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Tyler Valiquette chats with Cat Laine
The article that helped launch an organization, 
Tyler, Heather and Matt McLean featured on 
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The focus of 
Lead Designer Noel Wilson is interviewed for Carelton University’s design journal FIELDS for their 
San
We’re honored to have our CEO and Co-Founder, Heather Fleming, featured in PBS and Aol’s 
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The Navajo Times, the premier newspaper on the Navajo Nation, covers Catapult Design in a story titled, “
New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal features Catapult co-founder Heather Fleming’s story in a piece titled: “
In “
Read Catapult’s contribution to the Singapore Sessions’s “
ELLE Magazine’s May 2010 issue features 2010 
Catapult’s Heather Fleming, Mark Summer of 
Teju Ravilochan of the 
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Triple Pundit covers Catapult in its 
PRI’s The World interviews Catapult CEO Heather Fleming for their feature on
What is demand-driven innovation?
“As the populations moves toward the 9 billion mark and the Earth’s
climate becomes increasingly variable, we face growing social and
environmental problems,” is the opening text for Demand-Driven.org,
a new site for the international development community. ”Solving these
problems entails understanding what low-income communities need and
want. Developing solutions to tackle these global problems requires
thinking early about how the product or service will get to market, how
the private sector might get involved, and how to leverage diferent
sources of finance.”
With support from the World Bank, GATD, Catapult Design and Alana Conner Communications kicked
off development of Demand-Driven.org as a resource for innovators
tackling challenges in low-income communities. Intended for funders,
policymakers and practitioners, the new site serves as a prompt for
discussion around six areas affecting these innovators: customers,
products & services, marketing, commercialization, financing and
metrics.
Using stories from on-the-ground innovators interviewed in Rwanda,
Kenya, India, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the UK and beyond, the site
illustrates how organizations and individuals successfully (and
sometimes not so successfully) overcame the roadblocks in the design and
delivery of new products and new services.
We welcome your input, your stories, and ideas for
additional prompts. Tell us what resources the industry needs to be
successful at instigating change. We’d love to hear from you!
Catapult Labs 2013 in less than two minutes
If you missed Catapult Labs this year, here’s a quick rundown of the day in 99 photos. See you next year in San Francisco and on the Navajo Nation!
Catapult Labs 2013 from Catapult Design on Vimeo.
Photos by Justin Halgren Photography
Catapult receives grant to support entrepreneurial design event on the Navajo Nation
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Acting Chairman Joan Shigekawa
announced today that Catapult Design, a product and service design firm
based in San Francisco, is one of 817 nonprofit organizations nationwide
to receive an NEA Art Works grant. Catapult Design’s grant will support
the expansion of its design and innovation education program to the
Navajo Nation in Arizona.
In 2012 Catapult Design hosted its first design event, Catapult Labs,
in San Francisco with the goal of exposing attendees to new design
tools and methods that spark and support positive social change. With
NEA funds, Catapult will host this event on the Navajo Nation in 2014.
The event will bring together designers and entrepreneurs from Silicon
Valley and the Navajo Nation to build networks, activate communities,
and spark entrepreneurial social innovation.
In 2010, the unemployment rate on the Navajo Nation – which crosses
Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – spanned 40-70%, compared to 9.6% across
the U.S. Despite resource-rich land, the largest tribal landmass in the
country, and a viable workforce of 180,500 people, the growth of Navajo
small businesses is less than half the growth rate for the U.S.
By engaging local partners, such as the Rural Entrepreneurship
Institute in New Mexico, Catapult will assemble Native American youth
and budding entrepreneurs who want to turn their ideas into realized
solutions for community and economic development on tribal lands.
“It’s an opportunity to cross-pollinate methods and ideas in one of
the most entrepreneurially thriving places in the world – Silicon Valley
– with one of the most entrepreneurially challenged places in the world
– the Navajo Nation. Innovation exists in both places through a
completely different lens,” says Heather Fleming, CEO of Catapult Design
who is also originally from the Navajo Nation. “We’re eager to help
connect and support folks with big ideas for their community.”
Acting Chairman Shigekawa said, “The National Endowment for the Arts
is proud to support these exciting and diverse arts projects that will
take place throughout the United States. Whether it is through a focus
on education, engagement, or innovation, these projects all contribute
to vibrant communities and memorable opportunities for the public to
engage with the arts.”
For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov.
Five Skills Designers Have That Global Development Needs
“Development is being disrupted,” says Raj Kumar, President of DevEx,
a site devoted to helping the international development community
deliver foreign aid more efficiently and effectively. Beyond the buzz
generated by the “social entrepreneurship” and “impact investing”
communities, I’ve seen a significant shift coming from traditional aid
agencies in the past two years.
In 2010, USAID, the agency responsible for administering US foreign aid, launched the first-of-its-kind Development Innovation Ventures
quarterly grant program. Its funding model is inspired by traditional
venture capital and the focus is on scalable and entrepreneurial
solutions to poverty alleviation. Similarly, in 2012 the World Bank
hired a former Silicon Valley Google.org director to lead their new
“Innovation Labs.” UNICEF and the Inter-American Development Bank have
also launched their own “Innovation Labs” with similar goals of promoting open-dialogue, new methods, and cross-pollination of models that enable innovative activity.
So with all this talk about “innovation,” where are the designers,
the technologists, and the entrepreneurs? The folks behind these
initiatives are still folks with international and economic development
backgrounds, economics and finance. If they’re serious about innovative
approaches, it’s time creative problem solvers are added to the
equation. Specifically, here are five strengths designers have that the
development industry direly needs:
1. We are systems thinkers.
The problems that plague our world are complex, interwoven, and
multifaceted. As designers, we solve problems through a combination of
analytic and creative thinking. Many of the best designers I know are
themselves multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary. In addition to a design
degree, they’re also engineers or MBAs or economists. It takes both
sides of the brain to generate solutions to social challenges.
2. Fresh eyes.
Einstein’s “We can’t solve the world’s problems by using the same
type of thinking we used when we created them,” couldn’t ring more true.
Many of the social issues we’re fighting today have existed for decades
and consistently been addressing using old mechanisms—policy, aid, and
philanthropy. We are long overdue for fresh thinking to old problems.
3. We have a prototyping culture.
We make a lot of mistakes in development—mistakes that sometimes
negatively impact people with everything to lose; mistakes that could
potentially be avoided if the development sector fostered a culture of
iteration and refining ideas before rushing to scale. Instead, I see a
lot of money going towards untested ideas or worse yet, “solutions in
search of a problem.”
4. We focus on people.
Many decisions made today that affect the poor are made by people
completely removed from their issues. A designer’s viewpoint, driven by
an understanding of the needs of people or end-users, is completely
unique and lacking within the development sector. The key to better
policy, better products, and better public services is rooted in
understanding of the key players and what motivates them.
5. We create capacity.
We build things. We build products, services, websites—and by doing
so we are intrinsically building the capacity of those who make,
distribute, sell, or use what we create. On a fundamental level, giving
people access to tools that enhance their capacity is what drives
economic development. We play a central role in creating those tools
that are useful, relevant, and meaningful.
$22.8 billion of our projected fiscal budget is earmarked for
poverty-reduction activity in 2013. Traditionally, international
development agencies use the amount of the money put towards poverty
alleviation as a metric for efficacy. I’m hoping the next few years
shift that metric towards understanding underlying problems and funding
new solutions that address those problems. In order to do that, we need a
new breed of development thinkers. The next generation of designers is
inspired by careers that provide meaning and impact. Now is the perfect
time for the development sector to start connecting the dots.
“Reaching the doorsteps of the poor” with Living Goods
Photo by Living Goods
To appreciate companies like Living Goods, you have to transport
yourself to a world without Walmart, UPS, or a local Walgreens pharmacy.
Imagine if in order to purchase an item as simple as soap, you had to
spend more money on transport than the cost of the product alone, not to
mention the time spent away from productive work. As Chuck Slaughter
points out in a recent article in The Economist, “Distribution is often the missing link between design and impact.”
We couldn’t agree more. One of the most common hurdles social
entrepreneurs with exciting product ideas face is the lack of formal
distribution channels in rural markets. The prospect of creating your
own channels, especially without a proven market, is daunting if not
impossible.
Since starting in 2007, Living Goods has tackled this challenge in
Uganda by training local sales agents to deliver life-changing products
such as anti-malaria treatments, fortified foods, solar lamps, clean
burning cook stoves, and sanitary pads. The analogy they use is “Avon
ladies”, where CEO Chuck Slaughter worked for a few years in order to
understand the franchise model.
“Nothing about what we do is a handout,” says Chuck in a recent interview. “It’s really about empowerment. It’s about giving people the tools they need to improve on their own.”
With more than 1,000 profitable agents in Uganda, Living Goods will
expand its service to Kenya this year. The opportunity is huge. And
with a growing customer base, Living Goods is now in a position to build
on their brand through their own product line. In 2012 they began
discussions with a few major packaged goods companies about
manufacturing fortified foods for infants to combat malnutrition. But
big business moves slowly. And Living Goods is eager to address this
critical human need and fill this gap in the market. Enter Catapult
Design.
Catapult and Living Goods have teamed up to develop a new nutritional
product for distribution in Uganda and Kenya. Leveraging expertise from
entities such as GAIN and Technoserve, Catapult will work with the
Ugandan sales agents, Living Goods customers, and East African
manufacturers to prototype a packaged food at a price point appropriate
for rural households.
The end goal? Living Goods’ ultimate goal: to show that companies
can deliver profits and positive human impact. “A sustainable
distribution platform that can meet the needs of the poor — that’s the
holy grail,” say Chuck to The New York Times.
Stay tuned for progress on the partnership with Living Goods.
What Do You Have in Common with a Low-Income Indian Mother? More Than You Think
Photo Courtesy of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
Imagine this: You wake up early, as always, to prepare breakfast for
your family. Wiping the sleep from your eyes you shuffle to the kitchen
and light the stove—out comes billowing black smoke that immediately
fills the room. Business as usual. You put on a pot of water to boil
porridge. Your 3-year-old is now awake and comes over to watch you cook.
They lean against soot-blackened walls and cough chronically as you
continue cooking, learning how it’s done. You try to keep low, below the
acrid smoke, as you feed the stove and stir the porridge, eyes
watering. Breakfast should be ready soon, which is good because the rest
of the family is waking up. As the porridge simmers, your mind turns to
the day ahead—fetching wood, carrying water, going to market, preparing
dinner… Overhead the coal-black thatch roof crouches over you,
suspended on a pillow of smoke, but you pay it no mind. After all, it’s
been that way since before you were born.
Smoke is known to be toxic. It kills young children around the world
at a rate exceeded only by the drama and trauma of childbirth. The
negative impact on adult heart disease and life expectancy from cooking
in kitchens such as this is well documented.
To those who understand the ramifications of breathing smoke and who,
importantly, have exposure to other cooking methods, the harm is
literally written on the soot-covered wall.
But that’s just the point. You, and the billions of other people who
routinely cook their meals in this fashion, don’t know any other way.
Your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all cooked like this.
And even when you and your peers are informed as to the harm of your
approach, you persist. It seems far-fetched to think that a pervasive
and ancient cultural practice could be such a vicious killer. Besides,
it’s what you know and are comfortable with—it’s what everyone does. So
you continue, and the lungs of your family continue to fill with smoke.
Photo Courtesy of The Golden Hour Blog / Heart Attack Grill
Unfortunately, people are not rational actors; we are trained
creatures of habit, molded and formed by our culture and personal
experiences. Whether you’re a recent heart attack survivor who continues
to live on a diet of Big Macs, or an overweight office-worker who
watches hour after hour of television, you, and the rest of humanity,
persist with habitual behaviors that are illogical and clearly damaging.
It’s obvious to an outside observer, and maybe even to yourself, but
that doesn’t stop you. Despite infinite public service announcements and
articles about the harms of a poor diet or inactivity (to name only a
couple of common issues) people resist changes to their accustomed
behaviors almost as if their lives depended on it. Which, in a fashion,
they do. Their way of life depends on their habitual patterns. And it is
this habituated behavior that we, as designers and engineers striving
to address social issues, must overcome.
But how do we do this? How do we attempt to tackle millennia of
culturally instructed behavior? Contemporary psychological theories of
behavior change, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior,
tell us that people’s behaviors are based on attitudes, beliefs, and
values and that changes in behavior rely on changes in these underlying
attributes. Interestingly, the field of human-centered design also
emphasizes understanding human values as an integral part of the design
process. As David Kelley, founder of IDEO, tells us,
“The way to do it is to go out and figure out what humans actually
value.” In the field of design for social impact the theories of
behavior change and human-centered design converge and they both clearly
indicate that an understanding of values is key: successful designs
appeal to people’s values and so do successful behavioral change
campaigns.
So how do we understand peoples’ values? Again, David Kelley clues us in:
“At some point by observing these people and building
empathy for them you start to have insights about them. “Oh, they really
do value this.” It’s not obvious at first that that’s what they really
value. They say they really don’t do something but it turns out they
actually do when you observe them.”
If the way to understand values is through empathy, how do we build empathy? I touched on this subject in my last blog post, Design Skills and Life,
but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these questions because
they are central to all of our work at Catapult. So I’m taking you with
me as I chip away at understanding the process of empathizing.
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence tells us that,
“Self-awareness is the first component of emotional
intelligence – which makes sense when one considers that the Delphic
oracle gave the advice to “know thyself” thousands of years ago.
Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions,
strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives.”
Self-awareness, being the first component of emotional intelligence,
forms the foundation for the other components (self-regulation,
motivation, empathy, and social skill). Without self-awareness we
struggle to empathize, if we can’t empathize we will find it difficult
to understand people’s values, and if we can’t understand peoples values
we won’t know how to design meaningful products for them in such a way
that their behaviors change.
Photo Courtesy of Confessions of a Shopaholic
Do you, like the Indian mother in our example, understand why you
persist in behaviors or beliefs that are unhelpful? Do you understand
why you keep smoking, struggle with direct communication, judge people
who are uneducated, and all of the other myriad things that you do that
you would love to change in your life but don’t? If you understood why
you can’t stop eating, might it help you relate to people who can’t stop
shopping? If you understood why tradition keeps you cooking the same
gross holiday dish even though no one likes it, might it help you
understand why a mother might continue cooking over a smoky fire?
Let me take an example from my own life. I live in San Francisco, one
of the best cities in the US for public transportation. I also own a
car despite being an ardent believer in global warming, that the world
is headed toward serious environmental catastrophe, and that by
regularly driving my car I am directly contributing to the problem,
threatening the lives of millions. But I can’t bring myself to ditch the
car. Why? What am I valuing that is holding me back? It has something
to do with comfort (it’s convenient and easy) and familiarity (my family
has always had automobiles). If I was to get rid of my car I would have
to plan much more (requiring significant extra effort to plan bus
routes or rent cars for both routine errands and long trips) and it
would require a non-trivial reworking of my lifestyle (how would I get
my weekly groceries or go for weekend hikes?). I would also have to
explain to my friends and family why I am making the change and that
would require confrontation, something with which I perpetually struggle
(another family trait).
So, how can I relate to the Indian mother in our example? Can I
understand that it might be easier to just keep doing what she has
always done? Can I relate to the fact that change takes effort
(modifying cooking habits) and involves confrontation (explaining to her
family why she needs to get a different stove)? Can I take that
relating and integrate it into the products on which I work? Maybe we
can design a stove that can fit into her life in such a way that her
cooking habits don’t have to change. Or perhaps we can design a program
that reduces the family confrontation by making it more affordable. This
is where things can get creative as we explore ways of building our
products around the values of our end user.
By attempting to look inward at my own experience in order to see
what I have in common with a low-income Indian mother, I hope this post
has opened a door to you finding your own personal way to connect with
her. This is how we uncover the values that will give rise to solutions.
To paraphrase Daniel Goleman, it is by understanding yourself that
you begin to understand others. By feeling how your own hindrances are
active in your life you can start to empathize with other people who
struggle to make changes. Through understanding and empathy you can see
what might be holding others back (their needs, wants, values,
capabilities, beliefs, fears, etc.) and what they might require in order
to change their behavior. Cultivating these capacities of understanding
and empathy will allow you to work with others in an appropriate,
considerate, and effective fashion. And that’s what design is: working
with people to create tools that serve them in a meaningful way.
So I ask, all of you would-be designers and change makers, how well do you know yourself?
Think Like MacGuyver: Creative Resilience in the Developing World
Hulu.com
Raise your hand if you’re familiar with the TV show MacGyver.
The main character is truly a phenomenal human being. The plot of the
60-minute show is pretty consistent: He’s a secret agent whose specialty
is finagling himself out of the most impossible situations. He had an
uncanny ability of taking everyday objects from his immediate
surroundings and transforming them to solve problems. He could turn a
coffin into a get-away jet ski. He could disarm a nuclear warhead using
only a safety pin. In one of my favorite episodes he builds a
long-distance bomb using a rubber glove, a gas pipe, a light bulb, and
shards from a toilet bowl. He’s a universal symbol for resourcefulness,
ingenuity, and creativity.
If you deconstruct his actions in every episode, there are four
factors that enable his success. I’ve called them the four enablers of
creativity:
1. He is a do-er. It’s easy for teams to sidestep creativity when
taking on a new endeavor by quibbling over objectives. Ambiguity is
uncomfortable. MacGyver uses action to work through the ambiguity. He
could sit and have a discussion about his options, or create a tradeoff
matrix, but he chooses to learn by doing.
2. His resources are defined. One of the first things we do at the
start of a design project is figure out what we know and what we don’t
know. We make constraints. It’s a contrast to what we associate with
creativity—which is blue-sky, free-thinking, no rules. But the lack of
constraints, or lack of a creative process, is in fact a deterrent to
producing innovative results.
3. His goal is clear and a deadline is imminent. For MacGyver, the
bomb is always ticking down. He has a defined amount of time. Failure is
not an option. It’s similar to that feeling you get the night before a
deadline, when the creative adrenaline rushes in at 2 a.m. The pressure
is necessary to drive action.
4. He doesn’t have to ask for permission. Imagine if MacGyver had to
stop with 15 seconds left on the bomb ticker to get clearance to use a
set of pliers. Creating an enabling environment—tools on hand, creative
‘places,’ ‘time’ for creativity, diversity in thought—is what helps him
get the job done.
There are a number of websites dedicated to debunking this TV
character’s ingenuity, but he’s not entirely fiction. There are
real-life MacGyvers throughout the developing world exhibiting the same
resourcefulness and creativity, as well as entrepreneurship. This past
November I bought a Rwandan-made LED lamp (pictured above) for 800 RWF
(about $1.25 USD). It’s simple—some re-purposed wood, spent batteries
from a radio, an LED, and some wire. There’s not even an on/ off switch,
just exposed wires to complete the circuit.
This isn’t a solution that will produce IP, and yet it’s a prominent
source of lighting in rural Rwanda, which makes up nearly 95 percent of
the country’s population. It’s a great example of how creative
individuals within the local context have ‘MacGyvered’ solutions to
their needs.
Between 70-95 percent of the creative economy’s economic output in
Africa comes from SMEs, the informal sector. They are local craftsman,
operating under the radar, using their creative wits to survive. They
are among the most resilient people on the planet.
In my previous career I was a product design consultant in Silicon
Valley—the land of abundance. I worked on new technologies for American
households, all for companies who wanted to build reputations for
innovation. The irony is that I see more innovation, and less
volatility, coming from what we call “the developing world” or the
informal sector, where innovation is born every day from extreme
constraints and necessity. (Just like in MacGyver).
In these places, the landscape is littered with broad meaty
challenges like the lack of energy access, cross-cultural barriers, and
the digital divide. They’re addressing these challenges in new ways and
new models that are poised to leapfrog anything we can imagine in
Silicon Valley. And I’m not alone in my thinking. This week at the World
Economic Forum 2013 Annual Meeting in Davos, Muhtar Kent, the CEO of
Coca-Cola, shared that Coke’s innovation, which he referred to as
“frugal innovation” is coming from emerging markets.
With that in mind, how might business leaders leverage the global
creative economy to enable the MacGyvers working within their company
and perhaps to support economic development in new economies? If you
can’t answer the question, you might find yourself struggling to catch
up sooner than you think.
Our top ten must-reads of 2012
We culled our twitter feed and
picked out the best of the best from 2012. Read on for links to new
tools, resources, and thought pieces on design and social
entrepreneurship.
DESIGN + SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP PIECES
1. Fast Company asks: “Do Designers Exploit the Poor While Trying to Do Good?” http://bit.ly/zKuQzT
2. Niti Bahn identifies what is missing in designing for the next billion: http://bit.ly/KAAAh0 (tools, methods, frameworks)
3. D-Rev’s Krista Donaldson discusses how to create products for people living on less than $4 per day: http://bit.ly/OoWlSY
BONUS READ! Harvard Business Review post on “The Smart Way to Make Profits While Serving the Poor” http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/the_smart_way_to_make_profits.html
TOOLS
4. For empathy, check out “Life Without Lights,” a documentary photography project on energy poverty - http://lifewithoutlights.com/
5. For teaching, check out “Wicked Problems: problems worth
solving,” a handbook for teaching, learning, & doing disruptive
design work - http://bit.ly/zP1NpB
6. For doing, check out this new site providing free recs for
proven, low-cost household water treatment tech based on community need
- http://communitychoicestool.org/
7. For researching, check out this list of 46 smartphone apps for conducting ethnographic research - http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/apps.html
BONUS READ! For empathy, check out GSMA’s new report that gives a
glimpse into the lives of women living on less than $750/year - http://bit.ly/PMbil9
DEVELOPMENT THOUGHT PIECES
8. Esther Duflo & Co reveal their (controversial) research on
cookstoves: “Clean Cookstoves Must Be Rethought so They Actually Get
Used in Developing World” http://on.natgeo.com/OFQVIw
9. Stanford Social Innovation Review takes a cue from Esther Duflo
and posts a piece on the tricky claims social enterprise and non-profits
make when advocating for their work: http://bit.ly/PyNQsj
10. One of our most retweeted posts comes from The Guardian. Hugo
Slim posts his thoughts on: “The trouble with aid? Why helping people
is always complicated” http://gu.com/p/3cef2
Catapult, Davos bound!
We’re heading to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2013 in
Davos, Switzerland this January 2013. Not only that, we’re joining:
Jeanne Bourgault, President, Internews
Theaster Gates, Director, Arts and Public Life Initiative, The University of Chicago
Caroline Watson, Director and Founder, Hua Dan
Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art New York
for a session on Friday, January 25th exploring societal adversity
and creativity. We will also participate in a private session on the
“Creative Economy” where we’ll talk about building social-benefit design
programs.
Do we really need to say how psyched we are? Expect a blog on a
designers perspective of World Economic Forum and “improving the state
of the world.”
Creating Iconic Design Tools with the Noun Project
Ever needed an obscure icon for your
infographic? Need to make a universally understandable sign? Only have
20minutes to contextualize your product visualisation with a simple
picture? Do you dig Pictionary? Or are you sick of battling with
watermarks or creating amorphous stick figure monster icons?
Check out The Noun Project,
an iconic phenomenon that is a platform for creating and sharing a
global symbolic language. Catapult Design has used their resources on
several occasions within our design work and we will go through two
clear examples in a sec’, but first a bit of background…
The Noun Project hosts a library of
ever growing and iterated icons on their site that anybody can access,
use, and contribute to. You still need to acknowledge their creators
through an easy process of attribution (check their ‘usage‘
page for details) but their ethos is ‘open’ and they are all about
capturing and continuing a symbolic conversation (pictorially of
course). They also host Iconathons all over the place (mostly in the USA
so far), group lock-in brainstorm icon hacking mash ups that are run by
The Noun Project members to output a new set of icons around a pressing
theme (they did some cool stuff after Sandy…check the iconathon.org
site for details & upcoming events). I am itching to get to one, as
much to meet the crowd as make some symbolic magic happen. The site
(and the events) are meant for an audience well beyond designers.
Ultimately The Noun Project is opening up icon creation, access, and use
to a much greater audience and encouraging a flexible pictorial
literacy.
Catapult Design first tapped The Noun
Project resources when making a research tool for a project
investigating water access and use in rural India. I needed to get an
understanding of symbolic literacy in Rajasthan villages. I etched a
series of icons onto interlocking wooden tiles (some of them gleaned
from The Noun Project) and intentionally left a lot of tiles blank. In
each village we visited in Rajasthan, I asked people to experiment with
the tiles in 3 ways: first, I asked people to identify what the icons
referred to; then I asked people to explain a story using the tiles;
finally, I asked them to draw some tiles of their own. The intention was
to experiment with ways of discovering symbolic literacy, as well as
use those findings to inform any instructions or guides we would have to
make relevant to our water project.
The next time around was much more topical. Literacy Bridge,
an organization empowering children and adults with tools for knowledge
sharing and literacy learning, contacted us to help them solve an issue
with their Talking Book
interface. The Talking Book is an audio computer that shares
locally-relevant knowledge and improves literacy in areas with limited
access to literature. Literacy Bridge interacts with communities in
Northern Ghana where there is no word for ‘arrow’ in their lexicon. They
needed to be able to instruct the user to press a button relative to a
spoken instruction. We experimented with a bunch of different icons and
shapes, some of them from The Noun Project site, some of them created by
us, and a few lifted from other sources. Thanks to the timezone
difference between California and Ghana, the feedback loop was quick.
While we slept Literacy Bridge would report back the responses they got
from the field, we would adapt the icons according to their suggestions,
and the next day they would be tested again. We worked our way through
icons that had issues working with the spoken instructions of the
device, icons that implied too much of a specific task (‘fish’ = food),
that had too much potential religious connotation (‘plus’ = cross), or
that even had too much local political association (‘umbrella’ &
‘rooster’ are local Ghanaian political party symbols). We are continuing
to help Literacy Bridge achieve an appropriate interface through their
piloting stage (they are testing Talking Books in the thousands!).
image courtesy of Literacy Bridge
We plan to continue developing new
research games and other design resources, and to continue using The
Noun Project to help us when we need the right icon. It’s an excellent
resource even if I still cant find an icon for ‘design’ up there (nor an
icon for ‘icon’) but I’m hitting my sketchpad to work on it. I’m also
gonna get in touch with The Noun Project and suggest an iconathon themed
around rural life (on all continents)….oh and maybe I can put in a
festive wish for a ‘silhouette bank’ as well….?
Thanks Noun Project! Keep up the good work! We will see you at the next Iconathon!
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And here is thanks and attribution to all of The Noun Project icon creators that unknowingly helped us out!
Pavel Pavlov: Thumbs Up/Approve
Stephen James Kennedy: Auto Rickshaw
Roger Cook & Don Shanosky: Baby, Train, Person , Ground Transport
Nick Levesque: Cooking Pan
Connor Cesa: Water Drop
Mike Endale: Hut, Community
Udaya Kumar: Rupee
Adrijan Karavdic: Elephant
Gibran Bisio: Paint Can
Edward Boatman, Saul Tannenbaum, Stephen Kennedy, Nikki Snow & Brooke Hamilton: Childrens Library
Valentina Piccione: Tree
Tak Imoto: Leaves
Michal Stassel: Axe
Jeremy Linden: Knifes
Kyle Scott, Roman J. Sokolov: Glasses
Listed as Unknown on NP: Maize, Apples, Camel, Bird, Pencil,
Umbrella, Flip-Flops, Bell, Speakers, Fuel Pump, Fish, Campfire, Tap,
Battery, Bicycle, Drinking Water, Hammer, Spanner/Wrench, Flame.
