 All right, well, hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2017 webinar series on the topic of equipping development actors to practice impact design. My name is Yana Aranda, and I am the director of programs here at Engineering for Change. I will be one of your moderators for today's webinar. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join up the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinars. The emerging fields of impact design and development engineering are credited with delivering novel solutions to the world's most pressing, complex challenges. The products and services that they deliver are realized through transdisciplinary collaboration, enabling understanding of user behavior, cultural norms, processes, and political context. At E4C, we've observed and responded to the growing demand for training that prepares the next generation of practitioners to be better problem solvers. Likewise, universities, industry, and nonprofit organizations are also addressing this need by developing interdisciplinary programs and tools. Today, we've invited three impact design practitioners, Christian Benimana, the founding director of the African Design Center, Zoe Bispalco, the impact and design lead for the Autodesk Foundation, and Sophie Martin, the innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, to share the range of models serving development actors to better equip and prepare them to practice impact design. I'd like to welcome our speakers, and thank you for joining us today. Our moderator today will be David DeWene, who's the Editor-in-Chief of the Impact Design Hub. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the E4C webinar series team. If anybody out there has questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact the team via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. And also, I would like to note that today's E4C professional development offerings and information on upcoming webinar installments in the series, as well as archive videos on past presentations, can be found on our webpage and the URLs are listed here, along with our YouTube channel. Now, before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about E4C and who we are. E4C is an knowledge organization and global community of over one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges based by underserved communities. These can include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C members are free and provide access to current news, data on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and opportunities such as jobs and fellowships. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their type behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our platform, the better we will be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. We invite you to join E4C's passionate global community and contribute to making people's lives better across the world. Check out our website to learn more and sign up. Next webinar will be next week on February 28th, where we'll do a technical deep dive on the topic of the role of robotics in global development with Raj Madhavan, who is the founder and CEO of the Humanitarian Robotics Technology. Additionally, look to our webinar in March. I think the date here is misleading because we're going back in time, but it'll actually be in March and the topic will be professional water well in Africa and some information will be provided by Dr. Kirsten Danner of the Royal Water Supply Network and along with Jose Jessi from UNICEF. That will be at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard for both of those webinars and we encourage you to visit our professional development page for more information. If you're an E4C member, you will receive an invitation to these webinars directly. So another reason to sign up. So a few housekeeping items before we get rolling. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the chat window, it is located at the bottom right under screen. Please type in your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, you can access it by clicking the chat icon in the top right corner of the screen. And I'll go ahead and get us rolling here. I mean, joining everyone here from New York, I see that folks are replying also in the Q&A window. I see we have folks from Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis. I'd like to encourage everyone to please enter your feedback into the chat window as that's going to help us to keep everything straight. We have folks from Canada, from Toronto, my original hometown, Berkeley, Indiana, San Francisco. Welcome, everyone. We're really excited to have you here. Any technical questions or administrative problems should go into this chat window. And feel free to send the private chat and the engineering for change admin if you have any issues. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks that you might want to share with the other attendees. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is again located below the chat, to type in your questions for the presenters and we can keep track of them that way. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the Q&A icon on the top right-hand corner. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, please stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. Lots of folks from DC, welcome everyone. Very excited to have you. You are following the webinar to request a Certificate of Completion showing one professional development hour or PDH for this session. Please find instructions on the top of the for the professional development page. And again, you'll see the link here on the slide. All right, with that, it's my pleasure to introduce you to today's moderator, David Duane, who is the Editor-in-Chief for the Impact to Side Hub. David is a Journalist, Architect, Entrepreneur, and Educator. His background is in ecologically and socially equitable design, having trained under plenty of fiscals as a center for maximum potential building systems in Austin, Texas. David's recent topics include anticipatory design, world population, and human values, spaces of hyper-creativity and leadership and creativity. David is a healthy and fellow and has been honored as an emerging leader of the Design Futures Council and certified as an evil agent inside the world's bank institute. He holds a Master's of Architecture from Wright University, and we're very excited that he is joining us on today's moderator. And I'll turn it over to you, David. Wonderful, thank you so much. So hello, everybody. This is my first E for Change webinar, so I'm very excited to be with everybody. Just a little bit about Impact to Side Hub. Essentially, we are a journalistic website that functions right at the intersection of design, social impact, and advocacy. And what we're striving for right now is to create depth around very specific ideas. And so for the last couple of weeks, we've been engaged with UC Berkeley's Blum Center for Developing Economies to really go deep into the subject of development engineering. And so you can go to our site and read a number of different stories on it, including one that was just posted today on the relationship of developing engineering to the market economy that I'm really excited about. There is a critical piece of that. And one of the things that's most exciting to me as a journalist right now is all the different tools that are available to you to tell a story. And so one of those tools, or one of the realms, I guess, is audience interaction. And so for me, this is one of those audience interactive moments where we can sort of engage in a hot media exchange with some of our audience members. So what I would love to do is try to get through my portion of this as fast as possible and then move on to the Q&A so that you guys can ask as many questions of these great, great moderators as possible. So let me see, can I advance the slide? I'm gonna run through these bios very briefly. And then we'll just charge right ahead with their presentation. Zoe Bizpolko is building her career at the intersection of sustainability, technology and design. With a master's degree in environmental engineering and MBA in design strategy, she is currently leading the impact modeling initiatives and design efforts at the Autodesk Foundation, supporting the creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Sophie Martin is a doctor and is the innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. She develops and executes scaling strategies for technologies coming out of the Blum Center ecosystem, working with faculty and students to grow their impact. She also sports social innovators across campus and a Blum Center network in the Big Ideas Contest and the social innovator on-ramp curriculum. Christian Benimana is the founder of the African Design Center with Mass Design Group in Rwanda. I know there are probably a lot of engineers on this call and Mass Design is a architecture practice. If you don't know who these guys are, it's very tempting to open a new window and like go to their website and check out their work. It's like some of the most stunning and beautiful work that's being done in the whole entire world right now. So we're extremely lucky to have Christian with us. He's been involved with the design-built projects, development initiatives, operational and administrative leadership at Mass, as well as teaching at the architecture school of the former Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. He is currently leading the implementation of the African Design Center, a project-based apprenticeship that is set to be the new Bauhaus of Africa. Again, this is a really big deal and we're very, very lucky to have all three of these wonderful panelists with us. So with that, I'm going to pass the ball over to Zoe. Thank you, David. Hi, everyone. Can you pass me also? So hi, my name is Zoe and I am part of the Autodesk Foundation. We, Autodesk is a design software company and our motto is to imagine, design and create a better world. The sustainability and foundation team where I work in, we are the philanthropic vehicle of Autodesk and we really focus on the better world part of our motto. We provide a tool and expertise to inspire and support people to have a positive impact. And in particular, we work with entrepreneurs and innovators, such as non-for-profit organization, startups, university or incubators. And we also work with Autodesk's major customer in industry like product design, manufacturing or architecture on helping them achieving their sustainability goals. The way we work with these organizations are through supporting them into achieving their goals through the resources that we have as a technology company. So we provide software as well as running services so that we can help our customer to use their tool at their best capabilities to meet their goals. We also provide expertise through our employees with pro bono program for instance. And for some nurture customer, we also provide physical space and financial grants. The work I do and specifically is related to these value-added services that we provide to our customer and really looking at how we can use our resources to maximize the potential for impact of the organization we work with. So I'll just take you through a few examples of the work I do with our customers. So one topic that I'm exploring right now is how we can use the emerging technologies that are coming out of Autodesk Research Group to accelerate the impact of our customers. So here is an example from Build Change in Nepal. Build Change is one of the organization we work with. It's the non-for-profit organization that train local community in the design and building of earthquake resistant houses in emerging countries. They started working with our reality capture team here at Autodesk to use drones and reality capture technology to map out terrain, design and rebuild after the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We believe that emerging technology like reality capture but also the internet of things, artificial intelligence, robotic or VR have the potential to really accelerate the workflow of our customer and therefore to increase their potential for impact. Another example of support that we are providing is a residency program that we are piloting right now in our innovation space, Pier 9. So we provide access to Pier 9, its machine and training to designers and engineers within our portfolio. The idea here is not only to physically demonstrate some impact design concept but mostly to support our customer in their fabrication and manufacturing process. We realize that it's often a struggling point and we want to learn from our customer how we can create better tools to help them meet their goal in this specific sector. Finally, I also manage impact measurements initiatives for the Autodesk Foundation where I gather data and communicate the impact of our activities. I work closely with our grantees on understanding how they measure impact and how we can help them proving the impact of their design. Because I believe that impact measurement is the key for all of the actors in the development engineering and impact design field to communicate the value of our work to other actors. It can be founders with the hope of receiving more funding but also people on the field with the hope of increasing performances. So, all in all, at the Autodesk Foundation we really see philanthropy as risk capital for impact. We want to invest in innovation for which our resources have the potential to maximize the impact of the organization we work with. And hopefully this innovation could grow into large scale initiative. So, thank you. And I'll pass it to Sophie. Hi everybody, I'm really pleased to join you today. It's morning where I'm sitting but I realize everyone's from all over the world and it's really exciting to have this global exchange this morning. As David mentioned, I'm from UC Berkeley public university here in California. And I am innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies which is an interdisciplinary hub for students and faculty looking to do research and develop new ideas and new solutions for global challenges. And one of our marquee programs is something called Development Engineering. It really got started out of a large research endeavor that we are partnering with USAID on which seeks to develop new technologies and to scale those technologies for low resource settings all over the globe. So, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about this program today. So, I'm the staff lead on this program and Development Engineering as we conceive of it is really hoping to design products and services that improve poor people's lives at scale. And one of the key ways that we think about doing this is not just having well-meaning engineers conceive of good ideas in labs and then try to deploy them somewhere and hope for good outcomes but rather to facilitate teaming across engineering, business, economic, social sciences and other fields that are gonna be critical to developing lasting solutions because they take into account all of the various constraints and opportunities that exist within low resource settings. So, one of the kind of key things that we do in this program is we train students and we support research across these fields and this is really our framework for thinking about Development Engineering as a concept and this is what we apply in our classes and in our research. A lot of our Development Engineering projects and class projects as well, not just research projects are problem oriented. So, we really begin with a deep dive with students and really try to get them to understand deeply problems within their context. So, working with communities, working with people to understand what the problems are before we think of solutions and then moving through kind of a classic design framework which is the blue circle in the middle or the blue triangles that make a circle here. We'll really start with observation first and then we work to develop a framework and understand some insights about those challenges. We develop some concepts, then we prototype those solutions together with communities and then we kind of iterate in the circle over and over again. We do this in the classroom and in the research groups as I mentioned. All of this is informed by qualitative and quantitative data. We have large training programs in sensors and data acquisition and large data and statistics and economics. And then all of this is wrapped up with thinking about scaling for impact. So, when we form teams, we encourage students to form teams that really bring together all of the necessary components. So, not just the technical piece of design but also the business models, the economic frameworks that might be needed, the political frameworks that we need to be aware of to make lasting solutions. And so all of these, this design framework is done within the context of development goals and constraints but also opportunities. We think there's a lot of really unique and interesting research questions that are not answered that are unique to low resource settings. So there's a really, really interesting research questions that are being pursued by some of our faculty and students and so we hope to support those folks and we have a whole program around that within our development engineering ecosystem. What this is is a bubble chart, if you will, that was developed at a technical convening. So it's called TechCon. It's actually the annual meeting of our USAID grantee cohort. It's us and a few other universities and practitioners and NGOs. They get together and think about development challenges and development solutions as we're coming up with them. And so in this particular session that we had last November, a group of universities and NGOs and development practitioners came together and had an ideation, idea generation kind of exercise to come up with the skills that we think that development practitioners really need. And so these were some of the ideas that we came up with and really at the core of all of this is humility and being open-minded and coming at things not with a solution first and trying to shoehorn it into a very certain context, but rather coming in and recognizing that I myself don't have all the answers. I need to learn from the community and how they're solving their problems. And maybe at the end of all this understanding I can be of service with my skills. And so these are all the other skills that we've come up with. And these are some of the things that we're aiming to train within our classes at the UC Berkeley campus. So we're building humility and empathy. We're training people to work in multidisciplinary teams. So engineers have a very different kind of work style and work plan than say economists do or business folks do. And so how do you work together to bring your skillset to be a complement to the other skillsets that are around you to come up with solutions that stick and are adopted by communities. This is one example of student that we are extremely proud of in our development engineering program. His name is Wilta Pei. He's graduating this spring, just a few short months. He came to us a few years ago and he's an environmental engineering PhD student but he joined development engineering very early on. And his project is looking at redesigning sanitation systems and he's working in partnership with a social enterprise in Kenya called Sanergy to make urine and feces profitable basically, making toilet use something that has a sustainable business model. And so classically speaking, an environmental engineer wouldn't necessarily be thinking about business models or economics or policy, right? But because he's trying to develop a solution that actually will have some longevity, he's working with a lot of underground partners. He's working with economists and business folks on our campus to think about how the solution can be structured from the beginning in the right way. And so he's bringing the engineering piece but he's working with all these other folks. And he's been a tremendous participant within our DaVenge programs and really a passionate advocate for this approach. And as he says, the designated emphasis, which is basically the way that our development engineering program is structured is as a minor for PhD students on our campus and we call that a designated emphasis. So the minor is really meaningful because it recognizes that interstitial space that otherwise just isn't recognized. So really the crux of these solutions is between the engineering and the business and the economics and the social sciences. It's not any one of these skill sets by themselves. It's gonna make that lasting impact. And because it's interstitial, some of our researchers of, at the very beginning of our USAID engagement, we're saying, hey, I'm an engineer and some of my engineering journals aren't super interested in my applied toilet solution or my applied information technology and some of the economists were saying, some of our economics journals aren't super interested in my understanding of how these technologies are adopted. And so we worked really hard with Elsevier, which is a publishing house of scientific journals to stand up a brand new journal that serves as a home for some of this interdisciplinary work. And it really recognizes the key and really interesting research problems that exist at the interstitial spaces between engineering and economics, engineering and business. And it serves as a home for some of these really cool projects that otherwise maybe wouldn't get the light of day and wouldn't be so widely communicated. So we're really proud of that particular institutional change that we're driving and will hopefully lead to the longevity of this program. So with that, I want to say thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to your questions and to hearing from you about this program and hearing about how we can collaborate. But with that, I'd love to hand it off to Christian to hear more about his work. Okay, great. Thanks, everyone. Probably the only one joining the webinar from across the continent. It's evening here at 6.30 p.m., so I appreciate the invitation. Just a little bit background of the context in which we operate. We're a firm of about 60 people with two offices in Boston and Kigali and multiple projects will operate in the part of the world where you would say that poverty is rampant and this comes with many challenges to vital systems for society to function in a sustainable way. These are many the lack of access to these basic needs, healthcare, housing, education, democracy, opportunities for work and prosperity, et cetera. And in a few cases where there is access, many communities still struggle with crippled infrastructure and systems. So we strongly believe that architecture can play a vital role to be a catalyst to bring positive transformation to these solutions and the communities that they are meant for, even beyond. We have three core principles that we govern our work, if you will. And the first one is that architecture can improve life and can impact it and send it in a positive way. And that is the realization that the parents in the Botara Hospital that we built in 2011 in the north of Rwanda, not only this hospital challenged the traditional understanding of rural healthcare infrastructure, it also set a new standard of what quality healthcare need to be, not for the few privileged ones, but for everyone in that if it is possible in the rural Rwanda, then it should be possible everywhere. And then the second principle is that architecture must have a clear, architecture and design must have a clear, a legible mission that seeks to push the boundaries of the impact it can have on the community. And one quick example I'll give is of this young gentleman called Akiza. The tireless effort that went on to design a wall cladding system for the Botara Hospital that used this volcanic stone has gone on to creating a completely new trade of volcanic missions. This newly created skill has transformed farmers literally into contractors. And the best example is of this guy who's now a member of a cooperative that currently does this work all over Rwanda and we hope he can bring that also like in the region and beyond, if not possible because it was proven to be a great innovation. And then the last principle of the office work from is that the process of architecture and design is as important as not more than the outcome. So we're convinced that by using the right approach and paying special attention to the process you can position ourselves to achieve both direct and indirect impact. If you think that by limiting the construction industry one of the leading factors in the growth in four countries exclusively to men then you begin to ignore the benefits of availing income to women especially in relatively poor communities where studies have shown that the income in women's control is more likely to be used towards children nutrition and education as opposed to alcohol, drugs and gambling. And this is not to say that all men are irresponsible but the ratio of how much of the income goes to support to the household increases significantly when the hands of women than men. And the family well-being gets translated into chances to prosper into a better life creating more opportunities for women, youth and so-called unskilled people, et cetera. All other news that architect and design can make a huge difference in fighting the injustice that comes with an unbalanced sharing of resources in limited resources setting. So through our work we have come to understand that these lessons to scale up and reach the many people on this planet in need. It is critical that we create a movement of like minds that adopt this approach we call LOFA in foreign means locally fabricated. And by adopting this approach, you can see more and more examples that fight injustice and start creating the needed equity. So the LOFA approach has these four ingredients that they have on the screen. For every project you try to hire a locale when you reach the implementation not only for the economic reasons but also to create avenues for participation and ownership. Sourcing of your materials is either important in not only for the economic reason but offset as much as you can the carbon footprint associated with transportation and create a mistakeable contextual identity for the projects. That's very important to add as well. In basin training and because when you always look at a project implementation as an opportunity to have testing platform an existing skill can be elevated or a new skill can be taught or it created or invented similar to the work on external that I presented earlier. And then uphold the dignity. Always take the time to assess whether decisions we make do not create injustices at the end of the project or two years down the road. So the applicant design center is our response to create this movement that will go on to make a radical transformation that will not only solve the obvious problems you can clearly see in limited resources settings but also force us to take a look at the rest of the world and how a site is functioning now and understand what more can architecture and design do towards the safe, sustainable, equitable, and just work. So I'm looking forward to your comments and ideas on how we could advance this monumental task we have ahead and I thank you very much. I'll pass the ball back to David. Perfect. So I guess this next part of the schedule I'll offer a couple of questions and then each panelist can sort of weigh in on them. So the first I would say is talking about the challenge that you consistently face on a day-to-day basis. What would you say are one or two of the big challenges that you consistently face? Christian, why don't you start as long as you're hot talking? That's a really hard question to ask me because we... Because everything's going well all the time, right? Sorry? Because everything's going well all the time? Yes, perfect. I'm kidding. So the biggest challenge we face, I think, in all line of work, I would say the biggest one is an interpretation of what people's lives worth is. Because we tend to find a significant variation when we're talking about creating infrastructure as less of things or special structures that affect our lives on a daily basis. And you find that when the impact those structures have on our lives are overlooked by the people in position of power, not only it translates into poor infrastructure, but it translates into bigger problems than even design itself cannot fix. And our biggest challenge for now is the mindset. It's basically to always prove, like Zoe mentioned earlier, that impact measurements has to be a key aspect of development. You want to be able to articulate to these people that not everything should be translated in monetary value. And that's not an easy task. That's the biggest challenge. And then obviously the second one is, I would say that it has to do with having enough time and resources to actually invest enough into providing adequate solutions. Oftentimes we're pushed to, in the corner of providing a patch solution to a problem when we can clearly say, if you spend extra amount, extra amount of time or extra amount of resources, we're able to come up with an adequate solution that can actually solve like long-term solutions. So those are the biggest ones that we trace in our line of work on a day-to-day basis. Perfect. Zoe, what about you? Sure, I mean, I will resonate with these comments and reiterate on what I've said about communicating our value. And I think that I see it both working with people from the field where they're struggling communicating their impact to other funders. But I also see it like as a foundation within a corporation like Autodesk where our currency is impact. And as a non-revenue generating group within Autodesk, we need also to communicate what we are doing and the value of it to the rest of the company. So kind of this really this link around how we measure and how we communicate what we do is I think really key to the sector. And I would say that there are some field of practice that have figured it out pretty well such as the environmental field. In sustainability, we use carbon emission as the golden standard to talk about the impact we have. But in the social sector, I think there is a lot of conversation happening but there's still not one metrics or one standard that everyone can use so that we all speak the same language and we all understand each other's activities and impact. And so I think that sort of this, the fact that it's nothing is at all and it's a little bit messy in the field of impact measurements for social innovation doesn't help people from organization on the ground to funders really reach the maximum potential for impact. Hey, Sophie. Hi, yes. So I completely agree with both Christian and Zoe. I'm gonna reiterate exactly what they said, communication and impact and time and resources. I mean, those are really the four things. But in our context, what I would say that we really think that we can have the biggest impact with new ideas and with new partnerships and new research output is really in sending people to the field so that they're not kind of just sitting around our campus thinking of great ideas but really working with communities in the context with these challenges that exist all over the world and are unique in different contexts. And so for us, it's really sending students, sending researchers to the field and for that time and resources are the key kind of issue. And we really hope through those engagements to build that humility and empathy that I talked about and to build that really contextual knowledge. And on a more technical side, actually one of the challenges that a lot of our ideas and research projects face is they get to this place where they are piloting and they're really excited, they have great initial results but then they don't quite know how to start building or how to start developing the supply chains needed for larger pilots or larger engagements. And so we're really working on building partnerships and working on helping to arm those people with skills to build local partnerships with government agencies with local businesses and others to try to build those out. But to the extent that anyone has insights on how to strengthen supply chains and develop the economies, I think that would be a technical issue that we face that would really help to accelerate the impact that we would like to see in the world. Great. I'm wondering if you guys can talk a little bit about what you've learned from those that you seek to serve. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about this call or this webinar right now is that we have Autodesk Foundation, which is a kind of funder, we have an academic institution, and we have somebody who's actually working day-to-day as a professional in the field. But what we don't have is one of the end, the client or the beneficiary or the end user. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you've learned from the people who you work for. Maybe Christian, can you start with that? Yes, definitely I can start, I think. I'll say that the biggest lesson I've learned is that people have an incredible ability to adapt to situations and usually that through that process of adaptation, there is an incredible ingenuity that is hidden in the survival mode that people develop that also feel like designers or architects or engineers who've been in a privileged, in a more or less privileged position, might not necessarily be able to come up with solutions. And that's like a rich source for us to get inspiration from, to be motivated and work harder to either optimize those solutions or amplify them or push them, to the utmost level, but in fact, people might. Great, Sophie, can you talk about that? Can you talk about how some of your students work benefits from the feedback with the client, let's say? Yeah, so I mean, one of the critical things that we've learned and continue to learn all the time is exactly what Christian said, which is that communities are so innovative. People are solving their own problems, right? They may not be solving them the way that we would have assumed from the outside, if you will, or from our place in the world that they would solve them the same way as we might face the similar situation, but it's just so cool to see how people have approached different challenges and how really innovative ways they've come up with. And so I think that's one of the key lessons that I've taken, which is to come with an open mind and open eyes and ears first, you know, and really listen because there's so many kind of cool ideas out there already. And the other thing kind of building on that is that, you know, we're not the first to try to solve this problem. So if water access is a challenge in the community, there's a reason that it's not there and people have no doubt been trying to fix this for a long time. And so figuring out what's worked already, what is already starting to work and how can we build on that rather than starting from scratch and starting from no context and to really try to accelerate the change that's already ongoing rather than to upend the system and bring in some new solution that may or may not fit. So that's been kind of my biggest learning. So Louie, for you, this question seems maybe multi-layered because the people that you serve in some ways are your portfolio companies. And so you could, I'm very curious what your portfolio, one of the companies in your portfolio, I'm interested in like knowing how you learn from the people that you, the people that you support. Sure, I mean, as I was saying, like one of my role here is really looking at how we use our resources to support these different organizations. And I think as you said, we are sort of a step remote from people directly on the field, but still through, you know, our conversation and the work we do with our customer, we are able to learn the lot. And I think that, you know, the first one is, I think there is a lot of challenges out there. And I'm really impressed to see how we are working in a field that is really tapping into each other skills. And it's deeply interdisciplinary. And I really liked Sophie's slides around different skills that are needed in the field of impact design because it's really showing this need for reaching out to other disciplines and being humble and very curious. I would say that as a technology company as well, I think that something that I've been seeing and learning is sort of this eagerness to, you know, use new tools. And so as a company, our role is also to look at how we can bring these tools to the people that needs it. And so there is more and more effort from Autodesk to really make the software tools more accessible to everyone and particularly people on the field. And, you know, as historically, our software were really reserved for engineers and architects. And we are seeing more and more people using them directly on the field. So that's one of the biggest learning for me. Okay, so I'm going to start pulling questions out of the chat box. So if anybody who's attending wants to ask something or the panel is put it in there and I'll just try to add them. So the one other way is, can you provide some additional examples beyond Autodesk of industry engagement support for impact design and development engineering? Who else is providing funding or support? This is Sophie here. One of our major partners is USAID and other development agencies and, you know, some foundations as well are looking at this. So it's kind of diverse pool. I think we're trying to build momentum around this and really build a case for the interdisciplinary work. I think a lot of times we face kind of disciplinary constraints within some funding avenues. So we're really building on that interdisciplinary angle. And I think USAID has really recognized that and a lot of other agencies and funders are starting to move that way as well. Okay, USAID, anybody else? I think there are a number of foundations that we're looking at. And actually I, in fact, I was trying to do a better job of cataloging and organizing the funders. And in fact, we're at the moment putting together an infographic that tries to catalog many of the quote unquote funny trailblazers that are operating in this space. So check back in with us in maybe like a month's time and you might find a sort of a larger document that organizes that. One question is having to do with your attitudes towards risk and your appetite for risk, let's say, in low resource communities. Christian, what's the masses attitude towards like risk and potential for small failures? Yeah, so that's something that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And the reason, I mean, the way we found to cope with that is to make sure a dialogue is happening all the time, to go above and beyond what an average architectural firm would offer because there's a lot of advocacy work that needs to happen before we put up paper. So as much as you try to mitigate the risk, but it's less of mitigating the risk to you but mitigating the risk of failure of the initiative. And one of the best way to frame the argument is to present as many opportunities that Charles offers and hope that people will understand where the opportunity lies rather than remaining in the safe box and try to take a shot with you and give that commitment that they're actually going to go the extra mile with you to reach that full impact. Zoe, I'm curious about your attitudes, your autodesk or appetite for risk. Sure. Well, so I was, you know, investment vehicle. I think that we recognize the fact that there are risks involved into the work we do, particularly on the financial side. And in particular, as we are really looking at investing in innovation and sometimes, you know, early-stage, small-scale projects. But you know, I think that everyone in the design field would recognize that failure is part of our job and that's how we learned. I think that the role as a foundation like us is really to evaluate this risk and minimize it. And I think this is still, again, linked to, you know, a deep evaluation in terms of what is the potential for impact, how do we measure that? And how do we create metrics along the way that are able to, you know, indicate us how a project is doing and how this risk is minimized along the way. So we really approach risk as any other investors as well as through a design mindset of seeing risk as a learning experience. Beautiful. Sophie, do you want to talk kind of briefly about how your students or how you, you know, how you kind of counsel students to manage risk? Yeah, so I think both our students and researchers, you know, development work is risky and innovation is risky by its nature. But what you want to do, I think, of what all of us seek to do is to minimize the risk to the communities and to the people whom we're trying to help, right? So I think that's kind of the main perspective that we're going at it with. And I think the way that we go about it is to, like I said, kind of understand deeply the problems. And sometimes that involves, you know, bringing partners that would normally be kind of uncomfortable for people to talk to. So for example, an engineering student might have to talk to a local council member in the local government to really understand why a certain, you know, what the history of certain infrastructure development is or whatever. And so kind of build that local network. And I think that is building solutions on top of knowledge, I think, is the way that we go about it. And to understand the full context of the challenge that a community is facing before we attempt a solution is one way to mitigate that risk. I think, to Zoe's point, really having a clear set of metrics that are pointing toward a really clear outcome, really clear goal and really understanding what it'll take to get there, you know, building your theory of change, if you will, in a robust way before you really start monkeying around with people's lives, I think is really important. So that's how we deal with it in brief. Okay. To kind of close this, could you guys each ask each other a question? Start with you, Zoe. Could you ask, like, one of the other panelists a question? Sure. I mean, I will, like, I'm curious about how, you know, Christian is looking at the future of design in Africa and particularly on how he's thinking about scaling up this initiative of the African Design Center. In my dreams, in my dream world, the future of architecture in Africa would serve as a campus that do not only solve the current problems that the continent is facing or its plans to face in the near future because of the population growth and rapid urbanization, but also provide a chance for the rest of the world to also look under the hood and see how do we repair the damage that has been caused by these ineffective systems that we've been implementing for the past, I don't know, a few hundred years. And part of it is how do we change the perception of certain disciplines such as architecture, design, engineering that initially was thought to be solutions providers to real societal solutions to simple solutions vending disciplines. And this is the biggest problem. And the way I see that is the African Design Center will try to address that at a scale level first on the continent to try to understand what are the best solutions that you can come up with to solve these immediate problems, but for a long term. If you allow me, I want to also like answer really quickly a question asked by Atee Argo. He said like, can you provide an example of a situation where human dignity is sacrificed and how to overcome it? So one of the example I always like to give is that I hope African Design Center will be able to change to scale to a big scale is for instance, how do you understand education and how let's say architectural infrastructure solutions to provide for education actually have much, much bigger impact than providing simple classroom or shelter for education activities because education is set to train young people for a future that we might not see that we don't know what it is and keeps evolving and grows. So the notion that because you're building a school somewhere in rural Africa and you can build it for $10,000 not only hurts one generation because they don't have really a good school that provides stimulating learning spaces for young children but it tells false hope to this community that they're going to get education that will help them get out of this poverty but ends up hurting them more because they don't get out of that poverty they sink into it even more. So how do we change that? And then if that's the case and you can crack that solution or that formula for the rural settings then can you look back at communities that put so much resources into the education? And then question, is it widely utilized or are we wasting resources or has it caught up with the changes in recent education that was brought by technology and advancements and all of these new things like internet so like that's where I see like the future of education on the continent basically becoming the conversation starter to start addressing larger issues to the rest of the world. And hopefully the African design center will be an institution that is behind all of these conversations and all of these applications. Okay, we're getting low on time so I have one final question. Sophie, can you kind of direct the question over to Autodesk Foundation? I think it's been a real pleasure to work with Autodesk Foundation already it's some of our programs and it's been really inspirational to partner and I'm just I guess wondering what other opportunities I think maybe the listeners on the webinar might have to partner with Autodesk Foundation on their impact design challenges and projects and ideas and how we might move forward on that kind of partnership. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that we work with multiple type of partner as I explained we also usually actually we are being reached out either directly but most of the time through recommendation of other people in our portfolio that work with partners. So it's really about creating this ecosystem that sort of supports itself and get to us. So you should feel free to anyone that is interested on support from the Autodesk Foundation as well as just being part of the conversation could reach out to us through our website Autodesk.org or should mean an email that you had on one of my slides. I think that also the impact design hub is a great resource where we also bring a lot of information out there. And so people should feel free also to go and dig into the resource that are out there. Okay, I think this is a great point to sort of conclude on. I'm so grateful for the three panelists showing up today and bringing their unique perspective into this conversation. It's conversations like this that I get to have every day and it fills me with optimism about what the future is gonna look like and so I'm very, very grateful, very, very inspired. And so with that, I'm going to pass it over to Iana who's going to close this thing down and tell you about how to cash in your credits and so forth. Thank you so much, David and thank you to all the panelists. This was an incredibly rich discussion. We're certainly very excited to build a momentum around impact design and development engineering worldwide and know that your efforts are really contributing to a much larger change worldwide. For all the attendees, thank you so much for your participation today. You can certainly find the recording of this webinar in a few days on our platform. I'll look to the webinars page for that. If you're looking to get your professional development hours, please submit the form that's on our professional development page with the PDH code listed here and if you have more questions that weren't addressed or you'd like to have the panelists weigh in on, feel free to email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Don't forget to become an E4C member to get information about our upcoming webinars and also we hope to catch you on the next one in a week or in March where we'll be exploring topics around robotics and global development and professionalism and well drilling. Have a great morning, evening or afternoon, wherever you may be and thank you for joining us. Bye-bye.