Hasta La Ideas

All Photos courtesy of Reboot

This is the fifth post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. Lee is the jury captain for the 2012 Core77 Design Awards for the Service Design category. In The Messy Art of Saving the World, Lee will explore the role of design in international development.

After all the protests of 2011, from Cairo to Damascus, Moscow to Wall Street, it’s easy to forget that the “Arab Spring” began in Tunisia. The country remains the most coherent example of how revolution can happen in the 21st century: The autocratic regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had ruled for 23 years, deeply corrupt and largely unchallenged. The Tunisian people’s long-simmering frustration exponentially increased—and found new outlets—with the Internet, social networking and text messaging. When a fruit vendor, angry at government mistreatment, set himself on fire, his story catalyzed the collective outrage. Ben Ali was gone in a month.

Demonstrations spread from Tunisia to over 16 countries, but none was as peaceful, or resulted as quick a deposition. And today, none is as far down the road as Tunisia in building a new, more representative and more equal post-revolutionary society.

For this reason, many eyes around the world are watching the country, including the World Bank, which recently commissioned Reboot to report on its evolution.

Today, I’m so excited to announce the release of our findings: “Tunisia: From Revolutions to Institutions” is launching at the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development* and is also available for download here.

As the report shows (and as I’ve written before), design has an important role to play in global governance and development—especially in the context of today’s rapidly changing world. The Arab Spring demonstrated a fundamental change in the relationships between governments and citizens. Never before have people had so much power to demand accountability and fairness from their leaders.

And that power is only going to grow. As technology makes us all more connected to each other, populations are gaining new ways to demand opportunity, fairness and justice. If policy makers are going to serve the world’s increasingly vocal populations, they’ve got to be prepared to listen.

But too often, there’s a gap between the people who fund and create economic and development policies and those on the receiving end. Too often, development policies are based on site visits in major cities, or survey reports that may be outdated, or on commonly-accepted wisdom about what a certain region is like. These methods fall short in the face of real life (as any designer might predict).

Policymakers need deep, nuanced understandings of what citizens want and need. In short, the global governance and development community can benefit from better design.

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