Hasta La Ideas

This is the first post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. Lee will explore the role of design in international development, The Messy Art of Saving the World

International development and governance projects have a notorious track record. Every day, it seems, we hear another report of foreign aid siphoned off by corrupt officials and projects losing money to bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Take this story, published last year in The New York Times: The Egyptian government, hoping to increase internet access, had established over 2,000 telecenters across the country. But an independent researcher found that almost none of the centers were functioning; in one city, just four out of 23 were active. The telecenters weren’t being used in large part because they weren’t even necessary—the rise of internet cafes in Egypt had made them redundant.

“The failure, in other words, was in not understanding the ecosystem in which the telecenters would be operating,” said the Times.

Too often, projects like these are born and developed by corporations, foundations, governments, and other institutions without a day-to-day understanding of the lives of the people they’re meant to help. There’s no shortage of good intentions, hard work, and committed individuals. Where the field of development falls short, however, is in process.

This is where the discipline of design can help; its tools and principles can help address the flaws in strategy and process that plague the field, and help develop programs that impact people’s lives in concrete ways.

Right now, many disparate voices—both from development and governance and from the field of design—are working to articulate how design can improve societies all over the world. It’s thrilling to see so many talented designers excited about the possibilities. But this movement is still new, and while a lot of people are talking, too few are putting the practice into action.

One challenge lies in the gap between the discipline of design and the fields of development and governance. The latter two, like any other field, are fraught with history, political complexity, and operational challenges that a newcomer cannot fully grasp. Colleagues in the development sector and from other public institutions have complained that they are being bombarded by enthusiastic designers who have little understanding of the fields they’re so set on revolutionizing.

Just as the Egyptian government needed to look closely at a city before throwing in a telecenter, designers need to build an understanding of these fields before jumping in to innovate.

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