How Innovators Wield Power
Why do futurists, designers, and innovators have such a limited understanding of how power affects social change?
“After three weeks of co-design, we felt like we truly made something special.”
As a part of an International Development Design Summit, dozens of designers from over twenty countries flocked to a small village named D’Kar, Botswana, to co-develop appropriate technological products intent on addressing the complicated problems of the local villagers. Our project was to develop a deep sand wheelchair; an endeavor that required three mobility professionals and engagement across the entire D’kar community to be successful.
However, the project didn’t continue exactly as planned. During the final week, the team realized that to ensure the continued development of the wheelchair, it would need technical and economic expertise outside of the community of D’Kar to evolve. To sustain the technology and make sure it could reach as many community members as possible, the intellectual property had to leave the community which birthed the problem.
Although we built some ramps and made some repairs to our client’s wheelchair, we couldn’t help feeling like failures. After four weeks of in-depth work, how much could we really accomplish?
