Irshaad Vawda | 17 March 2021 | Tools and Tea Home
Over the last few months, we’ve soft-launched a new programme at Engineers Without Borders South Africa (EWB-SA), called Design a Difference. For me personally, this is a significant milestone, and it feels like my best work yet in the “engineering/design for good” space.
So what is this new programme, Design A Difference?
Design a Difference is a new EWB-SA programme that brings experienced professionals - not just engineers - to work with under-resourced communities to help them solve their challenges. The programme will focus mostly, but not exclusively, on infrastructure related projects - water, electricity, transportation, buildings, healthcare and education infrastructure etc. The programme will also focus on innovative (new) ideas/solutions that have the potential to scale to other communities and simliar contexts.
The thesis behind Design a Difference is simple: South Africa can be divided into two groups: the resourced and under-resourced, and the imbalance between the two requires increased effort to correct1 We’ve used the term under-served previously, but have shifted away after learning about the connotations of the phrase. See here, here and here for example.. Design a Difference is one such effort. Let me expand a bit more. There are many, many under-resourced communities in South Africa. By under-resourced, I mean that these communities don’t receive the attention that they deserve from engineers, bankers, designers, sociologists and everyone in between, in order to solve their challenges. Inadequately serviced by people who have the appropriate training and experience, these communities are often left with serious challenges around basic rights like water and electricity. These are typically communities without (conventional, liquid)2 Many of these communities live in areas with deep mineral/agricultural wealth, and deep cultural wealth too wealth who are ignored by both business and government (for different reasons).
On the other end of the spectrum are the wealthy group, who are lucky enough to have the attention of business and often even government. As a result, engineers and bankers and sociologists and psychologists are paid by them to solve their problems.
This discrepancy between the resourced and under-resourced requires us to try explore new ways of bringing sufficient attention of skilled people to assist under-served communities. Design a Difference attempts to do exactly that.
The programme has been very deliberately designed to facilitate bringing experienced professionals to work with under-resourced communities. There are several characteristics of the programme that facilitates this: (1)it’s a part-time, volunteer driven platform, (2) it focuses on on professionals with several years of experience, (3)it employs a distributed workforce but is co-ordinated by single project manager who is based near the host community, (4) it embraces a “socio-technical” perspective that embraces diverse skills and works with the community by centering their perspectives, (5) it employs a “systems” perspective to understand the context of the challenge, but also to manage the project, (6) it emphasizes the value of domain specific knowledge, (7) it encourages a high level of transparency and documentation, (8) it’s projects operate with a slower cadence than a normal engineering-type project, (9) it does not prescribe a specific design process, other than to embrace the iterative and messy nature of such efforts.
All of these mechanics and characteristics have been specifically designed, but before diving into an elaboration of the programme design, I think it’s instructive to explore the theoretical basis of the programme.
And before exploring the theory, I’d like to issue some disclaimers at this point. This piece is not particularly well referenced and annotated, particularly with respect to my usual standard (see this post for example). This is especially problematic since this is the first attempt at setting out the “why and how” of the Design a Difference programme. As an attempt at a “foundational” explanation, the lack of robustness is particularly worrisome.
This limitation, introduced by a lack of thorough referencing and annotation, is however emblematic of the messiness of the projects in the programme. I am (ironically) forced by an organisational deadline to put this out into the world short of the robustness standards that I would normally apply - one of the “beta projects” in the programme is raring to go.
Despite a (current) lack of easily available referencing and annotation, the ideas and thoughts expressed here have been developed over many years, and after reading many, many articles and books on different topics. It’s almost an accretion of knowledge that I draw on here, rather than a clear linkage between sources. I think that the ideas here will hold up over time (I hope), but certainly the lack of explicit referencing erodes the current robustness.
As a remedy to this limitation, I intend to revise this piece, updating it with more referencing and building my typical sidenote annotations. As I update it, I will keep this version, and any subsequent versions, available and linked to from this URL. I wonder what we might learn as this piece evolves (this reminds me of the “digital gardening” concept, which I am yet to write about)
Now that I’ve listed the limitations, I want to spent a little time on the why of the programme. Why does the programme exist in this format? This section, “theory” will deal with the theoretical underpinning of the programme, and try to explain its conceptualisation.
I want to note upfront that I am not trained to understand the political-economics of the world, and so the theoretical framework I present here is likely to be viewed by anyone better-trained as reductionist (at best) and substantively incorrect (much worse). I am an engineer by training, but one that is a big fan of and drawn to “the humanities.” As an engineer wanting to help correct the imbalance I perceive between the resourced and under-resourced, I require a working theoretical foundation for my activities in this space 3 In my previous piece, I cover my own positions on capitalism vs socialism, political organisation etc. This theory start’s where that one leaves of: i.e. working as engineers within the existing system to improve the world. And this is exactly the framework I present below. A last note on this point (which is now effectively a paragraph long disclaimer): as a working framework, I’m very open to updating my many assumptions made implicitly in the theory below, and as such, I am open to changing my mind on this theory.
Using the framework of resourced and under-resourced groups, it’s instructive to ask why under-resourced communities receive less attention and therefore fewer resources. I noted earlier that their lack of wealth results in them not being able to pay for the services of engineers and other professionals, but really this is much more complex, and deserves a little more attention here.
It’s straightforward enough to trace the linkage between lack of wealth and a lack of attention from businesses / markets. Private for-profit-companies are unlikely to invest money and resources into developing solutions for communities that can’t afford to pay for them. This is especially true of infrastructure services like roads and water treatment, where the customer is essentially a large group of difficult-to-coordinate people. However, the counter-balance to this is meant to be government, at least in democratic settings, and it’s more complex to understand why this counter-balance fails. Government is meant to correct the imbalance between the wealthy and the poor (the resourced and the under-resourced), and ensure that the poor are resourced as adequately as the wealthy. In theory, this should work because if government fails to do this, they would loose the vote of the under-resourced, and be replaced by another government. In practice however, it seems a different story.
Take for example South Africa. Corruption and incompetence has all but collapsed the government’s ability to truly serve the under-resourced, yet no major changes in governance (via the ballot) has occurred. This is despite the under-resourced population of the country representing the majority of the country. This is true of governance by the ANC, the DA4 See for example the economic disparities in the Western Cape, and the EFF. The reasons for this are incredibly complex, and studied by people trained to make sense of the political-economy of this country - I cannot hope to begin to understand why this is so. Yet it is the case. It is true that government’s failure (both local and national) to address the needs of the under-resourced has not yielded substantial changes in the people who run these governments.
In summary then, under-resourced people remain under-resourced because markets cannot see how they make a profit by providing services for these groups, and governments often, for whatever reason, do not face the consequences of not resourcing these communities.
What options remain then for those of us who would like to see this imbalance corrected? I can see only a few. On the one hand, we can support the development of strategies, skills and tools that help turn the under-resourced communities into consumers, and thus enable markets / private enterprise to fill this gap. This option reminds me of a book I read as an impressionable university student - the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (which was first published as an article)5 At the time, I was enthralled by the book, silly me, and I thought it would pave the way for the true end of poverty. I still remember regularly quoting “C K Prahalad.” Ah, youth!. This, I think, is at the very least too slow a change mechanism for my liking, relying as it does6 At least in my understanding on the “trickle down” effect. There are also, several more philosophical objections to these ideas, but speed for me is among the top most concerns.
On the other hand, we can support efforts to force government to address this imbalance. Activities like supporting good journalism, safe-guarding various important institutions, organizing political power to hold government to account and many other options, are ways of doing this. This approach, while better than turning under-resourced communities into consumers, is still too slow for my liking and requires a special skill set that few have7 I wrote about “organizing” in my previous post.
To be clear, both the above options are good, and should be pursued in situations where it makes sense. Both these options however require resources, which can come essentially from taxes or charity. I use the word charity deliberately here, because while the terms “philanthropy” and “non-profits” are often used, I think it’s useful to use the older but perhaps more direct term “charity.” And by charity, I mean the voluntary transfer of resources from the wealthy to the poor.
Both the above options would need to be executed through non-profit organisations (universities, NGOs, grass-roots politics etc.). However, both are indirect resourcing of the under-resourced.
There is at least another option I can see - the role of non-profit organisations in directly resourcing these under-resourced communities. When you come to the limits of what markets/business and government are capable of (for whatever reasons), there is still the option of non-profits intervening directly. Non-profits are usually funded by charity, which introduces its own set of challenges, and sometimes by taxes (for example in the case of some universities) but non-profits are theoretically capable of bridging part (but not all) of the gap between the under-resourced and resourced by performing the role of government.
Non-profits are capable of doing at least a little of what some corrupt, incompetent and even just slow/risk averse governments are incapable of. This includes the delivery of basic services to people, but also includes activities like helping for-profit businesses to sell services to the under-resourced.
Of course, since non-profits rely heavily on voluntary contributions for their resources, they face the obvious challenge that the wealthy do not easily support the development of mechanisms that focus attention away from them and towards the poor, particularly as the wealthy tend to view such decisions through a “short-term” lens8 A long term view would ostensibly indicate to the wealthy that their own well-being (specifically their progeny’s well being) is inextricably tied to the well-being of poor. For this reason, NGOs are clearly not a silver bullet solution, but rather just one valuable option among others.
So far, in this theoretical discussion, I’ve shown (hopefully) that bridging the attention gap between the resourced and under-resourced can be done in multiple ways. All of these ways should be pursued. One of these ways is supporting non-profits in directly resourcing under-resourced communities (performing a role that would ideally be executed by government).
The next question, for me at least, is what is meant by “directly” resourcing these communities? Here I can think of two options. The first is simply to deliver services and assistance to communities that would ordinarily be delivered by government. For example, building a road or a water treatment plant or an extension to the electricity grid. Here there is no innovation or anything particularly new - it’s simply executing known solutions for well-understood problems.
The second option is one I stumbled upon by reading Bill Gate’s writing (which is impressively succinct) on what he calls “catalytic philanthropy” very useful. Gates writes:
"But let’s face it: Capitalism is not good at meeting the needs of the very poor. Entrepreneurs and investors generally don’t sink their time, treasure, and talent into developing products for people who can’t afford to pay for them.
Government can offer services where the market does not and thus offer a safety net. But many governments do not take the long view, because of the short length of election cycles. And it’s hard for rich governments to justify big investments in research that may only benefit people in far-off countries—and they’re not well suited to bringing successful ideas to market.
When you come to the end of the innovations that business and government are willing to invest in, you still find a huge unexplored space of innovation where the returns can be fantastic. This space is a fertile area for what I’ve called “catalytic philanthropy.”
There are innovations out there that could generate earth-shaking returns. But if you’re in the private sector, you can’t even look at these investments because the returns won’t come to the innovator; they’ll go to poor people or society generally. The magic of philanthropy is that it throws off that constraint."
— Bill Gates, on his GatesNotes Blog
In the above piece, Gates zeros in on the role non-profit can play in innovating new solutions. Innovation, in this model, is different to executing the typical activities a government might do (e.g. water treatment), and refers instead to the generation of new ideas whose value would accrue mostly to under-resourced communities. I like to think of these innovations as new, fresh ideas that generate much more value at a much lower cost, for the benefit of under-resourced communities9 I think the use of bicycles in many, but not all, transportation systems is an example of this. Bicycles offer tremendously more value to commuters at much lower overall total system costs. A similiar case exists in solar generated electricity, which provides emission free electricity at much lower system cost.
The key take away here from Gate’s work for me is that the optimal role of non-profits is to focus on innovation and not necessarily on direct service provision. While both are valuable, and again both should be pursued, focusing limited non-profit resources on innovations is the “sweet-spot” strategy wise.
And this is exactly why the Design a Difference program is designed the way it is. It focuses on bringing the deep skills of many different people to work with under-resourced communities to develop innovative solutions to their challenges - solutions that have the potential to scale.
The optimal role, therefore, in the non-profit space is to find innovations that help close the gap between the resourced and under-resourced. While I support this idea, it’s worth pointing out that I do think that non-innovative activities that focus attention on the under-resourced (take for example, a simple food scheme aimed at addressing hunger in school children) are still extremely valuable.
I pause here to tackle very briefly (and really this requires much more interrogation) an important counter-point on innovation. One of the many books I’m in the process of reading isProf Lily Irani’s book “Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India”. Irani makes a good argument cautioning against “chasing innovation” - she specifically argues for caution against “entrepreneurial innovation”10 She only uses this term once in the book by my count, but I understand her to be referring to this flavour of innovation throughout the book. It really is a book worth engaging with more deeply. For the moment, my view on this is yes, entrepreneurial innovation is not a silver bullet, and much less effective than is often touted by media and business. However I do think such innovations should certainly be encouraged, and perhaps that’s where I diverge from Irani’s view (although I’m not sure I fully understand her position yet). But the type of innovation I’m referring to in this piece is not entrepreneurial. Rather, it’s “Commons innovation” (I haven’t seen this term used myself11 But the term “innovation commons” seems to be a fairly well defined concept, but like all things, I’m sure there is either a better name for what I’m referring to here, or the same name is already in usage somewhere) where the benefits of such innovation accrue to the Commons firstly, and not to entrepreneurs. Put more plainly, these innovations don’t make private individuals money, because they don’t have a business model, and as a result are by definition reliant on a revenue stream that is either tax or philanthropy. These innovations do however, bring significant value to society in general.
And that, I think, is the theoretical basis for this programme. It’s clearly possible to poke holes at this framework, and I invite you reader, to do exactly that. I’m hoping that after some intense prodding, the framework is still standing.
Having explained the theoretical basis for the programme, I want to focus now on the design of the programme. This section therefore is about how rather than why. Design a Difference has been very deliberately designed, with very deliberate decisions taken in it’s conceptualisation. Recalling that the programme aims to bring a diverse set of professionals skills to work with under-resourced communities, we can now explore these mechanics and features briefly.
The programme is aimed at attracting a diverse set of skills. This not only refers to engineering skills, but much beyond that. The idea is not simply to attract civil, mechanical, electrical etc. engineering skill, but also those from finance and the humanities. Since the programme employs the “socio-technical” perspective and tackles wicked challenges, it requires the skills of sociologists and anthropologists12 One day when I’m big I’ll have be able to tell these folks apart more readily than a vague intuitive feeling for the difference and psychologists and accountants and bankers and lawyers and corporate financiers and the list goes on and on.
This is an important feature, because while EWB-SA focuses primarily on the role of engineers, the programme needs to be able to cater way beyond that to be succesful. For example, engineers tend to manage sub-system interfaces in a certain way (hello classical Systems Engineering) but sociologists might struggle to operate within that framework (seeing nuance everywhere, as they do). The design of the programme must therefore account for this diverse skill set it aims to attract.
This programme is also aimed at recruiting professionals with several years of experience. The reason for this is straightforward: professionals with experience understand their craft and domain well enough to be able to add high levels of value to the projects in the programme. This is immediately different from EWB-SA’s other “community-project” efforts, which are usually run by students with little experience, and usually tackle simpler challenges13 By subsetting the larger, thorny challenges that all under-resourced communities face. The Design a Difference programme is therefore aimed squarely at our “Professional Membership,” which brings depth of (diverse) skill to the programme.
This point is explored in detail in the theory section, but from a design point of view, the programme needs to cater for working with poor, under-resourced communities. The practical implications of this can vary from “the majority of our partner community cannot read, so our engineering reports are of very limited value to them” to “Google Drive is a widely used tool in our partner community, but video is limited due to data costs.”
The implications of working with communities with low resources are many, and the Design a Difference programme has only begun to grapple with this. This is another areas I’m personally excited to watch to see how the tooling and processes we build plays out.
The programme will focus mostly, but not exclusively, on infrastructure related projects - water, electricity, transportation, buildings, health-care and education infrastructure, internet and information infrastructure, and more. There are multiple reasons for this. To begin with, infrastructure design is heavily determined by the work of engineers, which is our direct community as EWB-SA. It’s therefore a natural fit for our organisation.
Another reason is our belief that infrastructure is a high-impact area for improving people’s lives. Providing clean water, cheaper and cleaner power, cheaper, safer and more accessible transportation, information, and health-care, are all activities that enable communities to do much more by themselves. It’s the enabling nature of infrastructure that attracts me personally - the ability of good infrastructure to unlock human potential is a truly exciting prospect.
This is an important one, and the reasons for it are explored in the theory section more fully. Innovation here refers to the programme focusing on new and fresh ways of achieving solutions. This sets up the programme to very deliberately shy away from existing models and solutions - for example I don’t envisage this specific programme embarking on drilling a series of borehole water pumps for rural communities. Boreholes and accompanying water treatment are an established solution (with it’s own challenges, no doubt14 Like often unsustainable rates of extraction from ground water sources) with existing non-profits that excel at rolling them out (and general operations). Instead, I would like to see the programme develop new governance and funding models for the same borehole pumps, working with existing non-profits in the space.
To be clear, existing models and solutions are of tremendous value. Borehole pumps and water treatment plants bring unquantifiable benefit to under-resourced communities. I have deep respect and admiration for these projects. Having said that, our strength at EWB-SA is our community, and bringing the skills of that community to do fresh and innovative design work is where I believe the highest impact to be (for us as an organisation). Designing, for example, a new method of scheduling patient usage of expensive MRI machines in state hospitals (a seemingly classical industrial engineering meets industrial psych project?15 I haven’t explore whether this is a half decent idea at all - so take this with a pinch of salt) is of more value than simply trying to install a new MRI machine in a community clinic. The new method of scheduling has the potential to scale to many sites beyond the single one, and therefore has (potentially) the bigger impact.
There are many pitfalls with the idea of innovation, some of which are dealt with at the conceptual level in the theory section above (see for example my brief discussion of Lily Irani’s criticism of entrepreneurial innovation). Another important pitfall is the rate of success. Innovation is difficult, and has notoriously low odds of succeeding. Perusing innovation as a non-profit organisation is particularly challenging, since failure is not something donors are happy to tolerate. The design of the programme must account for this dynamic therefore, by building in high levels of transparency, clear expectation setting, very deliberate knowledge management, and more.
A last important point on “innovation” - we are not looking to do basic science research in this programme. Design A Difference is not looking to invent new materials, or even new technologies. Instead, it aims to utilize existing technologies in new configurations and formats. Classical R&D is not the focus of this programme, but rather “systems” type of innovation where existing building blocks are combined in new ways to provide value to under-resourced communities.
Which brings us to the ability to scale. This is another important feature, and also potentially contradictory with another feature: “the socio-technical perspective.”
Innovation, the previous feature, leads to new ideas. The Design a Difference programme however only accepts new ideas that potentially have the ability to scale. How is this assessment made? Well, the programme will need to design a mechanism to do this, but at this conceptual stage, projects will be assessed for their scalability by their potential to be used in other communities with simliar contexts.
And this is where the possible conflict with the “socio-technical perspective” lives. The socio-technical perspective considers both the social and the technical dimensions of a particular challenge. The “social” dimension is designed to center the community’s perspective, putting the uniqueness and intricacies of that community at the focal point of the design effort, and therefore involves psychologists and sociologists and all the other “humanities people.” One of the key ideas behind this approach is that each community has nuances, needs, desires and dynamics that are unique to that community, and therefore solutions must be designed within these parameters (and with these communities). In many ways this means that ideas and solutions are designed to suit a particular community, and the question that then follows with respect to Design a Difference is whether solutions became too unique to a specific’s community to then have the potential to scale. For example, the culture of a certain community might make a certain idea viable, but this culture could be fairly unique to that particular place, thus rendering the idea effectively un-scalable.
How then to reconcile these two features? On the one hand, to maximise impact the programme aims to find ideas and solutions that are scalable. On the other hand, the programme designs for the communities uniqueness and particular characteristics in order to deliver truly valuable solutions.
The answer for me lies in the following hypothesis, which is still to be tested by the programme: there exist sufficient similiarities between South African communities that allow the potential for a successful idea in one place to be replicated with some adjustments in another. In this hypothesis, the differences between certain communities is therefore unlikely to be material to the key characteristics (system architecture) of a successful idea. Let’s say the programme finds a way to provide solar powered flood lights that are highly resistance to theft (I’m aware this is extremely ambitious) in a particular community, there is a reasonable chance that the same model could be applied in other simliar communities in South Africa (but not all). It is my view that the main architectural elements of a successful idea will prove to have high transmittability (and therefore scalability), even if the smaller details (non-architectural elements) will need to be adjusted.
I could be completely and thoroughly wrong about this, and if that is indeed the case, the programme will loose it’s scalability. Given that this is such an important part of the programme, it is probable that if this assumption is proven false, it would have existential implications for Design a Difference.
However, even then, a single community would be the beneficiaries of a well-designed solution. Not, I think, a entirely terrible outcome.
We’ve covered this in the previous section briefly, but there is some value to expanding on the above. The socio-technical perspective proposes the idea that tackling the problems of under-resourced communities needs to account for both the social and technical elements of the problem. Typically, engineers embrace the technical approach and under-weight the social dimension in their analysis and design. This instinct, to come at a problem with a set of technologies and try to make them work, is the wrong approach16 And one that it taught too often at universities in SA - this is why we have our Engineering for People Design Challenge.
Instead, the “socio” part of this perspective encourages us to understand the community and the context of the challenge, prior to considering the technical. That is, before considering if X technology might work, the design team is required to focus first (and continuously) on making sure the community’s needs, desires, dynamics and nuances are well understood. This is simliar to the approach espoused by the “Design Thinking” movement, where the design work is “human centered.” I’ve shied away from using those terms here, for two reasons. The first is that “design thinking” is now, in my view, a term with little actual meaning. Everyone, particularly corporates, uses the phrase today and rarely does it mean actually trying to understand a community. The academic fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science etc., have much more to offer in this space than “Design Thinking” in its current state17 Check out this blistering critique of the topic from a partner at Pentagram (tools like ethnography and different types of field work approaches18 As I write this, I glance up at Jan Chipchase’s book on fieldwork on my bookshelf are, to my mind, far more useful). Truly understanding a community by working with them is difficult, requires time and resources, and a very open-mind. I think Design Thinking, in its original conception, was about exactly this and we collectively owe the field a debt for helping to shift mindsets19 The original Tim Brown article (and subsequent book) is insightful and instructive, and one I regularly reference. However, it has unfortunately gone the way of “creative thinking” and “strength in diversity” and become corporate speak for lots of work without meaning.
My second reason for steering away from the term “human centered” is that the phrase suggests being completely technology agnostic (part I think, of the corporatisation of the idea). This is theoretically a very good and appealing idea. The reality of design work is different, and designers (from engineers to sociologists) often mentally flip between the “functional” and “form” domains20 Borrowing these concepts from systems engineering, or between “understanding” and “solving.” One might be thinking in one moment about understanding the problem better, and in the next asking whether a certain technology or idea might work in this context, and once again switch back to “understanding” a few moments later.
Beyond this natural mental approach, which I’ve found to be a part of the messiness of design, I’ve also found that many good ideas begin with a technology in mind - for example, we might ask questions like “how might mobile phone technology be used to improve access to educational information in community X in rural Mpumalanga?” The answer to these types of questions is often to reject the use of that technology in that setting, after we better understand that context, but the start of the idea is often technology-centric.
All of which is to say, I find it useful to employ a approach that embraces the strengths of both the social and technical perspectives, while hopefully mitigating against their respective weaknesses. The “socio-technical perspective” (which I’m now tempted to call “socio-technical thinking” but it seems adding some PR shine to these concepts is effectively a death sentence for them) is something I’ve personally thought a lot about (find some link) and am optimistic that it’s use on the Design a Difference programme will yeild positiv results.
At the risk of falling into the trap I’ve tried to avoid with respect to “Design Thinking,” I’m including “System’s Thinking” as part of the approach used by the Design a Difference programme. While it suffers similiar problems, Systems Thinking is past the hype phase I think, and there is real value in the practice (even where corporate companies use it).
In this context, I’m referring to Systems Thinking on various levels. At the lowest resolution (30,000 foot view), Systems Thinking can be used to understand relationships between “big concepts”, like the relationship between an under-resourced community’s lack of clean water and the political landscape of the country. At higher resolutions, Systems Thinking, specifically in the form of Systems Engineering, is useful to the programme in managing sub-system interfaces21 Terminal Points anyone!
While System Thinking is a central component of “Design Thinking”, the flavour of Systems Thinking I’m referring to here is a more comprehensive one, and includes all the various tools that have been developed as part of the large Systems Thinking body of knowledge.
Ultimately, the use of Systems Engineering is a pretty essential piece in the Design a Difference programme.
Getting more into the weeds now, the programme is staffed by part-time volunteers. The primary reason for this is resource constraints. Like any non-profit programme, limited resources are a feature of the programme by definition. To do more with less, the programme draws on a volunteer work-force, which essentially means that the work done on the programme is unpaid (for now, and this has some nuance to it, discussed a little later).
The “workforce” (which should really be called a “volunteer-force”) is also part-time, with the programme “contracting” people as it needs it. This is not dissimilar to for-profit (engineering) projects, which also draw on specialised skills as and when needed.
A big attraction of the programme is based on this part-time, volunteer dynamic: engineers and other professionals who wish to “do good/do more” with their time, can now contribute to projects by using their main skill, and on terms that suit their lifestyles. For example, a civil engineer specialising in steel structures can now help to design a steel structure for a solution in an under-resourced community, during a period at work/life where she is less busy.
Of course, managing this complexity (part-time, volunteer workforce) requires a whole new set of management tooling, which will be built out by the programme over time.
Another of the features of the programme that follows from having a part-time, volunteer-force is that this work-force becomes a distributed one. Volunteers can sit almost anywhere in the world, working remotely on project. While this is all the rage currently in tech-driven industries22 And due to COVID-19, now all industries, many of the same principles apply to the Design a Difference programme.
All the tooling used in remote work in the tech world can be used here - video-conferencing like Zoom, MS Teams etc. and other tools like Slack, Drive, Dropbox, Notion, Basecamp etc. all become part of the tooling set for the programme.
However, there are some important differences between the typical “remote work” approach used in the tech-world and the approach we intend to use on Design a Difference. This programme requires that we work very closely with host communities, and to ensure that this happens, we will have a locally based project manager.
A project manager is someone who heads up the entire project for EWB-SA, adhering to the principles and guidelines set out by the organisation. The PM is required to be based in, or at the minimum, very close to, the host community in which the project is located. Again, this geographic proximity has been designed into the programme to help it deliver on it’s aim to “design with the community” and account for the nuances of that community.
It’s worth noting a little more about the Project Managers. Project Managers are a critical component of the programme, and will therefore be very carefully selected by the programme. PMs need to:
This last point touches a little on my vision for the programme. I hope that in a year or two, we’re able as EWB-SA to fund a few full time Project Managers (PM) positions. This would allow us to properly hone our approach and develop systems, processes and tools that allow us to deliver on the aims of the programme.
I’ve touched on this in the previous section, and this is a short expansion on the idea. Domain specific knowledge is, to my mind, an essential requirement on the programme. As alluded to previously, by “domain” I’m referring to both the “socio” and the “technical” domains of the project.
Using the technical as an example, if the project in question was related to transportation or water or energy, we’d need deep expertise in that specific area on a project. For the social domain, the project would ideally have a psychologist or sociologist or community worker that has worked in the host community previously on the team.
In both the social and technical domains, specific knowledge is important. Having said that, general and broader skills are also necessary, but I expect these skills to be the more abundant version available on the project, and so no special emphasis needs to be placed on that skill set (unless this assumption proves incorrect)
An important feature of the Design a Difference programme is the pace, or cadence, of the projects in it’s fold. Traditional projects, particularly engineering heavy ones, usually move at a quick pace. Time is money in those projects, literally.
The cadence of the programme will be much slower than the traditional project. This is for many reasons. For one, an emphasis on centering the community through the socio-technical approach means taking time to work with and understand the community. For another, being staffed by a part-time workforce constrains the pace at which we can work.
There is also the question of the size of the challenge - the challenges taken on by the project are not easy to “solve”, and by definition are “wicked problems.” This requires a slower pace, one that allows time for ideas to emerge slowly, and problems to marinate in the minds of the team.
The slow cadence of the project is also an important part of the expectation alignment within the project team, and the host community. There are unlikely to be quick fixes in the Design a Difference programme.
The programme embraces a very open-ended design process. I am of the view that each project will need to develop it’s own design process, and each will look very different to the other.
There are however at least two characteristics that I envisage will be common to all the design processes across the programme. The first is that I expect all projects to have lengthy phases dedicated to exploring and understanding the community (by working with the community). The second is that I expect the design process to be highly iterative, oscillating regularly between understanding the problem (both the social and the technical) and developing solutions that could potentially work.
This non-linear nature of the design process is one that reflects the “messy” nature of the design work on such challenges. It’s unlikely that the projects in the Design a Difference portfolio will exhibit neat and linear progress. Part of the excitement for me personally is, after the projects have made some progress, being able to review the pathways taken by these projects.
My own desire to review projects retrospectively (as I mentioned above) is only one of many reasons that this programme requires a high degree of documentation. Thorough and comprehensive documentation is one of the key steps to ensuring transparency, which is important in it’s own right (accountability to funders, our members and our broader community).
High levels of documenting the projects in the programme are also necessary to achieve the impact we are aiming for - a thoroughly transparent project allows other people working on simliar problems to learn from it, thus increasing the potential for this work to “scale.” It further allows us (and others) to identify failures and weaknesses, thus improving the odds of success of existing and future projects.
Transparency and heavy documentation go hand-in-hand, and the project will still need to tackle the various questions related to licensing of the documentation accumulated (when to use a Creative Commons license for example, and which one). We will also need to think through the challenges presented by the friction between privacy and openness - if projects are successful at working closely with communities, it’s likely that there will be some intimate and private information shared, which cannot then be shared with the broader world. There will therefore need to be a method of abstracting the lessons from the private information shared by individuals such that they can be used in more general terms (“Data Anonymization”).
A convenient “spin-off” benefit of heavily documenting projects is marketing material! Perhaps we’ll be able to someday produce documentaries like this really cool one from a (now closed) company called Makani
All of this is to say that the Design a Difference programme will embrace openness as far as possible, without compromisng privacy or the success of the underlying project (for example, some suppliers might be willing to provide better pricing for the project, but would prefer not to share their detailed proposal for competitive reasons).
If you’ve made it this far, a big thank you from me for indulging my thoughts on the Design a Difference programme. I set out some limitations earlier, and I hope that you were able to read this piece more charitably with those in mind.
My vision is to see this programme have a meaningful impact on the under-resourced communities of South Africa. Having made right to the bottom of this lengthy (and no doubt slightly verbose piece) I hope you will join me in this effort.