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Vol. 15, No. 4, Fall 2004
Patrick Whitney, Steelcase & Robert C. Pew Professor and Director, Institute of Design, IIT; Anjali Kelkar, Research Associate, Institute of Design, IIT
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“Poor people are not averse to buying products that can change their lives dramatically,” write Patrick Whitney and Anjali Kelkar of Chicago's Institute of Design. It's not a matter of trying to pry money away from the very poor; the goal is to create wealth in urban slums in the developing world-to make local economies more sustainable, encourage small-business growth, and help residents improve their living standards.
Kelkar, and their colleagues made use of a research framework called POEMS (People, Objects, Environments, Messages, and Services), as well as a user-experience framework that analyzes household daily life. Developed at the Institute of Design to help document how people interact with the designed world, the framework gives researchers a set of parameters within which information is to be gathered. Conducted in slums in three Indian cities-Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Baroda-the research was remote in that it was planned and managed from Chicago and conducted by Indian teams using research packages couriered to them.
Whitney, Kelkar, and their colleagues began with the idea of developing ways to improve slum housing. The POEMS framework, however, made it clear that housing was “inextricably connected to issues of water quality and access, sanitation, finance, healthcare, and related problems of employment, communication, education, and so on.” In other words, any truly workable solution would require a systemic approach.
The Chicago team first identified high-level design criteria, such as access to credit, economic opportunities, and secure earnings. These were mapped to a list of needs for basic living standards, such as employment, safety, shelter, water, and so on, to ensure that each of the criteria addressed as many needs as possible.
One of the team's first discoveries was that entrepreneurship was alive and well in these areas. The problem was, as the authors point out, 90 percent of workers in India participate in an informal economy in which financial transactions are cash-based and undocumented. Consequently, entrepreneurs have no security of earnings or means to build collateral. This was a situation on which a concept could be built. The answer was GuildNet, a bank-facilitated service through which individuals in similar professions could form business alliances. A small percentage of the group's earnings would be saved in the group account; what remained would be transferred into individual worker accounts. The group account could be used only for business purposes with the agreement of all group members. Expenditures and transactions for individual accounts would be at the discretion of the guild member and not accessible to anyone else-creating an incentive for the accumulation of financial assets, as well as access to financial services for all the members.
Another serious problem in slums is access to fresh, clean water. The Chicago team attacked this issue with a concept called Mobile H2O. This business would obtain clean water from purification plants, sealed into bags made from recycled plastic. Water trucks would deliver these daily to individual water delivery vendors on the outskirts of slum areas.
The Institute of Design team will continue its work in India and hopes to initiate similar projects in Brazil, Mexico, and other countries.
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