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Design of Resilient Products
for Small-scale Farming in
South Africa
Angus Donald Campbell, 1 Kyle Graham Brand
In _a curre~t climate of environmental, social and economic inequality it
is imperative that designers contribute towards sustainable developm ent.
South Africa has a dual economy as a result of ingrained economic division
which poses a challenge for designers when designing for the developing
sector because they predominantly form part of the developed sector of
society. The most pervasive method adopted for design interventions of
a developmental nat ure, especially when designers are from a different
context !o the inte~ded users, is User-Centred Design. This paper proposes
the ~ddition of an intentional designer influence or 'nudge' throughout the
design process, as was well as in the final products use, in order to address
~lobal an_d national agendas and ensure more resilience in the product
intervention. An example of the design and development of single-
household farming kit is used to explore the application of this approach.
In t_he ~xam?le a vital aspect for the resilience of the kit is the system upon
which it relies: the South African food chain/s. A decentralized model is
encouraged through the use of the designers influence on the end users
and this ultima tely results in a more resilient product.
Ke~ ords: small-scale farm ing, industrial/product design, decentralisation,
resilient products, single-household farming kit, South Africa.
Introduction
The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Agenda
21 (United Nations Environment Programme, 1992) advocates
the principle of developed countries investing in technologies
that would allow developing countries to develop in a sustainable
fashion. This is advocated at a global level to foster partnerships
f~r _sustain~ble development across the developed - developing
d1v1de. This same divide is also evident on a national level in
South Africa due to a dual economy resulting from economic
divisions (Schneider, 2003, p. 23). This dual economy is not
what economist Dale Jorgenson (1961, p. 311) describes as the
divide between the industrialised and agricultural sectors but
rather what consumer scientist Sara Duvenage refers to as a
"two-tiered economy" (2010, p. 4). The extent of the divide is
most evident economically, however geographically the divide
is less evident, even to the point of overlap: the distance between
Sandt~n City Shopping complex, one of the most prestigious
shoppmg destinations in Africa (Liberty), to the middle of
Alexandra, a township with many social problems including
unemp~oyment and homelessness (City of Johannesburg,
2012), 1s a mere 8km. This economic inequality could cause
tension betw~en various economic groups (Schneider, 2003, p.
24) however 1t also offers many opportunities for sustainable
1 University of Johannesburg, acampbell@uj .ac.za
278
development due to the close proximity of both sectors. The
principle promoted in the UNEP Agenda 21 of developed
countries investing in technologies to assist developing
countries could equally be applied on a national level in South
Africa in order to foster peace and sustainable development
for the whole country . Currently this is encouraged through
mechanisms such as cooperate social investment ( CSI) which
has seen a steady growth in South Africa (De Wet, 2007, p. 64).
Victor Margolin, seminal design theorist, argues that the design
profession needs to consider "economic and social development
from a global perspective ... addressing the gross inequalities of
consumption between people in the industrialized countries and
those in the developing world" (Margolin, 1998, p. 92). Margolin's
statement is in reaction to the "culture of sustainability" ( 1998, p.
85) that emerged as a result of the Earth Summit held in Rio De
Janeiro in June 1992 and the design profession's lack of advocating
its own potential contribution to sustainable development (1998,
p. 92). Twenty years later with the Rio+20 United Nations
Conference on Sustainable Development approaching in June
this year we need to ask what contribution the design profession
has made and is currently making to sustainable development
and sustainable poverty eradication since the 1992 summit?
The Industrial Design profession in South Africa predominantly
forms part of the developed sector since its contribution to
the economic and social environment is mostly consumer
product focused (Campbell, 2008, p. 97). If we continue with
the advocating of UNEP Agenda 21 it can then be said that it
should be the responsibility of industrial designers in South
Africa to contribute to sustainable technology for the developing
sector. This paper proposes a method for designing resilient
products for small-scale farming in order to promote sustainable
development. After briefly exploring the context of small-scale
farming, this paper highlights a generic overview of methods
often adopted by designers when approaching projects of this
nature and then proposes a variation of these methods in order
to encourage a more resilient result.
Small-scale Farming
''Agriculture ... holds the most promise - and the biggest payoffs
for mitigating climate change- in the short term .. :' (Nierenberg
& Halweil, 2011, p. 83), this is therefore a valid reason to focus
on research for farming, and more specifically in the case of this
research paper, on small-scale farming. Small-scale farms are
defined as farms of less than two hectares (20 000m2) in size
(Hurni & Osman-Elasha, 2009, p. 8) and although the merits of
large-scale farming can be argued at length, the authors of this
paper choose to advocate small-scale farming for the following
reasons :
• Small-scale farms tend to be more inclined toward organic
farming methods, which offer many advantages and
279
opportunities for the farmers and consumers. South African
organic agriculture has experienced steady growth since its
inception in the l 990's (Barrow S., 2006, p. 6) and 'the rise
of the artisan al eater " is predicted to be one of big trends for
2012 in South Africa and this would rely on and promote
small-scale, local agriculture.
• The export of food from poorer to richer countries has led
to "a steady erosion of local food production systems and
eating patterns" (Hurni & Osman-Elasha, 2009, p. 7).
• Many low-income consumers are moving to the cities in search
of work and no longer growing their own food (Duvenage,
2010, p. 3). This forces them to depend on earning an income
to purchase food (Ibid.). When work is not found, which in the
current economic climate is very often the case, they simply
skip meals or ration food resulting in poor nutrition (Ibid.).
Investing in the development of technologies which improve
and encourage food production especially on a small-scale
level is important as it improves food security for not only the
individuals farming but also for the country as a whole.
In addition to the reasons listed above, small-scale farming
should be considered a vital area of focus for sustainable
development since 90% of Africa's agricultural production
canes from small-farms (Hurni & Osman-Elasha, 2009, p.
8) and as Joachim von Braun, Director of the International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), states that " ... half of
the world's undernourished people, three -quarters of Africa's
milnourished children, and the majority of people living in
abmlute poverty live on small farms" (Braun, 2007).
Pa.11 Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises
whch assists rural farmers around the world, states that, "90
pe;cent of the world's designers spend all their time working on
solutions to the problems of the richest 10 percent of the world's
customers" (2008, p. 64). As designers who predominantly form
pait of the developed sector of South Africa and the world, we
need to take on a "culture of sustainability" (Margolin, 1998, p.
85; and try to contribute to sustainable development, especially
in areas of obvious need such as small-scale farming.
Re,ilience
Resilience is most often a term associated with ecology, but is
adopted in various other scientific fields. Broadly resilience
is defined as the ability to adapt to change; Katherine Pasteur
author of From Vulnerability to Resilience defines resilience
in :erms of the ability of a system, community or society to
"resist, absorb, cope with and recover the effects of hazards and
adapt to longer term changes in a timely and efficient manner
witnout undermining food security or wellbeing" (2011, p. 13).
As the title of this paper suggests the predominant concern of
the authors is product resilience. A product can be evaluated in
terms of resilience in the following categories:
280
• Physical form, i.e. materials and assembly
• Repairability, i.e. the prolonging of its use.
• Usefulness, i.e. the reduction of obsolescence.
• Timelessness, i.e. avoiding following fashion.
• Promoting the idea above the physical product, i.e. the idea
of holding pages together is more resilient than a paperclip
as a product.
Product resilience as referred to in this paper attempts to
consider all of the above; however one of the most crucial
elements that could affect the resilience of a product is the
system on which it relies. A resilient product within a vulnerable
system results in an equally vulnerable product. These systems
that a product could potentially rely on can vary in scale: global,
nation al, regional, local and individual.
Global policies such as UNEP Agenda 21 can be seen as a
contemporary system on which any product's sustained existence
relies. For a product to be holistically designed for sustainability,
a designer needs to take into account the product's manufacture
and use within the broader context/system that it forms part of.
However, the most important reason for the advocacy of resilient
products, especially in a developmental context, is the extent
that a developing community or individual will rely on a new
design intervention/product. This reliance could be considered
as a vulnerability because of the degree to which the developing
community or individual relies on the design intervention/
product resulting in catastrophe should the product fail (Pasteur,
2011, p. 11). This paper does not directly focus on household
or community resilience but rather explores the resilience of
products for small-scale farming which indirectly results in
increased food security for the household or community, i.e.
increasing their resilience. The ideal of a perfect resilience is
highly improbable; however there are methods that designers
can utilise to encourage the validity of their solutions.
Participatory Design Methods
When designing for a developmental context the majority of the
time the designer/researcher is from a different context to that
of the end user or beneficiary of the final solution ( developed
versus developing). This leads to an obvious lacuna in the
designers understanding of the user's needs, desires and context.
Polak states in the chapter on Practical Problem Solving in his
book Out of Poverty that anyone wanting to solve a problem
needs "talk to the people who have the problem, and listen to
what they have to say" (2008, p. 15). This seems to be an obvious
statement but is often not adopted by many designers . IDEO
the international design consultancy define the same principle
in the "Hear" phase of their Human Centered Design Toolkit
(IDEO, p. 8). This principle is formally part of what is known, by
most designers, as User-Centred Design (UCD). In his article on
UCD Prof. Turkka Keinonen from the Aalto University School
281
of Art and Design regards UCD " ... as a broad umbrella covering
several approaches that are perhaps partly conflicting in their
foundations and beliefs, but that follow the UPA [Usability
Professionals Association] principles" (Keinonen, 2010, p. 17)
which "grounds the process in information about the people
who will use the product" (Ibid.). This fundamental principle of
user focus should take place throughout the " ... planning, design
and development of a product" (Keinonen, 2010, p. 17). Since its
inception in the 1980's the UCD method has progressed from
seeing the user as an operator to the user being a "holistic and
active contributor" throughout the design process (Keinonen,
2010, p. 24). However when adopting a UCD approach designers
are encouraged to avoid imposing their own values on the
experience (Fabricant, 2009). This is often problematic as one of
the greatest problems with the UCD methodology is that " ... user
behaviour is ALWAYS subject to influence" (Fabricant, 2009).
Designer Influence
The influences exerted by a designer occur in various forms
throughout the design process and in product use. Robert
Fabricant, vice-president of creative at Frog design, in his
article Design with Intent looks at various examples of how
designers exert an intentional influence on behavioural change
(2009). In the context of designing for product resilience this
has the potential to become an important area of consideration
because it forces the designer to look beyond the product itself
at a broader agenda.
Influencing behaviour is fraught with ethical considerations
since " ... classifying what is, and what is not, socially acceptable
behaviour may prove challenging as social norms are
constantly evolving" ·(Bhamra, Lilley, & Tang, 2011, p. 441)
and "there is not a clear consensus of what is an acceptable
level of intervention" (Ibid.). The behavioural economists
Thaler and Sustein (mentioned in Fabricant's article)
advocate this exertion of influence by the designer as what
they term a 'nudge' (2008, p. 6). "To count as a mere nudge,
the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid" (Thaler &
Sunstein, 2008, p. 6) for the intended user, i.e. the opportunity
to avoid the nudge is equitable to following it. Thaler and
Sustein propose that sceptics of this approach adopt the false
assumption that "almost all people, almost all of the time, make
choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are
better than the choices that would be made by someone else"
(Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, p. 9). One of the reasons that this
could be a false assumption and especially in a developmental
context is that the access to pertinent information may not be
available in order for the user to make a considered decision.
Tracy Bhamra (et al.) looks more specifically at the ability of
designers to " ... plan and shape the way in which consumption
occurs .. :' (Bhamra, Lilley, & Tang, 2011, p. 428). They propose
the Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) strategy for
282
sustainable development in order to "reduce negative social or
environmental use impacts" (Bhamra, Lilley, & Tang, 2011, p.
430), however they also highlight the need for further research
into such a strategy (Bhamra, Lilley, & Tang, 2011, pp. 441-
2). Dan Lockton, specialist in design for behavioural change
(Lackton, 2004), is a co-author of a paper titled The Design with
Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour in
which he states that one of the presuppositions that underpins
this research is that designers and their designs can often
effect user behaviour unintentionally but this can be applied
intentionally (Lockton, Harrison, & Stanton, 2010, p. 383).
Additionally Lackton describes six lenses that can be used to
influence user behaviour namely: architectural, errorproofing,
persuasive, visual, cognitive and security (Lockton, Harrison,
& Stanton, 2010, p. 386) these are well documented in his other
co-authored publication titled Design with Intent: 101 patterns
for influencing behaviour through design (Lockton, Harrison,
& Stanton, 2010) and will not be discussed further in this paper.
The influence that a designer or design researcher could have
on the end-user can occur in various forms at various stages.
Looking at these potential influences in a linear fashion, the
first area of influence occurs during the research phase. A need
is often defined in comparision: by simply engaging a set of
potential users the designer could provide a comparison for the
users, especially if the designer forms part of a different economic
group. This influence could potentially affect the perception
of need for the participants. 'What is your greatest need?' the
designer might ask, 'a vehicle like the one you just arrived in .. .'
the participant might think. This influence is especially relevant
when designing in a South African context or anywhere there
is economic division. The potential positive side of this same
influence is what could be seen as indirect motivation, by showing
concern and interest for a user often proves to be motivational,
resulting in the users feeling connected with more than just their
immediate community. One of the participants, in a previous
developmental project undertaken by one of the authors,
remarked that just by the researcher visiting the community
"gives people power!" (Goqo, 2011). The second area which the
designer has a potential influence over is in the presentation of
concepts. The way a concept is presented can have a dramatic
influence on the user's choice. Users from different backgrounds
will potentially have different prejudices about perceived value,
understanding the influence presentation has, requires in depth
understanding of the end users as per the UCD method. The
third and final influence a designer could exert is through the
product itself. Using some of the devices described by Lackton
a designer could alter behaviour in a predictable way though a
product or system design.
To ensure resilience of a product this paper proposes that
a UCD method is applied as well as what can be termed as
the exertion of the designers influence. The UCD method is
283
used to understand immediate needs of the users as well as
attempting to identify value associations that can be used when
the designer wants to exert influence.
Example
As an example this method has been applied to the development
of a single-household farming kit (SHFK) for small -scale
farmers in South Africa. This project foJ"ms part of an MTech:
Industrial Design at the University ofJohannesburg. The project
is currently still in progress and therefore it is impossible to
discuss the application of the proposed method in totality, but
what follows are examples of its current application.
Initially the designer used a UCD approach to identify needs
in three low-income communities that form part of the Dr
Kenneth Kaunda district in the North West Province of South
Africa. Household food security was identified as a highly
pertinent need by community members and in order to
address this need the concept of a household food garden was
proposed since many households have unemployed members
who could tend the gardens. The designer aims to develop of a
single-household farming kit (SHFK) in order to facilitate the
development of these food gardens. By promoting this concept
an influence was already exerted in that the users were not
given the option to choose between aid based food provisions
but rather self-employment and self-reliance was encouraged.
The next phase was to identify external influences that could
affect the SHFK's resilience. One of these influences is the existing
South African food chain/s. The position of decentralisation was
adopted by the researcher since " ... we need the freedom oflots of
small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness
of large-scale, possibly global, unity and co-ordination"
(Schumacher, 1976, p. 49). The encouraging of decentralised
food chains also results in better local independence. This is
more reliable for farmers when compared to a centralised format
which depends on unstable external factors (food price, fuel,
transport). This consideration is currently being explored in
concept development, for example the size of the plot that the
system is designed for could affect the system that the users will
rely on (decentralized). Another way that decentralization could
be encouraged is not from the perspective of the projects outcome
(food) but rather how the product is manufactured. The product
can be designed for various manufacturing methods, dependent
on the context of the user. The same product can be intentionally
designed for a high-end urban garden market as well as a low-
cost rural subsistence market. In this way the product could
potentially allow for a broad adoption across various economic
groups which would ensure more resilience. The prototypes
developed during the design process will inform a craft version
which will rely on local artisans for its manufacture and therefore
its distribution will also be decentralised. By providing a
284
framework as opposed to strict rules for manufacture will allow
the artisans to innovate and adapt the design to local conditions.
These adaptions could in turn inform the mass-manufactured
version and in turn the mass-manufactured version could
generate funding for the distribution and development of craft
versions. Other considerations such as cost, durability, security,
usability and the farming system are also being considered using
this dual approach.
Conclusion
The influence exerted by a designer should be used to alter
behaviour to ensure product resilience not only for the products
sake, but rather to avoid the product becoming a potential
element of vulnerability for the users and their community.
Using this in conjunction with a UCD method appears
contradictory but should result in a more resilient product
because the UCD method should ensure immediate adoption
and application by the users, while the influence exerted by the
designer should consider global and national agendas to ensure
long term use.
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Mekanlar, Ritileller,
Yeme-i'rme Killtiirleri
Oturum 7
Oturum Ba~kam: Yrd. Do<;:. Dr. Tolga Benli
