IDDS: International Development Design Summits (Colombia)

Hands-on design experiences that bring together people from all walks of life to create low-cost, practical innovations to improve the lives of people living in poverty

2015-2018
Diversa | MIT D-Lab
Colombia (multiple locations)
#PD #STS
︎ Completed

Motivation

Access to technology in under-resourced contexts remains an important issue —not the only, nor the most pressing one— when confronting the battle against poverty. Lack of access is due to a myriad of variables including purchasing power, availability and appropriateness of technology solutions, and absence of local design and manufacturing capacity. IDDS summits focus on this last aspect by providing a practical experience showcasing how technology design can take place in these contexts. To do this, summits provide a non-formal, hands-on program in adult education to teach the principles of design following a participatory approach. The program emphasizes the practice of identifying and tackling problems collectively. These gatherings galvanize the idea that “working with communities is more powerful than designing solutions for them”. Design summits take place between two weeks to a month and focus on a particular thematic of interest to local communities.

Up: video reflection of the IDDS Design Summit (2017) on Climate Change Adaptation
Down left to right | Up/down: 1.IDDS Climate Change Adaptation (2017) team working with community partners in the Guavio Alto region. 2.Prototype of vertical lettuce garden installed at the DeFinca cooperative at IDDS Climate Change (2017). 3.Children testing the interactive arts and gardening prototype at IDDS (2016).

What we did

Together with a network of practitioners and members of the design collective at Diversa, we organized four IDDS design summits across different locations in Colombia. These experiences focused on issues related to urban solid waste management, primary education, climate change adaptation, and new coastal territories. Partnering communities for these summits included waste-pickers cooperatives, municipal government agencies, school networks, civil society natural reserves, regional universities, Indigenous groups, fishermen cooperatives, agroecology farmer collectives, and university students among others. More than 200 participants took place in these summits with more than a third being active members in local partnering communities. More than 20 fully funcional technology projects were developed and implemented including plastic material compactors for solid waste facilities, lightweight push carts for street waste-pickers, low-cost coffee roasters for rural small-scale farmers, solar lamps for remote Indigenous communities, pedal-powered rafts for waste collection across mangrove swamps, among others.

Clockwise from upper left | Up/down: 1.lightweight push cart team building a prototype, IDDS Zero (2015). 2.Tierra Libre soil-testing sensor team, IDDS Climate Change (2017). 3.Solar lamp team during fieldwork, IDDS New Coastal Territories (2018). 4.Low-cost plastic extruder prototype.

My contributions

Design facilitation, curriculum design, rapid prototyping, lead organizing

Collaborators

Diversa, MIT D-Lab, DAGMA, Alcaldía Ciudad de Cali, Tecnisolidos, Escuela Taller, Universidad del Valle, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad de Cundinamarca, Waia Sie reserve, De Finca cooperative, APRENAT cooperative, Tierra Libre collective, Universidad del Magdalena, INVEMAR, Fundación Tras la Perla, Cabildo Arhuaco Kankawarwa, Cria Pez cooperative, International Development Innovation Network.

Outputs

Smith, A., Linder, B., Landua Thabiso, B. M., Tien, D., de Castro Leal, D., & Reynolds Cuéllar, P. (2021). Beyond the Classroom: The (Ongoing) IDDS Journey in Community-Engaged Design. In Engenharias e outras práticas técnicas engajadas (Vol. 2, pp. 389–432). Editora da Universidade Estadual da Paraíba.

Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., & Delgado Ramos, D. (2020, June). Community-based technology co-design: insights on participation, and the value of the “co”. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020-Participation (s) Otherwise-Volume 1 .