I believe that everyone deserves dignity.

Having dignity is empowering; it compels people to act, change, and even inspire others. Why? Because I believe this how humans were made to be. The designer’s challenge is to create products, services, experiences that create a culture of dignity through their use. Good design makes people feel like they count, and that their needs and fears are meaningful. It changes the way they see themselves—and the way they see others.

If all this sounds rather abstract and idealistic, it is. I wrestle with how to embed my designs with a sense of dignity all the time. One thing I do know: having a deep understanding of my customers and their needs is the only way to create systems that really promote a sense of dignity.

I am challenged by this (albeit strongly-worded) quote from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor– when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love… To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce”.

How can our stove create a culture of dignity for all the people it touches? In my next post, I’ll talk a little more about this.

“Affordability isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  –Paul Polak

Opportunity Cost.  A person making less than $2/day has a huge collection of needs.  Which need is the most pressing at any particular moment?  Is it healthcare, improved nutrition, saving for the future?  What will this choice mean in the context of this person’s life?  How will this person weigh our product against the other options present to them?  Purchasing a stove may mean foregoing the purchase of another product/service that satisfies another pressing need.

When you’re working with customers who are miles apart from you, limited to very simple communication networks (i.e. nowhere close to high-tech videoconferencing) and don’t even speak their language, how can you accurately claim that the work you’re doing is human-centered?

Making sure that we understood our customers’ needs at every step of the way was a significant challenge for us, but one that we thought was crucial. We discovered that making prototypes, both here and in Myanmar, was the best way to communicate our ideas to our partners and listen to their ideas in return.

Showing prototypes to our customers helped them tell us what they wanted. When we originally asked what kinds of improvements they needed on their three-brick stoves, we rarely got any definite answers. These women had been cooking on an open flame for centuries, and they had developed all kinds of “workarounds” to make full use of the technology; it was often hard for them to articulate what they wanted to change. Setting our prototype in front of them gave them something to evaluate, and opened up the conversation about which features supported or conflicted with their culture of cooking.

Not counting low-resolution prototypes and partial ones, we’ve made about 16 working prototypes of our stove thus far. Typically, we come up with a revision to the design, draw up some plans and explain how to make it, and our partner builds a prototype in-country. They then tell us what they discovered from making the prototype, what changes they suggest, and what customers have said about it. We take their feedback, prototype their design ourselves, and make revisions. This constant iteration helps us make sure that we are attuned to our customers’ needs at every step, even if we can’t be close to them always.

Recently at the Cool Product Expo, we got a lot of great questions from people.  As I was explaining our goals for the project, one man asked me, “what do you mean by sustainable?”  What a great question!

Our goal from the start has been to create a cook stove that can be completely sustained within a local market.  One aspect of this is economic sustainability.  From the start, our cook stove has been designed to be as cheap as possible.  It needs to be a product that families living on $1-$2 a day can afford and one that saves them money over time.  (Current prototypes currently “pay for themselves” in about 3 months and are priced below what most potential customers say they would pay.)

But, even if it makes sense economically, our cook stove needs to be something that people want to buy and are willing to assume the risk on.  It’s surprising to some people, but marketing plays a big role even in the developing world.  This is especially true of anything that’s perceived as a risk or an “unknown”.

Sustainable also means being manufacturable using local (or easily importable) materials, tools, and know-how.  Shipping costs are of course a concern, but helping build local industry and entrepreneurship know-how is equally important.  It also fits nicely into our design philosophy of building prototypes, getting them into the hands of users, getting real feedback, and doing it often.

Sustainability is at the heart of what we’re trying to do.

Coming up with a name is hard.  Really, really hard.  Especially in a world where URLs are so important but domain squatters have seemingly grabbed everything out there.

Over the course of a week, we spent over 10 hours brainstorming together working through concepts for our name.  We were coming up with a bunch of OK ideas, but nothing was feeling right.  And then, during the ride home from one such session, it just hit Jackie and Larissa: it’s all about the 3 brick stove.  The rest seemed quite obvious to the three of us:

About 3 billion people still cook on an open flame–often with their pots resting on three bricks or stones.  When we first saw these stoves, we immediately assumed it would be easy to create a better design because they are unsafe and very inefficient at transferring heat.  However their durability, ease of use, and minimal up-front cost make them tough competition.

Our team’s name is about having respect, understanding culture, and designing the best solution for our customers.  There’s a reason why these three-brick stoves have been around for thousands of years.  They are not perfect, but we have more to learn from them than most people might think.

We picked the name about a month ago.  I think we all are still quite pleased about the decision.  :-)

In my last post, I talked about how introducing new technology to developing countries is often not enough, regardless of how great it is. There are many cook stove technologies being developed, but how many, really, have made a significant impact? How many have been embraced by women as the norm, and not as something foisted on them by an aid agency? I think that seeking to understand culture and how it changes over time is what differentiates our cook stove project from many others that have gone before it.

Culture explains why we chose some of the paths we took, such as deciding to make a wood-burning stove rather than choosing “greener” (or even free) sources of heat. It explains how low the stove is because the women we designed it for are used to squatting on the ground, and how wide the opening for the firebox is because they like to regulate the strength of the flame by the amount of wood they add to the fire.

Unexpectedly, culture also explained why women were so excited that the box design of the stove and the flame it produced made it look just like a gas stove; our design made them feel rich.

Don’t get me wrong, having a robust technology is still important to us. We’ve made some improvements to existing stove designs to minimize fuel consumption and to protect women from the heat of the fire because we know those are important considerations for them as well. But besides implementing the technology well, we hope to create a product that provides meaning in our customers’ lives. We’re creating a stove that enhances their culture, not rejecting it as “primitive” or “backward”, which some stove projects have a tendency to convey.

And yes, culture does change. People in this country didn’t use microwave ovens from day one—that technology had to be introduced. Perhaps there was a large resistance to change then, with women complaining that using a microwave wasn’t “real” cooking. As a team, we’re not averse to introducing new technologies as long as it seems to fit with where the culture of cooking is going. In fact, enclosing an open flame is still a pretty revolutionary idea in some parts of the world. And the microwave, though it was a radical departure from the cooking technologies before it, was part of a greater shift towards time-saving devices and a growing culture of convenience; it still made sense.

For me, the most satisfying compliment about our stove is not, “wow, it saves THAT much wood?!” It is in the stories we hear back from our partners saying that the stove has a prominent place in the home, is considered a pet by the women, and has become the focus of the family’s conversation at the dinner table. That’s when I know we have a shot at lasting impact.

I can hardly believe it was 1 week ago that we participated in Stanford’s Cool Product Expo 2009.

The experience was amazing.  We didn’t get much time to browse the other “booths”, but what we saw was pretty cool.  We were specially excited about all the Extreme Affordability born projects we saw there like Embrace, Driptech, and d.light.

Our booth was outside which turned out to be awesome.  It was threatening to rain all day, but we got lucky.  We didn’t have time to fire up our stove like we were hoping, but we did enjoy the extra space for our display (which we affectionately called our hut).

We ended up meeting a lot of old friends and made a couple new ones at our booth.  Several people ended up spending quite a bit of time with us–even doing things like brainstorming new pot-skirt designs.  We also met several bloggers and a writer from the Stanford Review.  It was definitely a great experience.

I’ll leave you with some photos from the event.

During our trip to Myanmar last year, our team created a set of cook stove prototypes  that rural women could try out in their cooking spaces.  We created two prototypes–one box-shaped and one bucket-shaped–that we took to women and asked them to compare.  We asked them: do you prefer the box or the bucket stove and why?  Which one would you prefer to use and why?  What does a bucket stove make you think about?  Have you seen something like this before?

Before we started this project, I had no idea that there was such a big stover community out in the world. Go on the web, type “cook stove”. You’ll be amazed at how many hits you’ll get: clay, metal, ceramic, wood-burning, charcoal, solar, new biofuel… you name it, someone’s tried it out. Heck, I would meet random people in Stanford, tell them I was working on a cook stove project and strangely enough, odds were, they were too.

To make my point, the technology we’re using is nothing new. Many people have seen the scarcity of fuel and smokiness of cooking on an open fire and have thought of creating a stove that would change that. But too many of these stoves are all about the technology—how efficient, how cheap, how easy it is to make; not enough are about the customers.

I’m not just talking about the need for a user-friendly stove; many stoves that are sold in developing countries are already easy to use and have addressed issues of safety to some extent. What I’m concerned about is that few stoves are designed with the area’s culture of cooking in mind.

Take a solar oven, for example. It uses zero fuel, can be made out of cheap materials, and has virtually no moving parts. As a technology for extremely affordable cooking, it’s pretty compelling. But will a woman used to seeing a large flame while cooking on an open fire trust that putting her pot into a black box (literally) will cook her food? Will she endure the passive wait time of what is closer to a baking process, or will she miss stirring her pot and checking to see that the food is cooked just right? If she has an indoor cooking hut, is she willing to cook outside, and only when the sun is out? What will the rest of her family think of a wife that lets the solar oven do all the work for her?

What will the food taste like?

What kinds of food will she be unable to cook?

Will she still enjoy cooking?

Expecting customers to use technology that is such a radical departure to their culture of cooking is asking them to turn their backs on traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. It’s like telling an Italian to make his risotto in the microwave. It just doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against solar ovens, and new technology. Maybe a solar cooker would be perfect for a culture where women are used to baking their foods in the hot sun for long periods of time. But technology itself isn’t going to have a lasting impact if none of the women really want to use it. In my next post, I’m going to explain how respecting culture has affected some of the design decisions we’ve made on our stove that make it a compelling product, not just another technology.