We’re targeting our wood burning cook stove at countries where deforestation is a major problem.  Wait…a wood burning stove is going to help in the fight against deforestation?

At first glance, this seems like a really bad idea.  Other technologies like gasification are more efficient and can use almost any organic material, but there are 2 major problems: they’re unfamiliar and they’re more expensive.

Of the women we’re designing our stove for, very few have ever cooked on anything other than an open flame.  As you can imagine, when you do something one way your whole life, you get quite good at it.  The further a technology is from a simple open fire, the less familiar it is, which translates to our users trusting it less initially.

The other problem is up front cost and risk of new technologies.  Most of the stoves that are available in the area don’t last very long because they’re made cheaply (thin metal) or use fragile materials (ceramics).  Users will pay up to a couple dollars for these stoves, and not get more than a couple months use from them.  This is why the marketing aspect is so important.

But marketing can only take you so far; you can’t get someone to pay a month (or more) of their salary for a stove–no matter how technically superior it is.  And even with great marketing, it’s hard to convince someone to cook in a manner that’s completely alien to them.  This is why we’ve developed a stove that’s more efficient and which looks high tech, but that fits pretty seamlessly into the existing cooking culture.

We do believe that there’s a place for gassifiers, solar cookers, etc.  But we also believe the best way to get there is baby steps.

In my last entry, I  promised to offer a few thoughts about what it means to embed a culture of dignity in this cook stove project. I call dignity a culture because I hope that each piece of our work—from conceptualizing the product to getting it into the hands of women–reflects truly humanizing experiences for everyone involved, including ourselves.

Our stove gives women agency by making cooking the center of their activity. Not tending the fire, not gathering wood, but cooking. I think people find dignity in their work especially if they do it out of love for others. Women in Myanmar cook all day for their families. This can be an arduous task, or it can be an act of love. By making it as easy as possible to cook with our stove, we hope that we make the woman’s role less menial and more meaningful.

We firmly believe in creating a stove that can be sold at an affordable price to women, not given to them as an act of charity; I think there is dignity in being able to choose a quality product that you need, instead of being given one because someone else feels sorry about something you lack. We also plan to manufacture our stove to fit local expertise and ability because we believe that the work of improving each others’ lives is something that the community should be able to own.

I don’t claim to know everything about how to make this vision of a culture of dignity a reality; I’m still defining for myself what dignity is in relation to design. One day, I hope to even be able to measure it. For now, we’ve made a commitment to hearing what our customers are saying at all costs, because we believe it humanizes our product. I believe that creating a culture of dignity is the biggest impact we can make, and hope to continue to work towards it.

“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.

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.

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?