Interim project report: User centered Agricultural value chain development
My colleague and project leader for the current work in The Netherlands, Bart Doorneweert has just published an excellent analysis of our workshop on user centered design for a multi stakeholder group invited by the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs. Here’s a snippet: Insights on the multi-stakeholder working processWhen the break-out groups re-convened […]
Static income vs dynamic income
It was when attempting to clearly distinguish between patterns of cash flow in the formal vs the informal economy, using the concept of the degree of control granted to the end user over the variables of time (duration, frequency, periodicity) and money (amount, cash or kind), that it struck me what kind of difference does […]
Who is Farmer Pedro?
If we were to arrive at a synthesized view of your average subsistence farmer, lets call him Pedro, how would we describe him? What is Farmer Pedro’s story? He grows enough to keep body and soul going, his first priority is always feeding his own family before selling any grain to the market. Perhaps this […]
Cashpower: prepaid electricity in Rwanda
Maarja Motus, an Estonian designer and my recent intern spent 3 weeks in Rwanda recently conducting some research on my behalf. Here’s an extract from her report on Cashpower, the Rwandese term for prepaid electricity. An electricity agent (Cashpower agent) next to Kigali market has 300 customers, only 10 of them buy for whole month […]
Mapping the path to prototyping an adaptable user centered design process
We’ve all seen the classic User Centered Design (UCD) process diagrams, mostly linear, that attempt to communicate the steps yet unable to capture the iterative nature of the activity simply due to the limitations on how many circular arrows one can add without losing clarity. When I first began exploring the process deeply for application […]
Developing a user centered methodology for emerging markets and the bottom of the pyramid
When I first began strategic design planning and concept development specifically focusing on low income customers back in late 2007, it was a learning experience in more ways than expected. The key challenge, which I’d identified back then and tend to refer to as the “values gap” between mainstream consumer culture and what used to […]
Exploring the concept of user inspired policy planning
Getting up close and personal with Farmer Pedro at the Minbuza Since late September I’ve been collaborating with Bart Doorneweert on an exploratory project for the Dutch government, taking a closer look at the design process for policy and planning related to private sector development of sustainable agriculture value chains. We’ve been thinking a lot […]
Barcelona and informality
The ancient Roman town of Barsino, or Barcelona, the Catalan capital in Spain, was the location for the recently concluded symposium on the Informal Economy. Short overview of the conference is here, while on Flickr you’ll find my overdose on Antoni Gaudi as well as just the myriads of eyecatching details of the city. I’ve […]
Reflecting on The Informal Economy, October 2012
John Keith Hart, who first saw the economic activity of the “unemployed” in Accra, Ghana back in the beginning of the 1970’s, almost exactly 40 years ago, opened the symposium with the statement that the informal economy had gone mainstream. After all, he said, here was a gathering of folks from around the world, ready […]
Risk mitigation strategies in the uncertainty of the informal economy
What is the role of flexibility as an inherent design principle for transactions in the informal economy? Why is it so critical to the success or failure of business models in this operating environment? What does flexibility primarily tend to mean in this context? Uncertainty is the primary differentiator between the developed world’s systems that […]
