Circular Economies = Financially Resilient Families
This project illustrates the value of design research. Feel free to follow the process and pick up pieces of the solution as they developed. Each piece of the process below includes a description of it’s scope. Or, skip down to the solution, starting at the ‘How Might We’ statement. *Hint the solution is a venture capital/business development service at the intersection of community development, circular economies, and financial inclusion.
1. observe, feel and play, then write down a problem
This phase is about developing a sensibility for the context of a solution before identifying a problem — this is done through major empathy building, hefty ethnographic study, insight derivation via design microcosms like rapid prototypes, games or performance, pretty much anything that will generalize to the problem space. Once in context, we pick a starting point and design more pointed studies.
Ethnographic Study - Video
Before leaving the study also became the context for a social enterprise, which failed, and then led me to MassArt’s Design Innovation program.
The starting point for this solution is … management around water allows settlers to poison their water supply.
This is true of the first world and developing world. For modern centralized waste systems, the decision to entrain our fecal waste in water goes back to a day when people through human waste out their window, then washed the street of it. The system we have today is a formal version of that, and, to continue on it safely, the first world had gotten quite proficient at creating expensive bandaids.
Insight —fetching fresh water is a responsibility formation mechanism for children in the developing world. If that responsibility is removed, a new means of real world knowledge building must be designed to sustain the current culture’s build. Thus, the children may need to play a key role in the execution of the forthcoming strategy.
2. simplify actors in maps
Designing to insights in this way taps into design thinking’s economies of scope. While finding a solution your building the communication for it.
Below are three maps, a mind map, a corporate/policy ecosystem map, and a community level ecosystem map. Each map uncovered something critical to the solution — a few key diametrics and behaviors, an overarching objective, and the target.
MIND MAP
Insights
- public perception of current sustainable solutions
- a psycho-social tendency I call ‘copy your neighbor,’ which multiplies the effect of bad decision making
- the reality that building requirements encode behaviors in buildings with regard to water, so those behaviors are particularly sticky
- design-build engineering firms are able to execute on best practices by taking on more risk w/key partnerships to capitalize on the cost savings of design thinking
Diametric factors
- 1st world-developing world. different solutions have manifested in different areas
- high-low education. Large scale waste removal and treatment require high levels of education and system integration
- no infrastructure vs infrastructure.
POLICY AND CORPORATE LEVEL ECOSYSTEM
Insight — disproportionate power dynamics
Corporations hold a lot of buying power relative to developing world businesses, which, according to porter’s 5 forces, puts developing world businesses at the whims of corporations, in addition to the whims and manners of duress of low integrity government officials on the ground.
Reformed forces of good like Nike, now supposedly using their powers for good, enforcing better working conditions and fair wages, are not observing the fullness of what’s required. This corporate superimposition is a form of neo-imperialism that does not tap into the natures of cultural sustainability that would empower and generate context specific innovations. IN any case, now, apart from first world corporate influence, we have have a class of ascended world governments who set the tone, heavily influenced by corporations through lobbying efforts, while other’s holding more hearty powers, act out of the, not impervious, United Nations. Lastly, at the top we have the much more free, first world ascended global development organizations and some true scientists developing edicts and papers, and funding mechanisms regardless of their belief system for worldwide equity and development.
In many ways this diagram is about unbalanced power between groups of bullies exacting various levels of disenfranchisement. So, this solution needs to also be about designing systems of restorative justice.
Overarching objective — Power reversals
COMMUNITY LEVEL ECOSYSTEM
Insight — A. Economies of separation, and the beginnings of urban sprawl.
Diametric factor — urban vs rural.
Primary Target — Victims of ‘economies of separation.’ In particular, urban living parents and young people earning money to support their rural living families.
Behavioral Pathway — B. shows family members returning to communities that have, or, to generate, sustainable economies
Secondary target — emerging rural work forces
These factors dig into the intersection of sustainable waste management models and family.
*Hint: We’ll develop a phased plan that targets urban workers earning money to support their rural families because they are in the habit and financially capable of investing in change.
3. frame up the problem
EPIGENETIC LANDSCAPE.
I like to use this evolutionary epigenetic development strategy to bring my thought down to earth because it functions really well in ambiguity and in framing complex multidimensional visioning into left brain sentences. ALSO, it establishes clear connections to landscape level transition designs.
I’m aware that the epigenetic landscape seems intentionally complicated, but… it’s really helpful when you lose sight during a project. It’s from genetics, but, in this context, it’s not really that complex, it boils down to two questions… what are the likely behaviors, and what can we do to change the path of least resistance.
Above, we have the aforementioned dichotomies, added to them is existing vs future, to modulate the epigenetic strategic field, our solution space, from the perspective of our overarching objective. Dichotomies were selected for the purpose of aligning our target to act within the bounds of our objective.
With regard to finding control points and guiding our target, we’ll now get away from birds-eye approaches evocative of old school urban planning, and transition to a grassroots approach reminiscent of Jane Jacob’s point of view, designing from the street view. In order to do that we must engage another framework…
COM-B
CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Because our behavioral pathway is meant to return urban earners to their families and make rural living possible, circular economies are the perfect means of enabling looped rural transactions, plus
“Developing countries are already using circular economy solutions. They’ve just had too.”
Deputy Director for the UN Environment Programme
with a problem firstly identified, then understood, we can now set a goal
How might we facilitate sustainable rural economies that keep families medically, socially, and financially resilient?
4. Let reputable sources refine the solution and financial tactic.
Research to Strategy loop
In 2012, an estimated 842,000 deaths in middle- and low-income countries were caused by contaminated drinking water, inadequate hand washing facilities and sanitation services — WHO, 2014b
In sub-Saharan African, 62% of the urban population live in slums. — UN, World Water Development Report 2017
As people move to a city that lacks earning opportunities, joblessness yields a severe lack of resources and inadequate social controls. — William Julius Wilson, Sociologist, Declining Significance of Race (1978)
The gap between water availability and water demand is growing fast, especially in cities, where the urban population is expected to nearly quadruple by 2037 — World Bank, 2012
When people move from rural to city areas, their resource consumption goes up four-fold. — Professor Herbert Girardet, co-founder of the World Future Council
It is estimated that only 26% of urban and 34% of rural sanitation and wastewater services effectively prevent human contact with excreta along the entire sanitation chain and can therefore be considered safely managed — Hutton and Varughese, 2016
THE BEHAVIORAL PATHWAY
In order to deliver on our overarching objective, power reversals, we will need to release those in villages from motivation depleting cultures of poverty. We will need to create an opportunity, for our target, that facilitates the construction of behavioral pathways that
- compete with the draw to live near the city, whose geography is responsible for a fourfold increase in consumption, for economies of separation, and for enabling the creation of environments with inadequate social controls.
- function diametrically to high education solutions… within the current capability of rural folks in the developing world
- reduce disease
- foster financial inclusion.
… facilitate sustainable rural economies that keep families medically, socially, and financially resilient… for profit.
For how many outcomes we’re seeking here, it’s not so much about reinventing the wheel, but instead getting between the money being sent from urban earners to rural living families and fostering agency over a series of existing solutions that together build a sustainable rural future. A future that pays the families of those investors.
66% of the combined adult population of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda use mobile money on an active basis — According to a 2017 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money
Key stakeholders
- LC1 chairpersons, community level sherifs
- Grant giving foundations, social welfare organizations, and other venture capital firms
- Urban Earners supporting rural families
- Restaurant owners
- Farmers (Agriculture, Aqua-culture)
- Entrepreneurs
- Emerging village work forces
THE SOLUTION
AB financial is a venture capitalist firm that exclusively supports the formation of social enterprises and co-op networks around specific solution sets
AB financial’s logo is a high level organizational model inspired by molecular organization. AB financial, in the image, is the ionized particle [the blue dot] speeding up and organizing the actions of business-minded investors and community development boards that manage a series of small businesses designed to support each other.
TACTIC
AB financial
- finds target individuals and initializes interactions between potential co-op members and then supports them on their journey.
- provides a decision-making platform that leads investor groups and community boards through the process of forming a circular co-op from securing grants, to legalize and daily financial operations.
Case study: Uganda Bidi Bidi. They report challenges such as keeping up with fast-changing local regulations.
5. Plot behavioral pathways, highlight the control points on journeys
RURAL CIRCULAR ECONOMY
The rural community of Buundo, Uganda, one of the foci of my 2012 study, revealed that when businesses were designed in isolate they failed. The financial feasibility, must take form as a pro forma, perhaps not unlike this remote private school pro forma, that allows boards to customized transaction amounts and timelines that fit their communities.
Depending on the reputation of the boards and investor groups, AB financial would award more control of the business to active investors, allowing the worthy to transition into business development from the investor pool.
AB Financial earns 7% of any grants acquired with their assistance. Grants AB financial acquires on their own accord can be directed toward any of its most promising community boards for expansion.
AB financial is a sustainability engine that converts mobile money users sending funds home into mobile investors. Initial touchpoints are made via mobile SMS text marketing campaigns, and display ads via facebook that link to simple precedent micro-sites optimized for mobile.
Depending on funds and number of target users in an area display boards on major road ways may be constructed.
Control Points and support on the behavioral pathway
In the beginning stages the behavioral pathway is almost exclusively digital.
Once a target, like Ivan, the persona above, clicks a Facebook ad or clicks a tracking link from an SMS message, he is immediately brought into a WhatsApp group, a virtual assistant greets him, until a member of AB financial’s community support staff seamlessly takes over the conversation. Initially this interaction will be simple, but as support staff grows AB financial staffers will respond together as one person, crafting the most compelling and targeted message possible.
If a target clicks from a Adsense ad, they’ll be brought to an AB financial micro-site specific to their area that showcases an existing solution. Then a message will pop-up prompting them to connect to find more info with others interested in starting a business. The interaction will be monitored in the same way, but with a more serious pressure toward business development.
When the timing is write, existing community members and entrepreneurs are prompted to join. ABF staffers connect with a existing investor, and loop them into conversation with a new potential community board member.
AB financial may award airtime expense accounts to select users to lower the barriers for business communications, especially when users choose the leave the WhatsApp group.
Testimonials + Proof will be provided on a website, but such information would be the product of an on-site journalism driven communications phase. The goal of such a phase would be to showcase all the solutions working together in one place.
NEXT STEPS
1. Find community partners 2. build a cross-platform crawler to pool user data and define target groups 3. get on the ground, find the people who manage existing waste management solutions, and 4. build a website.
💩
A special thank you to MDES — Integration Lab B instructors, Amy Cueva, Founder + Chief Experience Officer of Mad*Pow and Olga Elizarova, Behavior Change Design Director at Mad*Pow, for managing my ‘creative’ approaches forward and for all of their support and responses to my long emails.
