Why Designing for Different Cultures is Impossible (Almost)
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- Опубликовано: 1 июл 2024
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All content directed and written by John Mauriello. John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is an Adjunct Professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts.
Edited by Brad Heath: bradleyheath.com/
Why is it so hard for talented designers to create great products for developing countries? To get closer to an answer, I spoke with experts in international development, designers from diverse cultures, and conducted extensive secondary research.
Time stamps:
0:00 Intro
2:48 Playpump
5:40 Mosquito (Fishing) Nets
8:02 DeleteMe
9:04 One Laptop Per Child
24:45 Is It Possible to Design For Cultures You Don't Belong To?
Main Works Cited:
"The Charisma Machine" by Morgan G Ames amzn.to/3RMvCty
"User Friendly" by Cliff Kuang amzn.to/3W2w5ud
NY Times, Malaria Article: www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/wo...
Neo Nurture TED Talk (and the Design That Matters official website): • Timothy Prestero: Desi...
Liter of Light NPR article: www.npr.org/2011/12/28/144385...
"Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. I never explicitly cited this book, but it was really good for adding color/clarity to the topic:
amzn.to/4co8CcS
Other works were cited but in a smaller capacity. When referenced, they are displayed in the bottom left corner of the video.
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Skibidi
Why do you think aliens slowed down their helping to people
As a designer from a developing country, I see this problem even when designers from those countries try to design for rural communities or less developed communities in the same country. Designers are more likely to come from developed cities, and higher income households. So they rarely have the knowledge or the understanding of the needs of other communities.
This was another thing that's very important that I didn't get a chance to cover in the video. Within any given country, there can be massively different communities and subculture.
i think it's not a question of "culture", it's just rich people don't understanding what poor people need.
@@Design.Theory Goodness, the amount of trouble I had at work trying to get people to understand that there was an inherent problem with “the address of your business”. Even _outside our own building_ in Silicon Valley we had food trucks!
Unfortunately, the issue is not exclusive to developing countries. It is not exclusive to being rich or educated, it is just context, and it is actually a huge problem with politics. City-people simply do not understand the needs of rural people and probably vice versa. It would not be much of a problem if the majority of voters did not live in cities and assumes that their solution's applicability might stop a mere afternoon bike ride away from where they live.
@@pflasterstrips7254 It's dumb people not being competent to accomplish the task at hand. Money doesn't matter. Rich people donate to these NGO's but it is the organization itself that is unable to fulfill their mission. Incompetence is a waste of money and charity.
Modern day philanthropy is primarily self-serving and ego-driven more than it is actual altruism. A bunch of very wealthy people, largely divorced from reality, seeking accolades and affirmations that they are good. Some may have their heart in the right place, but time and time again, the results show a disconnect, and that being in such a privileged position does not automatically qualify someone of "knowing what's best" or that their ideal "greater good" is, well, actually good.
Agree. There are plenty of very effective foreign aid/international policy programs. But a surprising percentage of them are insanely wasteful and self-serving.
I think philanthropy should have the same oath as medicine, first do no harm. You're harming people by forcing things top down because you feel good about them. You can't force help on people, they have to ask for help first, they're still humans and have their own volition. I hate when people go creating policy and trying to force things top-down on others.
It is either that or given whoever in power resource to siphon the fund away from their people.
Nations have enough fund to develop their own infrastructure. They just don't want to allocate those money.
Truth bet told, should western nations stop doing charity and give out aides... the world wouldn't fall a part.
That's why it's better not to do it. You won't catch me doing that
that kind of "charity" is just a tax write-off and a way to placate the masses at this point. it would only take like .75 of one elon musk to eliminate world hunger. yet here we are, the weath gap widening like never before. really wish our governments would actually tax billionaires like they used to... maybe we could do some good in the world, rather than waiting for billionaires to get around to funding the projects we actually need, you know?
As a person with a masters degree in design, I can tell you most designers are arrogant and self absorbed (Negroponte is the poster child of this). They should read Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. It came out in 1971, and the design community ostracized him. He was spot on in the book though. Design education is loaded with a BS curriculum of saving the world and noblesse oblige. Leave your politics at the door and focus on context and needs, not a virtue signaling, self important solutions. I mean, they don’t have water, so let’s give them laptops.
I read this book in preparation for this video. I forgot to put it in the works cited because I didn't explicitly use any of the material from it. While I didn't cite the book explicitly, it was useful for adding some color/clarity to the ideas I mention throughout the video. I will cite it now.
+
The olde “let them eat cake” story really, in another guise.
"Leaving politics at the door" sounds a lot like the "Call of Duty isn't pollitical" crowd that we have in gaming: A slogan to discredit changes to the status quo by claiming that only the disruptor is pollitical but not those upholding the status quo.
Obviously, that doesn't mean using foreign aid funds for virtue signalling and ego building isn't horrible behaviour tho, just that focusing on needs is also loaded with politics. Which needs do you focus on? Whose needs do you focus on? How much do you trust various groups of people to accurately describe their or other people's needs? (In the field of foreign aid: Do you trust national politicians? County or equivalent level polliticians? Local (village or negbourhood) leaders? Or do you need a comprehensive survey?) Do you strictly focus on whatever need is stated to be most pressing, even if you think it's short sighted or unethical? In a corporate setting, do you only focus on user needs as long as it benefits the bottom line or do you push back against corporate interests and risk being replaced?
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Please do more videos about failed products. It's very intriguing to find out why products fail so we don't make the same mistakes
I will def do more videos like this. Unrelated: If you've never heard of the song "Ocean Man" by Ween you should check it out
@@Design.Theory"ocean man, take me by the hand and design me a laptop a child can understand" I think that's how it goes? 😂
@@Design.Theory +1 total crackup. I went to create a software incubator and found people wouldn't live there, even for free, because it doesn't reduce their parents bills.
That water pump instantly reminded me of slaves/pirates working on ships to bring up the anchor.
it isntantly reminded me of the devices to make energy on a micro-universe batery of the car, from Rick and Morty.
just plain evilness.
Reminded me of Conan the Barbarian
if they had any draft animals, it could have been easily converted and used to pump water into storage.
@@kcgunesq if they had any draft animals they'd eat them
@@kcgunesq That's what I think every time I see images of lines of women carrying water jugs on their head: just one guy with an ox driven cart could replace all those women... if only they had invented/adopted the wheel.
I think its because investors like to look at compelling things that look nice on paper instead of thinking about its practicalities. Amazing video!
Yes, exactly right
Imagine the synergy if both appearances and actual value were combined.
HUMANS have a tendency to do that, I think, whenever they come from a place of sufficient privilege that they're not forced to pursue practicality for their everyday sustenance the way people- richer or poorer- do when they're in rough situations. But yes you're right and I Thumb up your Comment.
This is 200% true. I was a disabled specialist who was asked to be part of a panel to judge smart home technologies for a new housing project for those with a mental disability.
One person came in who had lots of experience, who showed you could do more with less, who was respectful of the target demographic's privacy, who was easy to scale.
A representative of local government rejected their bid because "it is not ambitious enough" and lacked "wow factor". In other words, "it isn't hype, so no funding for you".
The biggest obstacle to improving lives around the world, is convincing politicians that the technology to help their people already exists and just needs to be implemented. They always want to be able to say they were a first.
16:05 they don't need to use the internet, how about we start with toilets. I'm dead serious.
Access to water systems and treatment is the base of civilization, its foundational, you have to solve that first, then you solve electricity, then you can thing about leisure like computers. That should be common sense, and its still a huge problem.
The laptop is an example I remember from my first year of collage in product design. That’s such a good example it is really burned into my memory. I will never forget that point.
My little sister was playing with her friend once and they were pretend playing. My sister was sitting at a table with a toy laptop and said she was working and doing her job. My dad has a desk job and my stepmom is a teacher who also works a lot at home behind a screen doing paperwork for teaching. Now her friend was laughing hysterically because she thought my sister was joking. She thought it was funny because a computer is for playing games not working. Now, her friends mom works as a cashier and she doesn’t see any adults ‘working’ with a laptop or computer. For her a computer is for games and playing, working is selling things or doing things. It was fun to see this happening. How 2 children have such a different view of working. I did explain this to both of them because my sister got extremely confused and started asking me if working is also on a computer. Ofc it didn’t help that the pandemic caused my dad to work from home for a large part of my sisters childhood so for her the natural idea of pretend play working was typing on a toy laptop. It was really cute to see but also a healthy confrontation with how we can all see things completely differently because of certain circumstances.
That's why when designing for any market or customer, you must first ask for their needs, come up with a basic idea, and ask them for feedback and not just blindly provide a solution.
They knew, it was just a money making scheme.
Right, that's like the first thing you're taught when studying design
Has nothing to do with design, they knew what they were doing and certainly profit from it.
Yes but other cultures have bias, history, and motivations that leads these types of initiatives. I would argue that if the infrastructure, and educational budget was there then ultimately it would have worked.
Part of the trouble with free/stolen stuff is that it cost the reciever nothing, not everyone sees an alumium cessna engine as valuable aside from raw materials.
@@proyectoseducativoslz341vapid cynic answering to captain obvious.
IT-guy here with 30 years of experience. The OLPC-project perhaps flunked, but it helped to set the bar, and I believe it helped to act as a catalyst for cheap computers. This was at a time when a laptop costed like 10 times the price of a OLPC. OLPC was the start of the race to the price-bottom. "price anchoring" is the technical term I believe. And today we have stuff like Raspberry PI that gives you excellent computing performance for a few bucks.
Yes absolutely agree. There were some really clever ideas in that laptop. It's just that they were designing for the wrong context.
@@Design.Theory Yeah, we guys in the IT-field are often plagued by "pre-understanding", as Nicholas Negroponte (I liked his book 'Beeing digital' btw) in this case. There is even a meme we use to make fun of ourselves: "IT is the solution - what's the problem?" :-D Thanks for your video.
i remember in the early 2000s or late 90s if you complained about high system requirements for certain programs the designer would be like wait so you are still using a 2 year old pc ?
but was that due to OLPC or other advancements?
Saw an article about a 128 TB SSD the other day. I could have sworn we were still dealing with stuff in the 2 or 3 TB range, I don't even know when it jumped all the way to triple digits.
@@MorbidEelI know what you mean. My laptop Ram is 4gb and I thought those were enough (use for normal ms office and play 2000s game). Last week my office upgrade mine and they have 16gb of Ram!!
I'm from Uruguay. The OLPC project was a success there. I'm surprised you didn't talk about it. Your points are all valid, but it would be interesting to analyze how they were addressed here.
la ceibalita! Estaba buscando algun comentario sobre Uruguay
@@tatianavilla5037 in spite of all the problems mentioned here, it was designed for children. They dropped the OLPC now in favor of just a windows laptop and it's a nightmare for parents. Children install video games that parents don't know about and are exposed to sexual predators through the chat. And this is all through a government-provided device that parents cannot opt-out of (and imagine the conflict with the kids if you did). We might as well give them smartphones with TikTok pre-installed at this point.
@@alvaromoe what are you taking about? the computers Uruguay use in schools and highschool use linux and most of them have a website blocker
And instaling games is reduced to a few games comatible with them.
The laptop was replaced with a horrible tablet that didnt allow to install anything in it
Whats happening now is that parents give kids smartphones too early
Yo tuve clases de programación con la XO (básicas, solo hacíamos juegos) y varios de mis compañeros se interesaron lo suficiente como para estudiar carreras relacionadas.
probablemente porque Uruguay ya tenía un buen internet en 2006
the biggest problem with the playpump is the design itself, regardless of culture. merry-go-rounds take a little bit of energy to get going and then spin by themselves for a while, which is why kids can and do play on them. playpumps require constant power because that energy goes to pumping water instead of spinning... (no wonder kids got tired of them so quickly)
this guy took a look a water handpumps and decided to replace something where you stand and move your arm with something where you walk in a circle...
A push wheel is certainly more practical. Not sure about for water pumping in this situation but depending on the circumstances it could be. Say for more large scale operations like irrigation.
@@brainstormsurge154 not quite sure what you specifically mean by a 'push wheel' but sure, handpumps aren't very useful at scale but these were designed to be like merry-go-rounds, so you have to stand sort of sideways to push them, too--all around less convenient. they also weren't developed for use at scale (even if they came with water towers that were supposed to mitigate the 'intermittent playing' problem), given that they were meant to replace handpumps for normal water use (the real value of a pump is that it gets to water that is less likely to be polluted and can't be contaminated by buckets or whatnot. less clean water can be used to water crops in most circumstances)
The problem is that the task of fetching water is carried out by mothers, not children .
Electric water pumps are the best😊
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa well, the water tower is probably also meant to mitigate this, since children playing fills the tower rather than fetching the water---it is just pumped to a place where it can be fetched more easily later (this is not how it worked out, of course; instead women both spin the playpump and get the water from the tower, as children don't play on the playpumps for the reason i mentioned above).
as for electric pumps, while they might be convenient in some places, the limiting factor on hand pump use in rural areas is the difficultly of repairs and a lack of replacement parts, which would only be more of an issue with a more complex and fiddly electric pump, regardless of the power source used.
Bro I freaking love hearing about failed designs. Please make more vids on them in the future. You learn the most from failure after all.
18:20 I was able to do that when I was 12 years old, that's because I started reading books about computers when I was 8, and I was taught by my father the basics of using DOS to play games, then I decided I wanted to know how to make games, that's when I was set on this path. But a lot of things had to happen, I had to be of middle class, to have a computer, which is expensive and was only possible because my father was an engineer, I had to have access to books and be autistic to the point of being able to learn on my own from just books, I was an avid book reader. I also spent a lot of time watching cable TV and getting immersed in that hacker culture.
Expecting a kid to just be able to do that, like if it was "natural" is ridiculous without the cultural context. Its insanity.
We had such similar childhoods that it's wild. But I was lower class and my dad worked on security systems.
So, yeah. I completely agree.
I remember when that laptop was announced and I was so upset because I wasn't able to buy one. You know who would have loved an open source pc for $100? My poor American self. I was playing Zork on an old laptop my mom had gotten from work that ran Windows 3.1. Zork is great and all, but it was really the only thing that laptop could do. I wanted one so badly, but they didn't sell them. At least, not that I ever saw.
nowadays computers are cheaper but you are not encouraged to program anymore .
I work for a translation company. A HUGE bias of machine translation is that there just isn't enough data for developing countries. Even really big groups like Swahili lack the subtle traslations available to english or spanish.
There isn’t enough data for Cantonese as well, a language spoken in developed countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.
It's the one thing people forget to do. It's just one simple thing that they can ask: "How can I help you?"
At an engineering conference I heard the testimony of one of the engineers and how a company they volunteered for tried to help a community. They installed latrines and toilets around the village for sanitation. A year later, they came back to check on how the community was doing but noticed that all the latrines were gone, some even had walls removed. When they asked why they would destroy them, members of the community just said that they had always been going outdoors and that was natural and something that was part of their culture. It connected them back to the land. The charity organizers still tried to explain that they had worked hard to bring them the materials and that it was done for their own health. But the community leaders explained that they never asked for toilets. They didn't want them. Their homes needed new roofs. When the rains come, it rains inside their homes and that's what they needed. So as soon as the organizers had left, the villagers tore down the latrines and used the materials for what they really needed, sound homes.
That does often bring up a dilemma, how do you approach a cultural practice that is clearly harmful to the population (open latrines or worse, human waste all over the place is an awful vector for all kinds of disease, no matter how natural it may seem). Do you ignore it, knowing that you are perpetuating harm, try and work around it even if it's nowhere near as effective as the ideal solution, or try to get them to change their practices, and risk being seen as the arrogant westerner imposing their culture on the developing world.
Of course a combined effort to get in roofing materials at the same time as building the toilets would have helped, but that still leaves the issue above.
None of these feel like a design failure, it feels more like philanthropic organizations caring more about the opinion of backers then the problem
Like Thomas Sankara said, if the developed countries truly want to help with the hunger in Africa they should send tractors and farming equipment so help produce a self reliant native food production, not one dependent on foreign handouts
The incubator should not only have been adopted in the third world, it should have been widely adopted in the developed world too. The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes about the level of corruption and mismanagement in western healthcare.
After all, an incubator is a relatively simple device that should not cost the earth to produce. Its economies of scale that keep the cost ridiculously high, anything with a limited market that requires non standard components with low production numbers will be expensive.
Consider the price difference between cars and light aircraft. A brand new Fiat Panda will set you back about $17,000, but the cheapest Cessna is around $300,000, yet the Fiat is a far more complicated machine. The difference comes from the economies of scale, the Fiat is built on a production line that can produce hundreds of cars every day, whereas the Cessna is essentially a hand made product.
The fiat is NOT a more complex machine. Your fiat does not need to have its engine rebuilt every 5 years and does not have the torque of every bolt on the car documented with strict inspections after every ride with the consequence of doing this wrong being death
@@BitTheByteuh a car does have more parts, it's technically more complicated. You're just pointing out the reason they cost so much, the regulations for a "certified" aircraft.
ok, there are some HUGE problems with this line of thinking, so i'll try to explain.
first there is the OMS regulations, that ussually are VERY estrict (for example, i, as a doctror can go to court if a camera catches me waching my hands for 55 seconds instead of 60), not even mention mass production. so for this incubator they would have to make the buildings where they assemble them totally asceptic, the workers that build them have to use at least gloves, masks, glasses, and biologic issolant clothing just to get in the building to work, the paint have to be special too, so you would have to make A LOT of imports just to get the incubator built. now there is the manteinence and the education for the staff, so at least you need a new carrer on your universities that teaches how to repair them.
then there is the social problem, would YOU vote for a goverment that gives those incubators to the hospitals, or would you vote for someone who promises top tech for your hospitals?.
@@HydraulicDesignThere are reasons for these certifications. It's not arbitrary, and it should be a real consideration. Cars are only more complex in a theoretical sense.
you don't have children. ask me how I know.
I did some consulting for a charter school back around 2002/03. They bought every student one of those new white Macbook laptops. The kids treated the computers like toys, tossed them. Essentially the laptops where a replacement for pencil and paper and the teacher had no guidance on how they could incorporate into lesson plans. For the students the computer was not really important for their school work.
The issue is much, much, more fundamental. The vast majority of foreign aid, in any form, is more about ego boosting of donors or diplomacy. One of the common examples of this is clothing and textiles industry in Nigeria, back in the 80's it was a major industry with 30+ plants but in the modern day more than 80% of textile products are second hand from developing countries. You see the same issue with food aid, why farm when a large portion of your nation food supply is given for free by rich nations? You can't compete against structurally free products as a business.
This is a similar issue you have with "designing" for developing nations, it skips loads of economic realities to "aid" these people.
A far more effective form of aid is investing local business' but also allowing them to fail and recognize when a business doesn't work, rather than giving free shit or giving money. Instead of setting up a water pump thats expensive and nobody knows how to fix or otherwise get parts for, set up a company that sells waterpumps. Yes, that means some communities might need to leave where they live because where they live isn't hospitable with their current standard of living that's no different in the west. We don't fund would be ghost towns in the west and have a community reliant on foreign handouts to continue existing, why do that in Africa?
Reliance of foreign aid isn't aiding the people.
You can perfectly develop products for different cultures, most products are developed at least partially with different cultures in mind. It's them wanting or needing it that's the real issue with the product you designed.
Another huge issue is there's almost no motivation for rural areas. The children might take interest in it and have fun, but there's probably more important things they could be doing. Whether that's because their family needs them or because things like programming have no motivation in their culture. To them, it might just be a novelty. Like they could instead be practicing whatever skills they use to get food/money on the table, or improve their homes, etc. Presumably there's not that many programming jobs in these countries or even infrastructure for these "abstract/modern" skills (math, programming, etc). While these are great skills for any country to eventually have, I have to wonder if they're really benefiting anything at this moment. I can teach a kid how to use circuit design software to make a solar panel, but they don't have the materials, the tools, or other specialists to know how to put that to good use.
I could be wrong with everything I said, but even if first world philanthropists had the money, effort, labor, and ideas, it still would take a lot of time for developing countries to build up. If you want them to explore more modern/abstract opportunities, they first need to develop the more "materialistic" skills they need to thrive. Until then it's just fun facts and novelties.
7:33 “there’s no easy solution for this,” but an appropriate solution would be for the organizations that caused the problem in the first place to pay for the fishers’ proper nets, so that they will stop using the mosquito ones, so the habitats can recover.
Exactly, the real problem is poverty. I'm not sure this is a mysterious cultural factor to value having food to eat. If they had enough money they could afford proper fishing nets and wouldn't need to use the free mosquito nets.
In Mexico a few years back the government wanted each kid to get tablet. They picked some cities to test it out, and sadly within 2 weeks the majority of the tablets ended up at local pawnshops.
loved this, thank you! i took an anthropology/gender studies class on power and international development in college and we learned similar things about NGO initiatives, etc, coming into a place assuming they know what the local people want and need-big projects with ambitious tech not designed for the cultural context, when the folks there are like, "...actually, we'd just love to have a clean well in our town so we don't have to spend half the day walking to get potable water?"
I remember seeing the liter of light in ads on the internet a decade or so ago and honestly the fact that THAT worked cause it was practical and did the job it needed for those who really needed it now.
It cheers me up that some of these intentions got it right.
Thank you for taking the time to upload this.
Its like seeing beautiful snow in the morning from your window but failed to see many crushed below the avalanche! Very well presented!
This is an excellent video. It hits so many good notes on education, technology, and philanthropy, not to mention the design lessons.
It reminded me what it felt like for these types of projects 10-15 years ago. There was so much hope that technology and social entrepreneurship could fix the inequalities between the developing and developed world. It's obvious in retrospect that if the problems were that easy to solve, the community would've likely already found a solution.
The discussion of the impact of environment and context on education has me thinking about what ways those things can be exported alongside technologies. For example, if the laptops had been developed with curriculum co-designed with the instructors of the classrooms. Or what sorts of educational activities can be exported as part of a computer program, and what parts need to be supported by cultural and social contexts.
Thank you for the well-researched and artfully presented video ❤️
Hey, I really appreciate the thoughtful message as well as the donation. It really does mean a lot. Thank you!
Omg you have a regular old plumbus I'm so jealous 😭
I thought everyone did?
regular ? that implies there's a deluxe model or something
Why would you be jealous of something so ordinary?
Billionaires and their charities should perhaps remember that the road to a deepening class divide is paved with good intentions.
Ha
And with bad intentions. I don’t think that they wanted to help more than they wanted the fame.
Imagine honestly believing billionaires have good intentions.
curtesy of the IMF and WORLD BANK the road of perpetual poverty is paved with debt
I remember hearing about OLPC on a news report as a child and thinking it sounded really cool but surely that money could be better spent on more immediately useful things. I didn't even need a laptop and lived in the western world.
At the endo of the day the sheer disinterest of Negroponte in what the people he was "helping" would actually find helpful seems to be the source of all the individual problems with that project.
I think the reason why OLPC was seen to have missed the mark about cultural values was that all the media, and therefore feedback, was targeted to Western investors. Investors fund the project.
It seems like there needs to be 2 types of pitches of the idea: 1 for the corperate western investors and 1 for the people in need. OLPC seemed to rely heavily on investors rather that the people which caused the product to miss the cultural mark.
As a Designer myself who has worked on projects both in 1st world and 3rd world countries, this definitely was spot on. There is so much that can be said on the topic but I appreciate this video
Well, the idea of simply throwing tech equipment into classrooms and expecting everybody to become an expert over night is not limited to development aid. Industrialized countries do the exact same thing as well, expecting the _teachers_ of those schools to miraculously acquire IT skills that magically multiply classroom productivity.
In other words, teachers are supposed to be coders, web designers, IT repairpersons, system admins and much more, completely free of charge and without any additional investment of time or other resources by the state. Can you guess how well _that_ is going right now??
A lot of these examples don’t have anything to do with not understanding other cultures. It has to do with not understanding humans and basic logical outcomes.
Even if that were the case, it’s not particularly difficult to force something onto a desperate population with no alternatives. They’re still technically humans; they’ll adapt to it. But with the incubators and the playpumps, that’s not what happened. The incubators would’ve worked if not for regulatory setbacks and the playpumps were a terrible idea for any society. It’s just a long process with far too many steps.
All in all, most of these things aren’t about culture, but about practicality and thinking about an idea for longer than a day before rushing to implement it for fame and glory.
25:32 Yeah, you can. It really isn’t that difficult. A lot of, if not most of these projects would’ve failed in Western countries as well.
Agreed. The pump and laptop didnt fail cus of cultural differences, they failed cus they were funded through flashy presentations instead of the merit of the design. Companies who design products funded by themselves frequently do so with successful results in other cultures. A better title imo would have been "why cowboy charity funding is unsustainable"
Exactly. Westerners would also prefer a normal hand pump for water, rather than spinning a merry go round. This isn't a cultural misunderstanding it's arrogance. Assuming that poor people will be grateful for something that you yourself would never use.
I rarely ever comment on videos, but this mini-documentary was interesting, engaging and well-researched. I really appreciate the work and the care that has gone into making this.
you make such amazing videos, so glad you can educate people about the global importance and impacts of design which is often overlooked
I've used the OLPC and it had several severe issues. The display is too dim in bright light (the backlight doesn't get bright enough to compete with sunlight when new). The keyboard has poor responsiveness, although it does have a cool compose feature for accents. the OS is a weird custom build of Linux which was difficult to learn (I was fully competent at Windows XP and Mac OS X at the time). And the wifi reception stank. Under ideal circumstances.
OLPC is basically a piece of technology, and just like any other technology, it needs to exist in an infrastructure (Internet, power supply, basically any other node that the device's data can move into outside of the device itself, etc) that can support it. And clearly, the device associated with OLPC is completely on its own out there in Senegal, both in technological and social contexts. There is absolutely nothing that can support it to give it some shred of chance of becoming a kind of sustainable thing the locals will rely on to help them consistently improve themselves in ways, shape, and form that they see fit.
@@TheGrifhinx And if I was having such strong user issues in the US, then they had no chance in West Africa
It was probably the best that could have been done for the price with the technology at the time. Nowadays you could make something a lot better for $200, something that probably would have cost more like $600-800 back then, even considering inflation.
I try to use youtube as a means of light education, and your channel is a perfect example of what i want. Thank you so much for your insight and your hard work.
I absolutely loved this! As someone who has worked on developing technologies for social good in the Indian context, I have been a victim of seductive utopian thinking myself. Luckily for me, I did some pilot projects in Indian villages, got most of my assumptions broken and ended up designing small scale, contextual solutions (which I never managed to scale up, different story :'( ). Case in point, I designed some games and curricula for teaching computer programming after being smitten by Papert's work. Long story short, I quickly discovered this does not work, particularly in the rural Indian context, so I ended up embracing a lot of instructionism (the mortal enemy of constructionism lol) with some project based learning added in where it made sense. It mostly worked and helped me train local school teachers who had no idea at all about the constructionist fad. On a related note, I would absolutely love a review from you of Kentaro Toyama's book "Geek Heresy" where he lists OLPC and also some other hyped up projects like the famous "Hole in the wall" experiment.
Great video, love the notes about metaphor.
Excellent content as always!
I think the examples are great, but its not like they needed cultural understanding to predict the fate of marry-go-round pumps or the cheap-looking incubators. Looks like a bad design choice regardless of culture? Might be wrong but pretty sure in every culture kids can get bored of playing or medical equipment should look trustworthy.
That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why people like to make it seem like you need some “deep cultural understanding” in order to provide solutions to other countries’ problems.
I feel like the design choices of these products revolved around catching the eye of Western investors and Western public sentiment.
I am not an investor, but I assume that investors or philanthropists give money to ideas that appeal to their idea of impoverished areas rather than their actual practicality in their geographical area.
Essentially, it seems like mundane, but actually, practical ideas may not go into fruition while exciting ideas would be the ones that actually get funded but don't actually make a difference. This stems from different cultural values between philanthropist/investor and the impoverished.
The medical equipment was trustworthy, though.
Exactly. Westerners would also prefer a normal hand pump, and a professional looking incubator. If that incubator works so well then why wasn't it also used in the US to save money on hospital costs? The real problem is arrogance, believing that poor people will accept absurd or shoddy devices that you would never use yourself.
Good video. What it essentially boils down to is language. Speaking the right or local language gives you so much more nuance in matters you would otherwise not get from a translator. It allows you to get more personal and dig deeper into problems and not waste time and energy on ideas that will fail in a certain culture. But learning the language, spending significant time with the locals, sharing food and so on is a lot of investment for most people as they would rather just send money to some good cause and move on with their lives. Imo if you want to have true lasting change, you must build culture bridges. People and structures that serve as embedded translators who have lived through BOTH sides of the bridge, that can translate, in natural language, what the true problems the locals are facing rather than try to fix the superficial one we see on the outside. Sadly it often comes down to a disconnect between the rulers and their citizens. However every problem has a solution, its just a matter of using the right language, putting in the time and work to fix it. Because when we stop doing this work we always end up using the worst language...violence.
Another great video from which we can learn a lot. We have set up the Art for Children gallery in Da Nang (central Vietnam), with the aim of teaching children on the one hand to enjoy art, and on the other hand to use what we can learn from art.
To this end, we have developed various educational activities and although the interest is good (also because the activities are free), we notice that it is not developing in the direction we hoped. It's not much more than fun. But this video got me thinking about how we can adapt our working methods. Within the group of volunteers, most are Vietnamese and only a few are foreigners. However, the Vietnamese want to learn a lot from those foreigners, but they go far too far from what their own culture has to offer. And as a result, the gap with the target group becomes too large, they no longer follow.
In short, it is clear that we should think and work much less from our offering and otherwise very interesting program, but much more from the target group. Thanks for another instructional video.
Would I trust a device made of used car parts to keep my baby alive? If it's the only option, I would be singing it's praises.
I‘d be chanting praise to the machine god like some Warhammer 40k tech priest
You missed the point... the people actually making the buying decisions didn't want to be sold some 3rd-rate solution no one in the West would be caught dead with.
Like he said, it's not the customers/patients making that choice
Everyone who rides in a car trust their life to car parts whether they realize it or not...
@@hcn6708 it literally is... they all ride in cars...
I read that the liter of light project was difficult to takeoff because many people did not want them as it made them look poor to others. But perhaps that stigma was surmounted as more had them installed. I thought it was brilliant and I still think of it all the time when I’m on top floors with ceilings
Thanks for the clear view
Love what you do, brother.
This comment is being left in order to influence engagement metrics and to drive algorithmic spread. Thank you for making thoughtful and interesting videos.
Love your videos!!
really awesome video, great insights, thanks for making it! :D
Excellent work. Thank you!
Thank you for your insights🙏
Thank you for video ❤
The first time a child actually touched an XO machine was when kids from one of the researchers were asked to take one apart and put it together (which they did, but I don't know with how much supervision) so they could claim to journalists that the children would be able to maintain the laptops themselves. I had previously done some experiments with kids and found, to my surprise, that for pointing devices they preferred trackballs (the larger the better) by a huge margin, then joysticks, then mice, then the IBM trackpoint and dead last was the trackpad (which is what I liked the most myself). Without such testing the OLPC machine adopted the trackpad with a capacitive middle and resistive extensions to allow drawing with a pen (this never worked well). One of their first deployments was in Nepal and it turned out that the climate conditions made the children's hands sweat in a way that made the trackpads unusable.
Thank you. This is a vital topic. This is a great reminder.
I wish I could give this video multiple thumbs up! It's absolutely gold. The amount of research and effort you’ve put into shedding light on this subject is truly impressive. And shedding light into that subject is very much appreciated
Wow, thank you!
Well-researched, great content!!!
Got this recommended to me. Idk when I subbed to you but this video is awesome.
Love this video!
BTW the concepts discussed here also apply to all cultures and subcultures regardless of geography. Whether it's fashion, law, automobiles or recipes etc...
I actually used one of those green laptops as a kid! I still have it, in fact. Honestly one of my favorite childhood toys
Great video - I encountered OLPC when looking for a cheap, small, basic laptop for university in 2006 and always wondered how that went. I ended up getting one of the first netbooks but I remember wondering what the point of teaching people to code and use the net was when they barely had electricity. Nowadays I realise that they were just trying to construct a digital serf class to run global tech support, and my feeling is they've just shifted focus to India to do that nowadays.
Remember all the well-intentioned engineers making intubation machines in the first months of Covid? Some were later tested and they would have ruptured a patient's lungs. Because the engineers didn't understand the question, they jumped straight to a "solution".
Despite Negroponte's plans, the first few hundred machines off the production line went to two pilot programs in Brazil (in São Paulo and in Porto Alegre). One of the included applications was eToys written in Squeak Smalltalk. This was not mentioned anywhere and the teachers in the pilot programs were not aware of it, but the children like the mouse icon (looks more like a cat) and played around with it on their own. They ended up teaching the teachers and this got enough traction that Porto Alegre hosted one of the two 2009 SqueakFest events (the other was in the USA).
Some really good perspective offered here. Personally, I opted to fund micro-loans organizations when donating; local entrepreneurs could decide which ideas to propose, and donated funding went to those ideas as start-up capital. However, after listening to your analysis here, I hope that the introduction of finance and debt was not similarly as arrogant as the example covered.
This is a great video! Thanks for making it!
My pleasure!
This was very insightful
Such an important video! An imbedded topic here is the design world’s distrust (disgust) with the free market. Using the market means you are approaching the problem as equals to your customers. If you fail to meet their needs, your business will fail. Charity is saying “here, take this stuff we think is good enough, and be grateful.”
Super interesting thanks 👍🏽
My mom did some work on the OLPC project, she was a MIT Media Lab alum and developed some of the software. Which is not to say that I have any deep knowledge of the project myself but I do think there was an attitude around the Media Lab--which Negroponte had founded and had left shortly before starting OLPC--that your ideas should all become start-ups. I think what they did create was a cool product that could have been of some use in solving the problems they wanted to address but they had that tech founder vision thing where they seemingly sincerely thought it was the whole solution, rather than the easier problem to solve that would need to be combined with a whole infrastructure and curriculum. The cost barrier ended up being largely solved by Moore's law in probably a shorter timeframe than it would have taken to develop a meaningful plan to make use of the cheap laptops they'd created.
This is one your best videos DT!
amazing video!!!
Epic video as always
Great Video! Cultural design applies in the working world, politics, war and much more. Now that we are a "global economy" it's hard to remember that we all think from a different place.
Very true. It's funny because the people I spoke with who are involved in international development approached it from a policy perspective. However, the considerations for developing policy are very similar to those for designing physical objects like the ones mentioned in this video.
@@Design.Theory It's a great reminder of how important it is to build a diverse team with different backgrounds when working on a product or problem. Sometimes you need someone to disagree with you.
Great vid.🤯
A few slum dwellers in the Philippines use the litre of light in the city. In the countryside where most poor people are they don't need a skylight. Its a basic aspiration to put a thin layer of ply under the tin to greatly reduce the radiative heat.
Thank you for making this video.
My pleasure!
I remember what it was like putting a new screen in my previous laptop when the first one died. I had to pull off the front bezel and remove the bottom of the laptop to disconnect cables. I also had to replace the waterproofing tape. Through the whole process, I was scared of doing permanent damage. Even though I followed instructions to a T, some of the plastic clips holding the bezel on broke off. I can't imagine placing that burden on a child.
Thanks !!!! !!!!!
Great video!
Didn't expect to be watching this through. Now I'm glad I did! Thank you. Put the laptop guy in an informal settlement in Nyunga Cape Town South Africa for ONE WEEK - you'll see how that laptop gets solar power, speed dial connectivity to emergency services and healthcare, anti theft protection and the ability to find domestic or gardening jobs AND THEN, maybe gets Solitaire and Word.
Excellent video with incredible insight! Good design solves a real problem in a manner that suits the user, NOT the designer.
amazing recap of OLPC. Completely forgotten about it, having read of that "project of the century" in PC Mag (time flies btw).... Sad it turned out that way.
0:18 the issue here is ... that the standardized incubator has decades of being used and has become a standard device used in the industry and nurses and meds are taught on how it is used ... considering this is normal the aversion of using something that is very new and not standardized.... it is known how this new product will affect something as delicate/fragile as a new born and of course nobody will take any risk with new borns. Unless that new machine is tested throughly and becomes standard its use, then it will have a market... it is basically the same irony as when talking about job hunting as a new grad without experience: to get a job you need experience, to get experience you need a job. if nobody gives you a job, you wont get experience, businesses wont give a chance to someone for a job that they are requesting experience.
top notch content
The weird thing is that Apple had something that would work as OLPC in the 90s called the eMate. It was NOT a laptop, it was more of a learning tool. It ended up being discontinued during Steve Jobs II, Return of The Sith, but quite a few school systems used them as classroom learning tools. The key here is that the eMates were not just tossed at the kids. They were integrated into a complete classroom program. Teachers were expected to learn, not only the basics of using the eMate, but the potentials for use within the curriculum. eMates were very rugged but pretty basic, with a small monochrome touch screen, built in keyboard and an operating system based on the Newton PDA OS. They came with word processing software, as well as drawing programs, spreadsheets and other useful software. They were intended to be integrated with the classroom's desktop computer and had a couple of different ways of communicating with each other and the desktop. There was even a provision to have multiple students using the same eMate (at different times, of course) by having password-protected memory on the unit. It wasn't a bad idea, all told although (being Apple) the actual units could be pretty pricey. The concept was that the schools would be in charge of the eMates and the kids would sign them out for classroom use or for homework. No internet capability, no colour screen, no extra bells and whistles, just a basic tool that would work alongside the regular classroom work. There was zero expectation that the kids would somehow be able to use them without instruction or that this would be some kind of a "magic bullet" to suddenly accelerate the kids to genius level. Just a classroom tool. Nothing more.
Kudos also to the team of Zipline, who developed a drone system launched with slingshots to deliver medical supplies to hospitals in Ruanda and Ghana. They’re saving lives everyday with them. That’s also a good example of how to make it right, like the bottle lights
I bought 2 OLPCs (one for me, one for my son). The concept seemed awesome to me, but I was disappointed that I couldn't even buy the generator, and I found them so bloated and slow that they were mostly unusable. Its amazing to me to see one that got used so much that a key wore out!
Making a Pi based OLPC form-factor is one of those projects I have in the back of my head... I might do it some day.
21:33 is perfectly illustrating the whole irony of OLPC.
The best design channel
i fucking love this channel, it PERFECTLY fills my niche and i can NOT get enough of it
The importance of computer reminded me of fiction where some important people of the past were introduced to the computer and internet through time travel shenanigans. One of the three usually happens:
1) The person (usually implied to be already educated or wise) quickly come to realise the implications.
2) A political tussle begins between those who see it as a threat, an opportunity and a tool of power.
3) The computer was fun while it lasted. Either taken out of commission by itself, an accident or miscare by someone who did not understand fully what it is.
I remember seeing ads for this one laptop per child thing in the mall when I was a kid. I thought it was really strange looking for a laptop.
It is kind of like in Britain when I went to the grocery store and saw “American Hotdogs”. It was little sausages made with what looked like corned beef inside and stored in a can on the shelf instead of vacuum sealed inside a refrigerator. That would be completely gross to North Americans. We don’t eat any sausages or hotdogs stored in jars here
I had an OLPC growing up, here in the us. My dad got it for me because it was cheap, so I could have a laptop as a kid. My least favorite part about it was the e-reader screen, even in proper lighting it was super hard to see. It was also horribly slow, even with a normal US Internet connection. Mostly, I would use it to play chickensmoothie or neopets at night when I was supposed to be asleep, lol.
amazing video :)
A big problem with the OLPC was also that they never commercialized it in the Western world, outside of the short and expensive Give1Get1 program. That meant the developer and user pool for the device remained small and improvements to the device would be slow, as there was no incentive to develop for it. The tech of the device was also a big issue, both flash storage (1GB) and RAM (256GB) where borderline unusable, it was enough to boot up the core OS and apps, but browsing the Internet was close to impossible and creative use like programming was excruciating. Again, something commercialization and a higher price point for better specs (and a better keyboard) could have easily fixed that.
The device itself was spectacular for its time in many ways, but it also felt like a device that was more about (unfinished) ideas and politics than about people actually using it day to day.
I'd read many articles on several of these devices meant to help, but very few articles on how they actually impacted the lives of the people who used them and almost no articles on the long term effects upon the various populations that adopted them. I'm glad to know what happened in the end.
To be fair, the incubator idea was just fine. Just because the intended purchaser was too ignorant to see that doesn't mean the inventors weren't correct.
Agreed. But like he said things like the system or government (or culture, individual financial status, infrastructure, etc) are issues too.
Too many people, western people, and capitalists put too much emphasis on just individuals and small individual businesses.
For example, creating and donating electronics if that place doesn't have infrastructure for electricity.
Watch Second Thought and More Perfect Union.