 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cooper Hewitt's National Design Week, celebrating its 20th year. Today's winners' salon, 20x20, shares the National Design Award winners with you through 20 20-minute programmes. My name is Caroline Royston. I'm Chief Experience Officer here at the Cooper Hewitt, and I'm honoured to moderate this discussion with Amy Smith, founding director of MIT D-Lab, when winner of the Corporate and Institutional Achievement Award for the National Design Awards. The design topic today will focus on empowerment through participatory design. This is going to be fun, fast and inspiring. So let's get started. Amy, thank you. So my first question, the MIT D-Lab got its start as the Haiti class, a single project-based class that was hands-on and rooted in the real world. How has that class transformed into what the D-Lab has become? Well, thank you, and first of all, I would like to say it is both a pleasure and an honour to be here. So thank you very much for selecting D-Lab as one of the National Design Award winners. It's very exciting for us, especially because as you talked about, we had very humble beginnings. I had come back to MIT after serving in the Peace Corps for four years and wanted to start a program that would have been the class I would have wanted to take when I was an undergraduate but didn't exist. So I was very interested in development work, international development work, and how can you apply the skills, the practical knowledge that you're gaining through classes at MIT in a way that can impact people's lives. So the very first class was called the Haiti class, as you mentioned, and I worked with some students from the Haitian Students' Alliance in order to create a class that sort of simulated essentially my Peace Corps experience, where we started by learning about the culture, learning some of the language, learning about different sectors of development, and then I took a group of 10 students to Haiti, and we worked in collaboration with community partners in order to identify challenges, and then we came back and held a design class where we looked at creating solutions to those challenges, and then in the summer we had a chance to go back and implement them. It was a remarkable class, and it was just really empowering to see what could you do in this type of forum. So we grew quite a bit afterwards, and the very first way we grew was geographically, where other student associations found out what we had done, like, oh, we want to do a program in India, let's do one in Brazil, and we didn't feel like we could call the next class the Haiti India Brazil class, and so that's when we came up with D-Lab as the name, where we focused on development and design and dissemination of technologies that can improve the lives and livelihoods of people around the world. So we started by increasing geographically, and that meant also the program increased in size, so we went from at the time one staff member to now we have 25, we went from a pair of classes to we now have over 20 classes, we went from one country to any given year, we probably have projects in 20 countries around the world, so we grew a lot, we went from the old shipping and receiving room in the basement of MIT, now we have windows, it's awesome, and we actually have the whole floor of a building, and so we grew quite a bit in size, but we've also grown in scope, so it's not just academics, although we do continue our academic program, and it's very much a cornerstone of what we do, we have a research program, and we also have what we call our innovation practice program, which is essentially our fieldwork, and so we have these three pillars, which are sort of different ways that we enact our philosophy around the world, and I would say that that's the other thing that is that grew over time, was the way that we looked at design and the role that design plays in development, so initially we very much were looking at what are challenges and what are solutions that we could create for people who experience those challenges, and the more we worked in that way, the more we realized that there's a lot more power in working more collaboratively, what are solutions we can create together with people who are facing those challenges, and then over time we also recognized the power in sort of providing design training so that solutions are being created by the people who are facing those challenges, and so those three paradigms, and it's not that we've abandoned any of them, but the expansion into those three different paradigms I think is one of the biggest areas of growth that we've had, and the challenge of course is figuring out when is the right time and place to use which of those paradigms, but I think fundamentally that to me is the biggest growth that we've had as an organization over the years. Fascinating, thank you. MIT D-Lab isn't just about the product design, it's about the processes of design, and I just wondered how are you and your students working with people living in poverty to create a sustainable life cycle of design? That's great and a natural extension from this discussion around philosophy, and one of the things that I realized is that how many people, and I can't see very well, but how many people here might call themselves designers? How many people here have made something, anything in their lives that more hands go up in that case? And how do you feel when you're done, when you make something, and it works? It's a pretty great feeling, right? First of all, happy and joyful. Secondly, you might feel proud of yourself, a sense of accomplishment, and then you feel like you can do anything. You put together that IKEA bookshelf and they're like, bring it on world, I'm ready to go. And so these intangible parts are part of the process of design, right? And it's not just the product, but the act of making a product that has an impact. And I personally believe that development is about transformation. And if you give someone a technology, there's a transformation in one dimension, but not multiple dimensions. If someone creates that technology for themselves, then that creates a transformation in many more dimensions. And so this process of design, I think, is a critical component about how we think about development and those intangible aspects, which are really important. If people are going to lift themselves out of poverty, if they're going to have long-term sustainable change, you want people who believe that they can create the change they need to change their lives, right? And that comes through doing the design, not receiving the design. So a lot of what I have the pleasure of doing with my job is to go around the world and do design workshops teaching people about the design process and building their both comfort and capacity. And not just working with people who are already carpenters and blacksmiths and welders, but people who do not think of themselves as creators, let's say, and just building that capacity. And then what is a joyful thing is seeing what are the things that they make that improve their lives. And sometimes it's small things just to improve comfort around the household. And other times it's a livelihood which fundamentally changes their household's economic experience. In many cases, doubling or tripling is a big income. And so these are things that I think are really important. And I feel like too often we think about just the products of design and innovation and not the process of design and innovation. So one of the things that I feel as part of our mission in D-Lab is to try to get people to think about both of those things. Fantastic. Just as a follow-on, in terms of a project lifecycle, do you return to those places several times after your first visit, or can you just explain a little bit about that process? Sure, absolutely we do. And what we try to do in addition to whether or not we visit, we will work with local partners because it's really important to have mentorship when you're going through any sort of educational experience. And so what we'll try to do is sort of create something of a local innovation ecosystem which includes a place where people can work, access to tools and materials and access to technical advice and mentorship. And so our vision is to create these sort of small local innovation ecosystems where people can learn about the design process, be supported in it and then support others. And there's a few communities where we've actually been able to see this progression happen and it's very rewarding. Thank you. Can you give us an example of one of the problems that DLab is currently working to solve? Sure. Of course the biggest challenge would be the word one because we're working on a lot of different things. So through our classes and research we work on a variety of particular products. On my side, what I've been doing a lot of work with is looking at the humanitarian sector, so working with people who have been displaced by either conflict or by natural disasters and trying to look at how could we take the same methodology and change the way that refugees and displaced people are involved in the humanitarian sector. Currently there's a lot of donations and giving but not a lot of empowering people to be designing and creating solutions either for themselves or in collaboration with humanitarian organisations. So one of the projects that we're working towards is, again, developing tools and curriculum and pilot studies that can help to build that so that refugees are creating their own livelihoods, improving their own lives, working with humanitarian organisations to do even more effective programming so that you don't find things where people receive solar cookers. Here's another audience question. How many of you cook with a solar cooker? Oh, really? That's remarkable. Quite honestly, if we were in a refugee camp and I asked the same question, it would be about the same number of people because it's not largely a super convenient. Do you cook all your meals on a solar cooker? 50%? 20%? Yeah. That's one of the challenges. I often joke that solar cookers are the way we want everyone else to cook because it's so sustainable. There are certainly places where they are effective. I'm not totally dissing it, but the challenge is when they're distributed to people with no regard to the way they want to be cooking. You'll find often in refugee camps solar cookers which have been discarded, which have been taken apart so that you can use the little pot to go on the top of your roof to prevent rain coming through or something like that. Looking at how could we change the paradigm of humanitarian aid so that people are more effectively getting access to the things that they need and they want rather than things that other people think they need or want. That's a project that we're working on that I'm very excited about and we hope that we'll be able to continue making inroads in both building the design capacity amongst the local population, but also building the opportunity for co-creation between those who are running programs and those who are receiving the benefits from it. Fantastic. You've been running iterations of D-Lab now for 17 years. What are some of the long-term transformations that you've seen in the communities that you've been partnering with? Great. I can give a couple of different examples. One example was quite a while ago, I used to work with a village in Ghana in the Branghaffo region. In the early days, we used to do a lot of work with doing water quality testing and water assessments within villages. We had done this where we had tested a lot of the different sources in the community. I think the second or third year when I went there, we went down to the river and I noticed that there was much less activity at the river side than when I had first gone. My colleague at the time was Pastor George Fouache. I was like, Pastor George, why is no one here? He's like, well, last year you came and you showed us this water was badly contaminated so people don't come here for their drinking water anymore. They just come on Saturdays to do their laundry. That was something that was very powerful. I think the way we did the water testing was we engaged people, we taught them how to do the testing and we showed the results at the community meeting and they changed their water habits. That was something. I think it happened because of the inclusive way that we did the testing. Another case is around a project that we've done to help enhance people who are making charcoal out of agricultural waste material. Cooking fuel is a huge challenge around the world and in many countries deforestation is a big issue. You can make a clean burning environmentally friendly cooking fuel out of agricultural waste. But it's strange. It's not things that people have looked at and it's not something they've seen before. One of the things that we've noticed particularly in one area where we've been working with a successful entrepreneur in this space is that initially when we went there you couldn't find a charcoal briquette anywhere but now everyone there is familiar with them. You can find them in the market. When you talk about Betty they're like, she's a charcoal lady, we know her. She's gone from making a few hundred briquettes a day to she's actually just installed the machinery to be making three tons of charcoal a day so that she can help to satisfy the cooking needs of families and institutions in the region without having to cut down trees. That's another example. Finally, just the personal examples of people who have gone through the design process and make changes in their lives. There's one group where there was a number of elderly members of the community group and it's an area in Uganda where they use squat toilets, so squat latrines. How many people here have used a squat pit latrine? How many of you are over 50? How many of you have noticed how much harder it is to get up from one of those? This group just designed some elevated toilet seats. Many of us went to the bathroom today on an elevated toilet seat, sure enough. In this region they didn't have them. This community was like, wow, this is a pain, let's change it. To me that's one of the powerful things about teaching design is that when you have a challenge you find a way to solve it. From there the group now sells these toilet seats around the village so they've turned it into a small business. Everyone are genuine Ugandan toilets. Let me know and I'll hook you up. Good to know. Exactly. You thought this wouldn't be a useful chat. I have no idea. I just wanted to finish up with a question really about the future. We've talked about the iterations over the last 17 years. I'm just wondering as we look at the way, particularly I suppose impact of climate change as one example, what you envisage perhaps for MIT D-Lab in the future and where you think your focus and your effort might be? Thanks. That of course is a bit of a challenging question but a good one and there will be people on the D-Lab staff who agree with me and those who don't but I'll share a little bit of my thoughts. I think that our vision of how you can use design to impact people's lives is we've done a lot of it on the sort of individual and community basis but I think that one of the things that we're really seeking to do is to have an impact on a much larger scale. So to have sort of some of these methodologies that we've been developing implemented on a large global scale for large global problems. So are there ways that we can do design trainings with people who are experiencing the challenges of climate change so that they can be creating the technologies, the programs, the systems, the products that they need in order to adapt to these conditions and we've actually been doing a small pilot project on that in El Salvador with Oxfam. And so looking at how can we sort of democratize design crowdsourced solutions in a way that really respects and harnesses the creativity and ingenuity of people who are living in poverty around the world. Fantastic and I look forward to watching what you do with great interest. Thank you so much, Amy, for this very short talk but very informative and thanks to all of you in the audience for being a part of this conversation. We're on a very tight schedule I've been told so if you wouldn't mind leaving the room um it's like the bad end to a party, isn't it? You bring the coats out but if you wouldn't mind leaving the room when the lights go up so we can prepare it for the next round of talks but if you'd like to give a big round of applause for Amy, thank you so much.