Designing in Cambodia

[Adam L.]

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a blog by a group of Dutch Industrial Design students documenting their work on a portable, solar powered lamp for use in rural Cambodia. As a design student and a former PEPY volunteer, a got a lot of pleasure from looking back at their notes. Besides working in partnership with a Khmer solar energy company, the students were able to conduct user research directly with Cambodia's rural residents. It was great seeing them conduct interviews in people's homes and ride their motorbike through villages that were pitch black at night.

Now I have another blog I would like to share and since this one is just beginning, I am looking forward to following it's development. It is Wandering Jefe by Jefe Chapin, an IDEO designer who is taking a three month sabbatical (or a "walkabout" as he refers to it) in Cambodia to work on a low cost latrine with International Development Enterprises (IDE). IDEO is an international design consultancy that we follow very closely at the school I attend. Several of our instructors have worked for IDEO and the company's founder, Bill Mogridge, is credited with coining the term Interaction Design- my field of study.

IDE on the other hand is an international nonprofit that helps farmers in countries throughout Africa, Southern Asia and Southeast Asia. Unlike many large, international nonprofits, IDE says they are not interested in giving handouts but "profitable enterprises and value chains that deliver sustainable social and economic benefits to the rural poor, enabling them to increase production and improve their quality of life." Sounds similar to the stuff I heard at PEPY and I am especially reminded of our visit with Micky Sampson at RDIC. In Cambodia IDE have done this by developing products and services to improve agricultural productions and water sanitation.

According to Jefe's blog, IDEO and IDE first got together to create the Human Centered Design Toolkit. Human Centered Design is part of what I study and is what IDEO is famous for. This toolkit is a guide for applying this method of design to developing world contexts. The toolkit can be download for free here. Here is an excerpt from it:

It contains the elements to Human-Centered Design, a process used for decades to create new solutions for multi-national corporations. This process has created ideas such as the HeartStart defibrillator, Cleanwell natural antibacterial products, and the Blood Donor System for the Red Cross—innovations that have enhanced the lives of millions of people. Now Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of smallholder farmers. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear the needs of smallholder farmers in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

Jefe's project, which he promises to document on his blog, will apply IDEO's human-centered design process to IDE's work in the field of water & sanitation in the form of a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings. Jefe summarizes the problem in this way:

Cambodians are relatively poor. A five-person family at the national poverty level earns about 900USD per year, and rural Cambodians cite cost as the number one reason that they don’t invest in effective latrines. A lot of NGOs are working in Cambodia trying to assist the poor, and a number of these NGOs have historically given away latrines. They tend to build what is, in fact, quite a nice latrine (including an offset tank, pour-flush pan and solid walls and roof: I’ll explain latrine options in a later posting. . .) that costs about 150USD to build. This has caused two problems. First, this latrine is now seen as the ‘ideal’, and people don’t want to build anything lesser. Yet they can’t save up enough money to build it. So, the second problem . . . they wait and see if an NGO will just build them a latrine. Yet, the NGOs can only reach a very small segment of the population so very few get built (of the latrines existing in Cambodia, only 17% of them are provided by NGOS. . . the rest are purchased by the users).

More background information about the problems of sanitation, the need for affordable and desirable latrines and how they propose to do this are currently on Jefe's blog. I hope that he continues to update it with photos, videos, observations and notes in the same way that the Dutch students did. And given that Jefe is an experienced designer from IDEO, it should be a great read. I wish him luck!

http://www.wanderingjefe.blogspot.com/