I was at a Wellbeing in Low Income Communities workshop at Helsinki School of Economics this week, where we got to grips with one of the field’s core challenges: ethics.
Businesses entering into BoP markets are often faced with an ethical dilemma. How does their offering match the market’s culture? Will their offering have an undesired or even negative effect because it fails to address the value gap?
Prabhu Kandachar, professor at TUDelft, told a story that illustrates this ethical dilemma perfectly. A company developed an affordable ultra-sound scanner for the Indian market. It was meant to improve pregnancy healthcare and pregnant women’s quality of life. But the company soon discovered that the scanners were being used for gender selection.
How should the company deal with this? Stop designing? Seek answers from the ethical experts? Keep designing, learning and trying to solve something that seems unsolvable? Or proactively attempt to design new behaviour patterns and value sets in the country so the product is used as intended? That’s according to a western value set, at least.
As a designer, I think the way forward is focusing on context. Address and understand the underlying contradictions – whether they be cultural, economic or social – and make the solution fit. And most importantly, remember that policies and visions alone won’t bring tangible differences to users’ everyday lives – to achieve this, we need well-designed products and services.
But as we all know, this takes time. And doing something is far better than doing nothing - especially in healthcare, where a well-intended product can suddenly affect basic human rights.

“These people have a high bullshit meter,” said Niti Bhan, founder of Emerging Futures Lab, at Designit’s Business with the Poor seminar last week, referring to the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day at the base of the socio-economic pyramid (BoP). The aim of the seminar was to provide a fundamental understanding of new BoP markets and how design can be a strategic tool in this new context. We had a great turnout – with participants from the corporate, non-profit and academic world – proof of the growing interest in the field.
Everyone quickly had an aha-moment: this isn’t merely about making products cheaper! It’s about understanding a life of adversity – and developing solutions to meet these needs.
Which brings me to Niti’s point about the bullshit meter, a cynicism engrained in the unique mindset of the BoP customer. And how design consultancies can help companies target BoP markets.
BoP projects are design intensive. The market is demanding. And for all the wonderful visions currently emerging from businesses and policy-makers, one thing is missing: results. Designers go the last mile – materialising visions in a way that is meaningful, relevant and valuable to the user. This is what we do in collaboration with Emerging Futures Lab.
And yes, that means getting companies past the bullshit meter…

Rubbed my eyes an extra time checking out from my local IKEA Saturday morning. No manned check-out counters but 100% self-service. So… I scanned my purchases, paid them and simply walked out. Looked back over my shoulder a couple of times to check if someone was following me, but no. Strange how honesty can make you feel criminal – please control my bags somebody! No really, good thinking, IKEA and thanks for reintroducing simple stuff like trust! I’m sure we’ll get used to it. And that you will manage to almost double your check-out throughput (an IKEA employee told me from 45 to 75 clients per line per hour) by letting us do the job. 

I grew up on Findus cuisine. Well, not quite. My mum refused to serve the frozen ready meals. But as a kid growing up in 1990s Britain, I was bombarded with adverts about the joys of frozen food.

Now Findus has come to Denmark. And I’m puzzled. Danes simply don’t have a tradition for frozen ready meals – they’re virgins in this territory. Findus isn’t just trying to enter into a new country market. It’s attempting to change an entire nation’s eating habits. I wonder if they’ll succeed on the basis of their ad campaign, which plays on Danes’ busy lives: ‘A person spends 65 days of their life chopping vegetables’, reads a poster near my house. Is this tactic enough to get a nation – increasingly organic and health-obsessed – dashing for the frozen counter?

Mmmh, not sure. I can see a market in Denmark. But a small (single male) one. Perhaps Findus has done their homework with thorough market research and will surprise us all with whopping sales. Because this isn’t about food innovation - Brits were eating this stuff years ago! It’s about identifying new product markets. And that’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. I’ll be interested to see if Findus is still here this time next year.

Though many people in Denmark and Europe consider the iPhone as an extremely expensive mobile phone, the concept is quite the opposite in USA. Many low income people in the US don’t have a spare income to invest in a (laptop) computer as well as a broadband connection, and are thus using the iPhone for all the internet business.

Just a funny thought when you compare our ways of using the potentials of the (i)phone…

Supplementary reading at TechWorld…

And now for the funny iPhone-image-f-the-day :-)

Venture company Solar Botanic (http://www.solarbotanic.com/) has officially announced their new innovative product - artificial tree. It has both solar array  batteries and wind generator elements in the leafs.

Press release of the company said that tree looks like the natural one. Interesting that one tree can supply energy to a whole house. Unfortunately there is no prototype yet :))

The interesting thing is the technology “Nanoleaf”. Solar Botanic has already working examples. Leafs consists of photoelectric and termogalvanic elements. A special mechanism turns energy of leaf movement into electricity.

Unfortunately there is no mention of capacity parameters on the website. But it seems that this kind of small power station could come soon to each house (I hope so). Solar Botanic consider that this is not just ecological but also very aesthetic solution.

Now a lot of companies are changing to green solutions. For example IKEA started a new direction. The idea is to make green solutions available to a lot of people. So soon we will go to IKEA and bye solar array  batteries just for 20 KR.

So let’s Designit be a green design company :)))

Today we’re accompanying Denmark’s PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the Chinese-Danish Climate Change Conference in Beijing. The atmosphere will be celebratory – he did, after all, get China on board yesterday for a climate pact goal at next year’s UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. A well-needed triumph that’s left the Danish press whooping.

But bigger challenges lie ahead for Fogh. Denmark may be a world leader in modern energy. But we pay our way to almost half of our national C02 reductions through credit initiatives abroad. Is that visionary? Is that a good example to set to the world?

Now’s the time to solve climate challenges in our own back yard. And us designers can help reduce CO2 emissions in lots of ways. Create packaging that stacks well, so reducing transport pollution. Apply user-centred or persuasive design so people use products and services efficiently. Or, like we’re doing at the moment, designing a progressive metro so people ditch the car for public transport.

Our message to Fogh? Use designers like us. Design isn’t just about making nice-looking chairs. It can actually solve global problems, like climate change. Let’s make it happen!

Not everything goes fast in China, but some things move incredibly fast. One of them is the MagLev train in Shanghai, which I took this week. It takes you 30 kilometres in less than 8 minutes. Leaning into curves at a speed of approx 430 km/h is quite amazing.

The paradox is that the end station, however, is in the middle of nowhere. We had to transfer to a taxi. And with a speed of 430 km/hr, couldn’t you have built a bit more track?

Nevermind, many Danish commuters daily spend between 3-4 hours in an old-fashioned train travelling between Copenhagen and the country’s second-biggest city, Aarhus. MagLev would do the same lap in about 45 minutes. Add a bridge across the Kattegat and it’s 20! Almost faster than taking the phone:)

Wake up, DK! China’s coming!

The Minister of Trade and Industry in Norway, Sylvia Brustad, recently announced design as one of her focus areas and grants the Norwegian Design Council 10 million NOK to initiate a design driven innovation program.

Even though it is not much, it is a very important sign in Norwegian politics. The politicians might finally have realized something our Nordic neighbours realized years ago. Design is about creating value and not just about styling…

Later this fall, the government will publish a white paper on innovation. In the government’s plan for innovation made in 2003 - design was hardly mentioned. And this was the same year as the Korean government launched their very own five year design strategy to increase the country’s GDP - with great success!

So here we are almost six years later with multinational companies around the world using design as a strategy in sharpening their competitive edge… Have Norwegian politicians finally gotten the point? And will they succeed in forwarding this message to business and industry? When Sylvia Brustad says she believes in design as an innovation driver - does she really mean it?

In an interview, Sylvia Brustad mentions products like the Tripp Trapp chair and Cherrox boot as good examples of design innovations in Norway. These are almost 40 year old products that represent the “old way” of thinking design. Sylvia Brustad needs new examples of design innovations! She needs examples that show the potential in design TODAY - e.g. service innovations that examplify design being used in developing immaterial values – in creating user experiences.

And as she needs new examples - Norwegian designers need the support in creating them. Use the 10 million for this! The Norwegian Design Council should initiate service design projects in our growing service sector just like the Danish government has done. This can improve our services and our design industry - they both need support in evolving….

I believe that the big potential for innovations are not in the Norwegian industry - it’s in the services!

Put that in the white paper on innovation!

This year's Mini-lit hit

Due to my roots in communications design, I’m often asked this question. It’s a question impossible to answer with conviction, as no other design discipline has such a wide cultural and personal variety as communication.

Blogging may be the fashionable answer right now, but in essence it’s just more of the same. There’s a more interesting answer. A new thing is going on, that if nothing else illustrates the challenge of the continuous information overload.

It’s called Mini-lit. The phenomenon owes a lot to synchronised messaging: SMS, Twitter.com, chat etc. It’s about saying a lot in very few words - demanding more from the reader - and sender. Mini-lit is limiting the number of words you have to convey a message: a five-word film review, 12-word novel, six-word prayer. Concentrate, think and communicate and challenge me – don’t just spam me with words. That’s the idea.

Hemmingway apparently started the whole thing when he was dared to write a six-word-novel. He came back with: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Now you know what I mean.

I think Mini-lit will find it’s way into mainstream communication - for a while. This year’s surprise hit in U.S. bookshops was ‘Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure’. And a second six-word collection, on love and heartbreak, will be out in January. The Mini-lit thing is spreading.

Read more here