Design Thinking At Work in the Peace Corps

The story about fetching water in Brown and Wyatt's Design Thinking for Social Innovation reminded me a lot of what my cousin, Rajeev Goyal does and has done regarding social innovation. My cousin is a former Peace Corps volunteer who has since been the national coordinator for the Push for Peace Corps Campaign, which expanded federal Peace Corps funding by $60 million.

This falls under the “Policies to Support Social Innovation” portion of our class, and I thought that it might be of interest to some of you. Rajeev spent some time in a remote village in Nepal where he organized the construction of a water-pumping system. This one project gave him insight into how the government and social innovation are related to each other, and how they can often be at odds with one another. He essentially took what he learned from government structures abroad and brought it to our nation’s capital. In addition, he emphasized the importance of utilizing the resources that were already in the village by teaching the people different skills as opposed to bringing in new materials and expecting the outcome to be sustainable. Similar to teaching women how to effectively gather food that is nutritious or how to carry large amounts of water between destinations, his solution had a foreseeable outcome that would allow the people in the village to adapt new practices and even build from their current state in the future.

In regards to Nick’s comment, “With the appearance of the human-centered design toolkit, are we not risking to box in our ideas and fall prey to generating ideas and change through the use of frameworks? The last thing we would want is for design to be a simple manual.” I think that designing solutions through human-centered frameworks is only the first step towards creating sustainable solutions. Once we create this metaphorical box of ideas in a way that is manageable and understandable, we can think outside of it and make the development more innovative as the changing needs of the people involved become more apparent. What I am still struggling with is the timing of all of this- when is it best to move past the human-centered design framework towards different (potentially risky) solutions? How long should we observe the outcomes of an innovation before making changes to it? I think it largely depends on the population and geography of a region.

If you are interested and want more information regarding my cousin’s work, this is a link to his book that he is having published: http://www.amazon.com/The-Springs-Namje-Ten-Year-Villages/dp/0807001759/ref=la_B007R724FS_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346787821&sr=1-1 (I have also pre-ordered a copy so you can just borrow mine once I get it).  His story is pretty inspiring and I’d love to put anyone who might be interested in contact with him!