The Benefits of Designing from the Bottom-Up

            The theme of week two of Foundations of Social Innovation and Enterprise is “Drivers of Social Innovation and Human-Centered Design Thinking” and the article The Importance of Frugal Engineering explores the manner in which products for emerging markets have required changes in the way they are designed in order to adapt to the different needs that people in emerging markets need. Product development in the United States typically focuses much more strictly on functionality for the perceived customer but utilizes a much more prolonged set of tactics to do so, performing research by way of focus groups and relying on sometimes overwhelmingly large teams. The goal of this is to use focus groups and a series of surveys to find out what the consumer wants, how they will use the product or how that product can be altered to capture a larger portion of the market. Here costs are then cut by making the best model possible and then removing features to drive costs down.

            People in emerging markets are finding a new degree of largesse as their stake in the world economy grows and they increasingly are buying what would have previously been luxuries, though they’re looking for the more basic and no-frills ways to have those experiences. However in a different environment and culture what is considered basic can be completely different and by looking for inspiration in that environment it is possible to have a more successful product. An example of this would be the Tata Nano, which used the rickshaw, which was more of the cultural norm and better for navigating the traffic of cities like Mumbai than the traditional car. By building a profoundly cheap car from the ground up and focusing on features their market actually needed, Tata was able to use simplicity to deliver the experience its market needed.

Conversely, by ignoring that environment’s particular needs and having a product that focuses on the wrong aspects, distribution channels, or way of implementing things everything can end up being for naught in the end, as found in the other assigned article Design Thinking for Social Innovation’s cases where in Ghana mosquito nets that could have drastically cut instances malaria weren’t distributed due to a short-sighted focus on pregnant women and recent mothers as well as a lack of nets for hospitals or other possible vendors. While the nets themselves worked spectacularly, a lack of opportunity for many others to purchase these meant a large segment of the population went without these potentially life-saving nets and Ghana saw much less of an impact from this program as similar programs in Ethiopia or Rwanda, showing how good intentions can easily be trumped by a missed aspect of the problem.

            Emerging markets’ design of products and programs can’t hope to copy-paste strategies that work in the first world and hope for automatic success, they need to focus on their customer base and how to deliver and distribute the best possible experience to them in particular.