John Mauriello explains how expert blindness and cultural assumptions cause Western-designed products, like the One Laptop Per Child, to fail in developing nations.
🔒 Remove your personal information from the web at joindeleteme.com/DT20 and use code DT20 for 20% off 🙌
DeleteMe international Plans: international.joindeleteme.com
Become a patron of my channel: patreon.com/JohnMauriello
Sign up to learn more about the design book that we're going to publish: studioello.com/mail
Check out my online industrial design course, Form Fundamentals: bit.ly/335vsqO
Join my discord channel: discord.gg/hFw55nh
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/john_mauriello
Follow my Instagram: instagram.com/mauriellodesign/
Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mauriellojohn/
All content directed and written by John Mauriello. John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is an Adjunct Professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts.
Edited by Brad Heath: bradleyheath.com/
Why is it so hard for talented designers to create great products for developing countries? To get closer to an answer, I spoke with experts in international development, designers from diverse cultures, and conducted extensive secondary research.
Time stamps:
Intro
Playpump
Mosquito (Fishing) Nets
DeleteMe
One Laptop Per Child
Is It Possible to Design For Cultures You Don't Belong To?
Main Works Cited:
"The Charisma Machine" by Morgan G Ames amzn.to/3RMvCty
"User Friendly" by Cliff Kuang amzn.to/3W2w5ud
NY Times, Malaria Article: nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for-malari…
Neo Nurture TED Talk (and the Design That Matters official website): youtube.com/watch?v=WpldYJ3sSIo
Liter of Light NPR article: npr.org/2011/12/28/144385288/in-philippine-slums-capturing-l…
"Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. I never explicitly cited this book, but it was really good for adding color/clarity to the topic:
amzn.to/4co8CcS
Other works were cited but in a smaller capacity. When referenced, they are displayed in the bottom left corner of the video.
#design #industrialdesign
Why it's here
2 people recommend this
What people say. Recommended for its insights into expert blindness and how cultural context affects product design and technology adoption.
z
zahlmanon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort”
>If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable. It requires more than funding to solve the problem. Sorry that my source is a YouTube video, but link to this video explains a general problem (that of trying to solve problems that are more prevalent elsewhere in the world, from within your own cultural context) and gives malaria as an example. People in malaria-afflicted countries, given free insecticide-treated nets, will often try to use them for fishing - not caring about the effect the insecticide will have on the haul. It's not due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, but due to a value judgment: people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem,…
It was this line of thinking which lead to the One Laptop Per Child failure. See "Why do Western Designs fail in Developing Countries" - link to this video OLPC is discussed from ~9 minutes in, but the whole thing is relevant. OLPC started when Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte went to Senegal to teach people to code, and found that there was no good reason to learn to code if you live in rural Senegal and people were not interested. They decided they knew better and doubled down, making the OLPC project, and when presenting their laptop to the world the African delegation at the conference objected to spending money on laptops instead of infrastructure, schools, water. Negroponte decided the targ…
> On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context While I share the opinion that the command line is _the one true way_ of computing, I don't think this is really all that true. Computers are alien. GUIs are alien. CLIs are alien. Everything is learned. Everything is experience. Everything is culture. Learning, experience, and culture blind us from the experience of the novice. This is "expert blindness". Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries link to this videolink
