Human centered design for financial inclusion: Lessons from fieldwork in rural India, The Phillipines and Kenya
Introduction Financial inclusion has become mainstream thinking in economic development. The vast majority of the unbanked live in the developing world, and a significant proportion of this population are rural residents. One can easily surmise, without recourse to statistics, that the bulk of the target audience for institutions seeking to offer them affordable and accessible […]
Thinking like a user centered designer about brand management
Design is fundamentally a value system, a set of principles, that is then manifested in tangible form. Conventionally, this has been known as setting the design criteria. However, rather than specification guidelines, as used in engineering, if one were to change metrics and numbers into values or emotional responses, one could, in fact, create a […]
A design challenge for agric service innovation in rural Africa
Find a way to embed principles of sustainable good agriculture for the smallscale farmer in a socio-economically beneficial way. How would we do this? Where do we begin? The answers to these questions and more will be forthcoming on this blog. I reach out and encourage you all to consider submitting your thoughts and opinions […]
Post-Colonial Design Blowback: the challenge facing the global design industry
By Niti Bhan | Published: July 16, 2010 With Bruce Nussbaum My twitter feed informed me this morning about the storm in the designer teacup raging around Bruce Nussbaum’s post last week “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?” and I followed through religiously by catching up on “In Defense of Design Imperialism” – the rebuttal […]
Why are they shaming Simon Berry for making an important and valuable strategic change? #colalife
In my 2009 article “The 5Ds of BoP Marketing: Touchpoints for a holistic, human centered strategy” I used Simon Berry’s initial work, with Cola Life, as an example of innovative distribution models, so: Such “piggybacking” has been attempted on an existing tried and tested global distribution network as a way to distribute medicines to the […]
Consuming the future: a wide angled perspective
This was written at the end of August 2007; how far have we progressed? Even as I have just written about sustainable design and ecodesign, I find myself pondering the larger issues at stake. I didn’t set out to go green and I’m not wholly sure what my outlook is on this topic as yet. […]
Case study of design strategy failure: Whirlpool World Washer for emerging markets
This is a comprehensive study of the introduction of an automatic washing machine, the World Washer, into the Indian market, by Whirlpool Corporation in 1990. Conceived as an important part of Whirlpool’s global strategy in the late nineteen eighties, it was designed for the emerging markets of Mexico, Brazil and India. It failed dramatically and […]
Time to plan the obsolescence of consumerism
Consumers did not exist prior to WW2. People did. It was after the postwar boom in the United States that a variety of existing professions evolved and morphed to meet the needs of Big Business as industrial production and wealth increased. Consumers were created to meet the unmet needs of the producers. The Waste Makers, […]
Why is design important?
Design is first and foremost a philosophy, based on a system of values, which seeks to solve problems. What are we creating? Why and for whom? Are we correctly framing the problem to be solved? These are the questions to which the answers are then manifested tangibly in the form of a new product, service […]
At the Estonian Design Society in Tallinn
Tallinn, Estonia on 28th June 2012 Lots of user centered design talk, strawberries and wine. This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
