We did it!  Our team is in the finals for IdeaBlob.  And now we need your help.  Please, please, please take a minute or two and vote for us.  Every vote gets us closer to the $10,000 prize.  Precise instructions on how to vote can be found here.

Winning IdeaBlob will definitely open some doors for us.  Right now, we’re paying for everything out of pocket, which does limit our reach.  Although our stove is designed to be very low cost, the prototypes do cost a non-trivial amount of money.  (Raw materials cost more money when you’re not buying in bulk, and there’s some equipment we don’t have access to unless we buy shop time.)  But, the big cost is travel.

If you’ve read many of our blog entries, you know that our entire process revolves around end-users.  To do this, we need to work very closely with partners in the country, and we need to talk to our actual users.  Both of these necessitate at least one trip up front to do needs finding and to get face time with potential partners and to create a plan for our collaboration.  It’s not easy to do this without money for travel.

There are other avenues to funding, but every hour we spend trying to fund ourselves is an hour we can’t spend making our stove better.  It’s our hope that, with your support, we can win this and continue focusing on what really matters.  That said, we’d love to hear suggestions on other avenues of funding!  As always, you can get ahold of us at team@3brickdesign.com.

Thanks for your continuing support!

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.

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.

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?

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.