9 percent of the waste in Greater Jakarta, only 6.5 percent is recycled, according to a World Bank pilot project on waste identification.

To increase this amount, it is necessary to work with the informal sector.”

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Benefits of informal waste collection

Inclusive Cities is an organization that aims to improve the livelihoods of the urban working poor, most of whom are employed in the informal economy, many as waste pickers, street vendors, and home-based workers. Inclusive Cities has several reports, one being Waste Pickers (PDF).

“Waste pickers form a small, but vital, part of the informal economy. In nearly every city of the developing world, thousands of men, women, and children make a living collecting, sorting, recycling, and selling the valuable materials thrown away by others.  They collect household waste from the curb side, commercial and industrial waste from dumpsters, and litter from the streets, canals and other urban waterways.  Others live and work in municipal dumps – as many as 20,000 people in Calcutta, 12,000 in Manila, and 15,000 in Mexico City.”

The report lists benefits of informal waste collection as:

• Contribution to public health and sanitation. In the fast-growing cities of the developing world, informal waste collection is the only way that waste gets removed from the many neighborhoods not served by municipal authorities. Third World municipalities only collect between 50 and 80 percent of the refuse generated in their cities.
• Employment and a source of income for poor people. The World Bank estimates that one percent of the urban population in developing countries earns a living through waste collection and/or recycling, in the poorest countries, up to two percent do so. A significant number are women, and, in some cases, children.
• Provision of inexpensive recycled materials to industry. This reduces the need for expensive imports. The Mexican paper industry, for example, depends on wastepaper to meet about 74 percent of its fiber needs, and buys cardboard collected by Mexico’s cartoneros at less than one-seventh the price it would pay for market pulp from the U.S.
• Reduction in municipal expenses. Waste collectors reduce the amount of waste that needs to be collected, transported and disposed of with public funds—in Indonesia, for example, by one-third. And in Bangkok, Jakarta, Kanpur, Karachi, and Manila, informal waste collectors save each city at least US$23 million a year in costs for waste management and raw material imports.
• Contribution to environmental sustainability. In many cities, informal recycling is the only kind of recycling that occurs at all. It decreases the amount of virgin materials used by industry, thereby conserving natural resources and energy while reducing air and water pollution. It also reduces the amount of land that needs to be devoted to dumps and landfills. 

Image credit; Mikhael Subotzky.

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Plastic waste recycling press

From Afrigadget.

“We’ve got a lot of plastic trash all over Africa, especially in the cities. A team from IDDS (Amit Gandhi from the US, and Mark Driordan from the UK) decided to create a way to add value to waste plastic by using a low-cost process to transform it into something useful: plastic sheets. From these sheets can be made a number of other products. On display they had shoes, bags, pencil cases and folders.”

See video here.

Image credit, Maker Faire Africa Flickr pool. 

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The recession and informal recyclers

From the New York Times; A Scrap of Decency

“Among those suffering from the global recession are millions of workers who are not even included in the official statistics: urban recyclers — the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse. Their work is both unrecorded and largely unrecognized, even though in some parts of the world they handle as much as 20 percent of all waste.

The world’s 15 million informal recyclers clean up cities, prevent some trash from ending in landfills, and even reduce climate change by saving energy on waste disposal techniques like incineration.

They also recycle waste much more cheaply and efficiently than governments or corporations can, and in many cities in the developing world, they provide the only recycling services.

But as housing values and the cost of oil have fallen worldwide, so too has the price of scrap metal, paper and plastic. From India to Brazil to the Philippines, recyclers are experiencing a precipitous drop in income. Trash pickers and scrap dealers in Minas Gerais State in Brazil, for example, saw a decline of as much as 80 percent in the price of old magazines and 81 percent for newspapers, and a 77 percent drop in the price of cardboard from October 2007 to last December.

In the Philippines, many scrap dealers have shuttered so quickly that researchers at the Solid Waste Management Association of the Philippines didn’t have a chance to record their losses.

In Delhi, some 80 percent of families in the informal recycling business surveyed by my organization said they had cut back on “luxury foods,” which they defined as fruit, milk and meat. About 41 percent had stopped buying milk for their children. By this summer, most of these children, already malnourished, hadn’t had a glass of milk in nine months. Many of these children have also cut down on hours spent in school to work alongside their parents.

Families have liquidated their most valuable assets — primarily copper from electrical wires — and have stopped sending remittances back to their rural villages. Many have also sold their emergency stores of grain. Their misery is not as familiar as that of the laid-off workers of imploding corporations, but it is often more tragic.

Few countries have adopted emergency measures to help trash pickers. Brazil, for one, is providing recyclers, or “catadores,” with cheaper food, both through arrangements with local farmers and by offering food subsidies. Other countries, with the support of nongovernmental organizations and donor agencies, should follow Brazil’s example. Unfortunately, most trash pickers operate outside official notice and end up falling through the cracks of programs like these.

A more efficient temporary solution would be for governments to buoy the buying price of scrap. To do this, they’d have to pay a small subsidy to waste dealers so they could purchase scrap from trash pickers at about 20 percent above the current price. This increase, if well advertised and broadly utilized, would bring recyclers back from the brink.

In the long run, though, these invisible workers will remain especially vulnerable to economic slowdowns unless they are integrated into the formal business sector, where they can have insurance and reliable wages.

This is not hard to accomplish. Informal junk shops should have to apply for licenses, and governments should create or expand doorstep waste collection programs to employ trash pickers. Instead of sorting through haphazard trash heaps and landfills, the pickers would have access to the cleaner scrap that comes straight from households and often brings a higher price. Employing the trash pickers at this step would ensure that recyclables wouldn’t have to be lugged to landfills in the first place.

Experienced trash pickers, once incorporated into the formal economy, would recycle as efficiently as they always have, but they’d gain access to information on global scrap prices and would be better able to bargain for fair compensation. Governments should charge households a service fee, which would also supplement the trash pickers’ income, and provide them with an extra measure of insurance against future crises.

Their labor makes our cities healthier and more livable. We all stand to gain by making sure that the work of recycling remains sustainable for years to come.”

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Recycling in Nairobi

Steve Daniels has a great post at Analogue/Digital about Nairobi’s Industrial Area. “Essential to the Industrial Area’s thriving activity, and indeed a critical differentiator from rural jua kalis, is an equally thriving materials infrastructure. To sustain the manufacturing of so many diverse products, a separate industry has emerged for raw materials, both recycled and new.”
“Working with scrap material presents new design challenges. Flexibility is critical when ideal parts are not always available.”
Have a look at Nairobi Industrial Area: Products for more recycled lamps, boxes and much more. Images by Steve Daniels. 

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Waste Not: Sustainability as survival and foresight

Via do_matic, images by 16 Miles of String. Also see New York Times article.

‘Song Dong’s Project 90 show. The piece of work on display is called Waste Not. Here’s a snippet from the MOMA description:

(A view of the show shot from above by sixteen-miles via Flickr. Our iPhone didn’t cut it.)

Experiencing the piece, I went on a little journey of revelation. I wondered where and how the artist’s mother stored everything. I imagined how she might have imagined using what was kept. I saw how foresight and thriftiness becomes a daily, necessary activity: self-insurance against an uncertain future.

In the end, I realized how little I was doing with what I was consuming and how carefree I felt in my ability to consume more tomorrow. I definitely consume this many bottles in a year, yet I marvel at how this woman kept them or found those that others failed to keep (via sixteen-miles).

 

So back to business design… It made me wonder…

How might we better design products so that they can be there tomorrow for us or for someone else to use them or get value them?

How might we make thriftiness a daily routine? Something to be cherished? Something thrilling?

How might we make one person’s trash another person’s recyclable? In urban or rural environments?

How might we consume less, yet enjoy more?’

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Nokia and education, part one

Met some really interesting students who are designing and exploring education delivery on handheld devices.

‘Project Nokia.Expand aims to create a learning platform for children in developing countries in the form of a mobile device. The device will be durable, low-cost, light-weight, easy to use and contains components that enable the children to interact with their immediate environment. The example applications are based on extensive user studies across multiple countries and continents. They will support learning, communication, and playful interaction within and outside a school. We believe that learning happens through interacting with the world. Technology supports that.’ Design Factory.

More to come after the opening of the Product Design Gala.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Blogging for Readymade

Photo Credit

I am writing for Readymade’s Illustrated Weekly World of Design, topics include the design process, innovation, design news from South Africa and all the other stuff in between.

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Out and about

Having fun, dealing with Africa time, good times.

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