Transcriber: Capa Girl Reviewer: Fran Ontanaya
Good afternoon.
I am delighted to be here today
to have the opportunity to talk to you about
how I believe we can use design to change the world.
And I don't know what you think of when you think of design,
but I think even based on the last conversation we often think of this --
This object has become a piece of fascination for us
because it has transformed the way we create
and we collaborate and we communicate.
And some of us -- and you have to confess -- sleep with this object.
While others of us, if we've lost it,
actually feel as though we've lost a part of ourselves.
Yes?
But when I dig a little deeper and I look at the statistics
of who's actually owning one of these objects
and the highest percentage on this map is represented by the red color,
and the lowest percentage moves down the scale
from orange all the way down to green,
we can see that not everyone is existing with an iPhone.
And not everyone is being changed by this technology.
In fact, I would propose that we live in a world today
that is begging for more than the design of objects
to solve its significant problems.
We can look at issues of homelessness,
of transportation, food security, and even our own economy
are things we're beginning to question if we haven't been already.
And so today, we're at TED and we all love "Ideas worth Spreading"
but I propose, that if we're going to make these ideas
hold any value for our future we need to be about action.
And when I think about someone who's really inspired me
and taken an idea and turned it into action,
I think about a man by the name of Dr. John Snow.
Dr. Snow was a physician in the 1800's,
and he was really curious about how cholera was spread.
The common notion of the day is that it was an air-born illness
and that you had to inhale it.
But Dr. Snow wasn't convinced of this.
He actually believed you had to ingest it through your mouth
and in 1854, when cholera broke out in London,
Dr. Snow wanted to see if he could prove his theory
and he did this, not by staying in his doctor's office,
but by going outside to talk to people.
And what he did in talking to people, was begin to map
all of the incidences of cholera in a particular region of London.
And what this mapping did for him,
was show him where all of these people were getting sick,
and it revealed a correlation,
that everyone who lived in close proximity to,
and got their water from the Broad Street water pump,
were the ones who were getting sick and potentially dying.
What Dr. Snow did after this, is not just wait to see,
"Oh, that's nice, I've got this information," he actually took it to the city officials
and showed this visual to them, and made a compelling argument
so much so, that they removed the handle from the water pump
and actually saw cholera dissipate.
Now, I love Dr. Snow's work so much because I'm a designer
and I always loved the power of design to take something
that its complex and use visuals to make it compelling.
And in this case, it changed the world.
But I also love Dr. Snow because I believe he gives a lesson to all of us,
about what it means to take an idea and turn it into action.
And I would propose he didn't do it haphazardly,
I would propose to you today, that he actually used a design process.
Now, many of us can talk about design process in different kinds of ways.
And if you're designers out in the audience,
you may have your own particular method.
But for the purposes of today,
I'm gonna talk about it through these four lenses.
I believe for every design project there is a point of discovery.
A time to understand what people really need.
From there we move to actually defining the problem we're looking to solve.
Then we move on to developing opportunities those can be many,
we don't try to refine it too quickly until we've explored a lot of options.
And from there we move to a point of delivery.
And if we skip these steps, we run into the risk of actually doing a failed project.
And so like I said, I think the idea to action strategy
needs a process for us to go through,
otherwise we just have these random ideas
going nowhere, and even potentially random actions
making no difference in the world.
I would propose that as soon as Dr. Snow found out that there was cholera
and there was a problem, he went to define an objective,
a problem he wanted to solve.
And in the end, delivered something that actually changed the world.
And the reason I'm so convinced of this,
is because I've been complicit in a design project that led to failure.
And this failure came, because we jumped all the way
to the very end of the process.
And I'd like to tell you about that experience.
A few years ago, I was invited to be a participant
in a sustainable development project in Rwanda.
I was a designer, and my task was to develop a website
for a group of women who were living in a rural community.
They where taking an environmental problem
and turning it into an economic opportunity.
The problem, is this particular plant, known as the water hyacinth.
It's a plant that grows over the lakes and rivers of the region in East Africa
affects many countries in fact,
but these women are actually taking the plant and extracting it.
Because if they didn't, the amount of growth over the lakes and rivers,
actually eradicates them, and kills off life forms and kills off water sources
for these women and for these communities.
They're taking this particular plant and transforming it into a weaving fiber.
And from there, they are turning the weaving fiber into handy crafts
they can actually sell.
And while this is lovely and I was invited to participate,
the problem was I was asked to build a website.
And the website was for a community of people who had no computers,
no internet, and no electricity -- Excellent!
As a designer, that is a huge failure,
that feels like you're defeated, you're actually so discouraged,
because the thing you've made is not really going to make a difference.
And the Google Analytics prove it, no one really goes to the site.
So I wanted to go back, before I left on this project
to the beginning of the design process
and I did this by spending time with the women
and talking to them more about the weaving business in Rwanda,
and I learned that it's quite competitive.
And in fact, these women don't necessarily have a way to distinguish themselves
from the rest of the weaving cooperatives in the country.
And they know that some women get their work sent off to New York
and put into Macy's department store
and they would love that opportunity,
because they know it gives them more income.
And so rather than jumping ahead to figuring out already what I wanted to deliver,
I redefined the question, and I asked
how might we create a brandmark to help distinguish this cooperative,
and how might we spread this brand story
when electricity and computers are not available.
Changing the question, changed what we might move forward on
and what's typical for a designer, is to take that question
and go work by herself or himself and get focused on how they'll solve it.
But instead I chose to switch the story,
and I chose to invite the women to be the creators of their own logo.
We spend some time together and then they do various pictures
of all the ideas that they possibly could have
about what was possible for their logo mark.
Things like baskets -- which are the most obvious thing -- emerged.
My favourite I think was that they actually drew furniture
even though they never made a furniture piece in their whole time together.
But I like to think of it as this future forward thinking,
quite entrepreneurial.
In the end we decided that the water hyacinth was the actual icon that made the most sense
because it was the fiber that made this particular group very different.
And so I turned it into a logo mark for them,
but rather than just putting it on the website I actually turned it into a rubber stamp
because that didn't require computers or electricity
to allow them to spread their brand story.
Now, what this whole experience has thought me is that
we have a very interesting focus in our world.
We currently live and are compelled by the expert.
And we think that the expert knows the answer.
In fact, many development projects are developed, designed,
created and implemented
by experts sending them out to the people who need the solution.
And we can talk of many failures in this particular sector.
I would propose that in our world we need to shift this.
We need to look at many of us as the expert.
You are the expert of your own experience
and the reason you don’t take action on things is
sometimes because you don't even feel you have a place at the table.
So when thinking about this, and thinking about the projects in development
I went back to think about my own. And I realized that
because the development project had been assigned to me
rather than developed with this community and me being a part of that conversation,
we were limited in the outcomes.
I switched it to see what it would look like if women had a toolkit
to develop their own development project.
In the toolkit were pictures because I need to clarify
we didn't speak the same language.
We couldn't communicate using our typical verbal messaging.
In the toolkit were cameras, and notepads, and pencils, and pictures.
And I was not present as the expert.
I gave them to a Rwandan colleague and asked him to ask the women to complete the tasks.
These various tasks were asking them to take pictures
of things they love about their community,
to draw pictures of things they wanted to change in their community
and in the end we had a lot of visual content that helps us to re-imagine
what another development project might be beyond the piece of technology.
These are some of the images that the women created.
I can see lots of potential for projects that help with transportation and food
and other necessary items in the community's survival and thriving opportunity.
These are some of the imagines that they took
and what's fascinating to me about this particular part of the project
was that they took pictures when given an average daily wage,
which is about dollar US, of things that they bought with that dollar US
and for the record the majority of the photographs that came back were pictures of food.
So, it begs the question of thinking about a larger system in our world
rather than a one-off design project.
Now, we don't all live in Rwanda and this may seem like it's a far off story
and something that was nice for that particular scenario,
but I believe it's a compelling argument
for how we live today and how we transform our world.
I am currently working with a group of students
none of whom are designers,
who want to make a difference in our city around cycling.
They know that not everyone wants to cycle
and they know that there are some inhibitors
as to why people may or may not choose to become part of a cycle friendly city.
And rather just assume that there's nothing that we can do,
and just hope that people will want to buy a bike next year,
they are actually embedding themselves in the problem.
They call themselves "Team Break the Cycle"
and they have looked at a discovery process that is very interesting.
What they uncovered in their research was
that people didn't buy bikes and didn't get into biking
because they were deeply afraid of bike theft.
So they've interviewed bike thieves and they have interviewed the police
and they have talked to our city and the part of our city
that's really interested in cycling.
And they are actually proposing a social enterprise
that would help create jobs and reduce bike theft.
Unfortunately, it's top secret information I won't know till next week what comes of it,
but I am excited because they're actually moving it to the place where it could be implemented.
Dr. John Snow is who I started telling you a story about today
and I proposed that he use the design process to make a change in the world.
He saw that there was cholera, he wanted to figure out how it was spread
when it came into being he wanted to figure out how to stop it,
he mapped that problem and actually changed the system
by getting it in the hands of people who could do something about it.
And I believe if Dr. John Snow had not acted on that day, and on those various days,
to collect all of that data, we might still have cholera.
And I believe today that if we don't stop just talking about ideas
and not getting us to the place where we will actually put them into action
we run the risk of losing the very things that are important to us.
And we have evidence of it every time we turn on the news.
So, you are people who have the ability to engage a process,
you can discover people's needs,
you can move it through to a delivery that will make sense
and you can share the table with others to make a difference in our world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)