Yup, that’s a manhole cover. The kind that covers sewer holes. Just walk outside and you’re bound to run into one. They’re typically made of metal but look closely and you might notice the one in the photo is made from fiberglass. So how is this inspiring?
To better appreciate our fiberglass friend, this story is about the Internet and the country of Uganda in East Africa. I was working on a project to bring faster internet capacity to the country. Part of the strategy involved laying fiber optic cables underground. Manholes are added every couple hundred yards to enable easy access for future repairs and cable splits. The original project plan called for metal manhole covers. But it quickly became evident these were stolen by local thieves to be melted and repurposed. This was not only a costly oversight but immediately left open manholes that pedestrians could fall into. After a few phone calls and engineering stress tests, fiberglass quickly became the material of choice.
This is a humble reminder that context matters for design. While one can aspire to design a one size fits all product, sometimes the world just says no. My team assumed metal manhole covers were valued in a universal way only to realize it’s malleable nature opened up possibilities we never considered.
I really appreciate this example because often times, we as designers forget that our own cultural heritage brings its own assumptions and this can truly impact our research design in the first place, and we are faced with a challenging problem and have to make the most optimal design decision without testing (due to various issues like geographical location, cost, resources). That’s why it’s really important to do field work (which is what I see often in the industry) and participatory design (more popular in academic settings) to immerse ourselves with our user communities. I think this is as important as the iteration process itself. Thanks for sharing your work and it’s really meaningful and intellectual challenging to work in developing countries.
This is such an important reminder, and I’m going to remember your example next time I’m designing.
It affects research design too! I was helping out with a study in Morocco a few years ago, focused on how middle school-age students use & perceive technology in different parts of the world.
The first component of the study was focus groups, which required permission slips signed by my students’ parents. Seems like an easy thing, but parents at the school spoke one or more of 4-5 different languages, and the permission slips had only been provided in English. So they had to be translated before we could even begin the study, which took a considerable amount of time– especially since it hadn’t been anticipated in advance.
And then the second component was a diary study, requiring each participating student to carry a small video camera around and record observations and reflections over the course of a week. Out of three cameras, two were stolen (not by students) and the third was returned without tape. So no diary study.
The research methods chosen were, perhaps, not ideal for the context, and it resulted a lot of frustration (for me) and less useful data (for the lead researchers). The study design may have worked great in the US, but in the context of Morocco, communication difficulties were underestimated, security was not considered, and an unreasonable level of responsibility was expected from 12 and 13-year-old participants.
Developing countries offer different kind of design challenges. They can question our basic assumptions. In remote parts of India abandoned buildings can have a their perimeter wall removed – for bricks. Poverty and lack of resources makes people steal bricks from old buildings so that they can build their own dwellings.