Just a quick note on the conferences we will attend in the near future:
mLife 2009 Barcelona - “A Platform for Socially Responsible Organizations in the Mobile Value Chain”, taking place September 2-4 in Barcelona. Confirmed speakers here are
Mr. Serge Ferre, NOKIA, Vice President Corporate and Head of EU Representation
Ms. Evelyn Rys, CISCO, Sales and Business Development Manager, EMEA Public Sector Vertical, Cisco Systems
Dr. Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, Deutsche Telekom - Board Member of T-Mobile Germany and T-Home.
Mr. Ken Banks, Kiwanja Net
Africa Gathering - taking place October 10-11 in London. After the first Africa Gathering this April we decided to attend the upcoming second instance of this event this October as well. So far only one speaker has been confirmed - Ken Banks (kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS) - but more are to come and judging from April it will be a great event again.
Yesterday, the workshop Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design in Developing Regions took place in Uppsala, Sweden and around the world, as people where joining presentations and discussions online including from the UK, Madeira, and Malaysia. The workshop is part of the INTERACT2009 conference, which takes place from 24-28 August.
An important issue that Ida Horner raised in her presentation, and which we have also experienced during our work in Zanzibar, was the importance of doing research in the field and familiarising yourself with the environment, before implementing anything. Ida stressed that it is particularly important to understand how communities are organised. Otherwise researchers run into conflicts before they even started.
Overall, I expected the workshop to focus more on interaction design and experiences regarding methodologies, while most of the discussions that followed each presentation focused on ethical issues, often raising high-level problems that interaction designers might not always be able to solve. These issues were also reflected by the workshop themes, but the questions that remained for me where: what is the role of interaction designers in developing regions, how is it different to their role in more traditional contexts, and what are appropriate methodologies?
An interesting discussion emerged around problem solving, which seems to be a very engineering/technology-driven approach, and whether this approach is appropriate in a developing context. Are interaction designers solving problems? And are researchers bound to only generate new knowledge and understanding, but not supposed to solve problems? Although being an academic I personally don’t completely agree on that, but maybe that is only because I always had one foot in industry projects as well. I would be interested to hear others’ opinions on this.
We also presented our paper Designing an SMS-based application for seaweed farmers in Zanzibar (and why it failed for now) at the Workshop. In this paper we discuss a project that we started, while we were in Tanzania again last year, working on the Hello Africa movie. The project described in the paper was not successful measured by our initial goals. It was successful given the insights that we gained by applying a user-centred design approach in the field. The aim of the paper is to share our conclusions of why the project failed, since we believe that many projects in an African context might experience similar challenges. Below are the slides from our presentation.
All workshop papers are available from here. Many thanks to Andy Dearden and Niall Winters for organising this event! It’s a really valuable step towards better understanding the roles and ethical issues interaction designers need to be aware of in developing contexts.
Notes from the Workshop on Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design in Developing Regions was published on August 25th, 2009 by Martin Tomitsch.
It files under global.
Maker Faire Africa 2009 is over and it’s time for me to give a short résumé.
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William Kamkwamba
The makers
The story that impressed me the most was William Kamkwamba from Malawi - “The boy who harnessed the wind“. He built a windmill from material he found at the scrap yard just by looking at diagrams at the local library. Although people in his community considered him as crazy he kept going and is now able to power his family’s house, a water pump and some other services with the electricity created. Furthermore he teaches other people how to build windmills. His talk was quite impressive as he seems to be a very shy guy and talked very silently, but with a self-assurence as if it would be the most natural thing what he did. Really remarkable.
Another fascinating story was the one of Johannes, a maker who assembled furniture from plastic bottles and founded a company called Planiture or Planish, didn’t quite understand that. His motivation was that he had moved in a totally empty apartment in Kumasi and thought of ways to create inexpensive furniture. After a while he came up with plastic bottles as frame and leather cover. Due to his words most people who see the pieces just say “wow” - and indeed that’s how I felt as well when looking at them. They are really comfortable, too.
Dominic Wanjihia - from AfriGadget.com
Another maker with whom I spent a great deal talking about his products and in the following also about Africa’s current state was Dominic Wanjihia from Kenya. He presented two products, both of which aimed at extend the life-span of food. One was an evaporative cooler, another one a food dryer based on sunlight. His motivation for those pieces were that in Africa obviously 60-80% of the food goes bad due to insufficient storage and refridgerating solutions - new information for me.
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The atmosphere
The atmosphere of all three days was very relaxed and friendly - but at times also tense and inspiring. Everybody was up for a little chat and willing to share his story. The good weather and openness of the venue contributed to the good spirit. Furthermore the story of the makers were really stimulating and there was a feeling of positive uprising in the air. People denounced the problems of Africa - but also offered simple solutions and ingenious ideas. Everybody was motivated and significant improvement of the continent’s state seemed possible this weekend.
AITI offered great internet connectivity for everybody to share the event online - and judging by tweets, really many people internationally followed it. The seperation with inside - workshop and sessions, outside - showing of devices was good and invited many visitors to stay and commute between inside and outside. Furthermore - music was great and thanks for the food!
Accra provided nice venues for a drink afterwards, only the traffic was quite annoying.
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Organizations
Several organizations took part in Maker Faire, two of which impressed me quite a lot.
Inveneo is an organization based in California and specialises on the creation and sale of apropriate technology. The showcased devices - computers, servers, routers, … - were really impressive. Compact and robust, they reduce energy consumption by a large amount. Additionally Inveneo offers batteries which can be solar-powered to eliminate the problem of power cuts.
Louisa (Butterfly Works), Charles (Internet Research) and me on Johannes' plastic-bottle couch
Butterfly Works, a Durch organization helped organize Maker Faire and presented several projects - including Naitobits, the original program which inspired Zanzibits, amongst others. One cool project they did during Maker Faire was called “Match a Maker” - aiming at connecting people having problems in “making things” with people offering solutions all over the world. The project was actually initiated right there at Maker Faire, I hope it will be online soon.
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Suggestions for next time
Some small remarks to the organization: as the planned schedule was quite strict and didn’t consider the existence of a second presentation room, the schedule was changed several times which led to some confusion and to some skipped sessions. By offering a schedule with more empty spaces and a possibility for parallel sessions this could be solved.
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Overall, the whole event was great - lots of interesting people and projects, fascinating devices, insightful talks. See you next year in Nairobi!
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Here once again the links to the blogposts on ICT4D.at on Maker Faire Africa
Multi machine prize: encourage individuals in Ghana to put together multi machines by the end of the year - 500$
Next Maker Faire - hopefully in Kenya, Nairobi -> looking forward for a Maker Faire price - 1500$
Acknowledgement of the partners and sponsors
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Emer Beamer, Patricia - Match a maker
Searching for people with AutoCAD skills, for a sys-admin internship in Ghana or somebody with skills in Shae-butter production - look at Match a Maker, soon to be announced on Butterfly Works
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Mark Davies - Esoko, Wayan Vota - Inveneo, Miquel - Maneno; Building SMS applications and bandwidth ICT models
Phone is perfect for applications as the reach is really good
Due to some requests at Maker Faire Africa this weekend, I want to put up the links to download our documentary on mobile phone culture in Zanzibar “Hello Africa” once more.
There is a low-res streaming possibility at Vimeo:
The organizers and participants of IDDS were present as well as representatives of the university and the villages where the IDDS people went to.
First Amy Smith, founder of IDDS and lecturer at MIT gave a short speech. She outlined how extraordinary this whole experience had been and showed a small video to give an impression what IDDS was like. The participants had made a lot of experiences:
how to do design - stages of design
moving projects from paper to ideas to discuss
learning a lot about different types of technologies
people from the outside came to share their visions
the village visits which gave the participants an idea who they were working with and what their desires are
building & prototyping
After her presentation, Rajnish Jain, one of the participants shared his impressions. He praised IDDS as an event which lights the flame of innovation and creativity in everyone of its participants.
Then all the 12 teams shortly introduced their project and the solution they found. In the following some notes on their presentations and some pictures of the presentation of the prototypes afterwards (sorry for the quality, my camera isn’t the newest anymore).
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Shea Nut Oil
Improve the Shae oil extraction process for women in rural areas
-> decreasing the time and labour involved
hydraulic powered oil press - eliminates 5 of the 10 traditional steps
response of the communities - quality of oil appeared to be the same
-> further testing necessary
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Electricity from the river
many villages don’t have electricity -> challenge: bringing it to them through the river
tested the rivers to see how fast they flow, unfortunately it wasn’t enough to produce a significant amount of electricity
-> decision for another approach
children were playing everywhere -> merry-go-round to produce electricity
goes in a battery -> charging mobile phones or likewise
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Chlorine dosing team - making water safe to drink
every minute 4 children die of waterbourne diseases, chlorine is an accurate and easy solution to purify the water
chlorine is available almost everywhere in the world
problem: dosing
project - creating a smple chlorine dosing machine
three simple prototypes
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Chlorine production team - producing chlorine to make water safe
should allow people with no access to chlorine and energy to produce chlorine
everything needed
salt
water
human power
two devices with two different methods - hand-crank and bicycle
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Cool storage team
many farmers lose valueable revenue due to vegetables that go bad while storing
they also have no access to cooling solution
-> creating a device to prevent vegetables from spoiling
absorber (corn-combs)
phase change material to maintain a constant temperature
doesn’t need electricity and is much cheaper than a fridge
tomatoes last up to 8 days longer
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Family friendly latrines
around 700 000 children die annually because of hygiene
challenge: creating a latrine which is safe to use for children and easy to maintain to have a hygienic environment
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Cassava processing/grating machine
when processing cassavas, the grating is the most exhausting and dangerous step - injuries might occur
-> providing a machine to grate cassava
no energy is needed
protects the user from injuries
efficiency of women processing cassava tripled
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Rice destoning
Ghana consumes a lot of rice
imports are more popular, although it is more expensive
because it is seen as having more quality
local rice has a lot more stones
stones come in because farmers thrash rice on the ground
plastic waste is a big problem for communities
-> creating plastic sheets which can be used for different purposes
creates income
removes waste
provides scarce material
Device:
uses aluminium heating elements
small motor for slow and steady movement
artisans created great items out of the material
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Mobile child monitoring
challenge: tool that can improve child monitoring
many children are underweight
15 million die every year from malnutrition - related illnesses
devices currently used are not sufficient
data is stored analogue and is hard to use
device:
measures weight and height
automatically sends data to server and receives feedback
from 0-5 years
sends data immediately -> reduces human error
tested in a community - trying to incorporate as much of the feedback as possible now
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Small scale energy
1/4 people worldwide live without reliable, accessible access to energy
poor people spend a lot of money on batteries, keronsene, …
designed low-tech batteries from local available materials to replace imported batteries
uses aluminium cans to create electricity
to power LED lights & radios - mobile phones to come
4V battery costs 5GhC to make - our would last twice as long
manufactured and distributed at a low cost
can be built and maintained everywhere in the villages
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Threshing technologies for groundnut smallholders
developing a machine to speed up threshing process
threshing = removing the nut from the plant with your hand
removing the nur is slow, tedious & exhausting
process can be sped up with the device
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For more detailed information on the event and better pictures, visit the official IDDS blog.
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mLife 2009 Barcelona - “A Platform for Socially Responsible Organizations in the Mobile Value Chain”, taking place September 2-4 in Barcelona. Confirmed speakers here are
Africa Gathering - taking place October 10-11 in London. After the first Africa Gathering this April we decided to attend the upcoming second instance of this event this October as well. So far only one speaker has been confirmed - Ken Banks (kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS) - but more are to come and judging from April it will be a great event again.
