Looking back at the last 15 years of The Prepaid Economy Project
In 2007, I was the Closing Plenary speaker for the CHI2007 25th Anniversary conference in San Jose, CA. Today, I look back at the last 15 years of the “mobile as a post industrial platform for bottom of pyramid and emerging markets” conceptual working space, and find myself ready to move on to a new […]
Resilience of informal urban food systems: Does a systems thinking approach make a difference?
Sterk, van de Leemput, and Peeters (2017) help me start off this sensemaking exercise by clearly distinguishing the difference between engineering resilience and ecological resilience with respect to a system. This was useful to establish the direction of exploration for informal urban food systems. Specifically, Sterk et al (2017) state that ‘engineering’ resilience focuses on […]
Reflecting on Béné’s review of important concepts for local food systems resilience in context of systemic shocks
Béné’s (May, 2020) review last year of the most important concepts for thinking about resilience of local food systems, in context of the pandemic and other shocks provides frameworks for situating empirical data on the resilience strategies employed by informal economic actors in the last mile of Nairobi’s urban food system specializing in fresh produce […]
Reflections on Kate Meagher’s work
Meagher’s work (1990) clearly demonstrates that what I would go on to see 25 years later at the borderland of Uganda and Kenya, she had already seen at the borderland of Uganda and then Zaire (now DRC). Possibly the only difference in our interpretation and narratives is due to our own positional frame of reference […]
Strategy Tools for Value Creation by Including Informal Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
There is a lot to unpack in the title of this post and not all of it might happen here today. Consider this the amuse bouche of my current thinking and writing, with the unexpected side effect of releasing the first faint sounds of music that’s been long hidden in my keyboard. The phrasing of […]
Mobile telephony and low income customers: Market conditions drove product development and pricing
Many who were around and as obsessed by the entry of mobile telephony in the global South during the early years of this century will recall this eyecatching graphic used to illustrate the announcement by Cameroonian researchers Victor and Irene Mbarika that can now be pointed to as the moment Africa’s mobile revolution was born: […]
Theoretical background for contextualizing User Agency in Participatory Processes
Scandinavian participatory design practices are not distinguished by particular methods but rather by political commitments to societal concerns and relationships with participating users and communities. Pelle Ehn writes:`In the interest of emancipation, we deliberately made the choice of siding with workers and their organisations, supporting the development of their resources for a change towards democracy […]
Less Technologically Advanced Societies are not necessarily backward or primitive: Assume at your own risk
This illustration by Jeroen Meijer of Jam Visueldenken of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, was created for our team during a workshop to capture the insights from a feasibility study on agritech we had completed for the Dutch government’s sustainable agricultural value chain development at Wageningen University’s Economic Research unit back in mid 2013. I’m pulling it […]
When digital ecosystem development is far faster than physical ecosystem development
I have the advantage of having seen the evolution of the crop of company sponsored student projects (10 to 12 annually) for at least 7, if not 8 of the annual PDP Galas at the Design Factory (which is only 10 years old) New product development direction is moving towards artefacts and services that integrate […]
Is Design Prepared to be Responsible?
Last week, I was invited to join a 60 strong group of pan African thinkers in law, human rights, gender, debt and related issues to convene in Nairobi to explore the concept of predatory lending now being delivered direct to your handheld device. As a human centered designer, I was rocked back on my heels […]
