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1.KEYNOTE PAPERS
019
SOUTH AFRICAN KEYNOTE SPEECH FOR LENS WORLD DISTRIBUTED CONFERENCE
DESIGNING SUSTAINABILITY FOR ALL
Angus Donald Campbell
University of Johannesburg Head of Department, Senior Lecturer & Postgraduate Coordinator, Department of
Industrial Design, Co-Founder & Steering Committee Member, Design Society Development DESIS Lab
acampbell@uj.ac.za
020 | angus donald camPbell | SOUTH AFRICAN KEYNOTE SPEECH FOR LENS WORLD DISTRIBUTED CONFERENCE DESIGNING SUSTAINABILITY FOR ALL
Hello, Sawubona, Mholweni and Howzit!
I am honoured to represent the African continent as the invited keynote speaker in Cape Town for the first
LeNS World Distributed Conference exploring ways of Designing Sustainability for All.
As you are all well aware, sustainability is regularly over-simplified and misused, which is unfortunate for what
is an incredibly important and complex systemic consideration for the continuation of human civilisation. My con-
ception of it has been developed over the last 21 years through personal reflection, active participation in design
projects and through broader engagement in academic discourse. I believe one’s concept of sustainably is inherently
personal, but at the same time would like to take this opportunity to present how the Department of Industrial
Design at the University of Johannesburg has grappled with framing sustainable design within one of the most un-
equal societies in the world. In this regard I will be exploring the themes of immersion & connection, lay designers
& local experts, small & incremental, systems & networks and concepts & reality. I am well aware that many of you
are experts in product service systems and distributed economies, but as is common in Africa, I will take a narrative
approach, through a series of self-reflections on my past experiences as a means to engage with our approaches to
Designing Sustainability for All.
IMMERSION & CONNECTION
The first aspect of sustainable design that I would like to explore is the immersion of the designer in a particular
context and his or her connection with those he or she is designing sustainable outcomes for. In 2005 I participated
in an ICSID Interdesign workshop focused on Sustainable Rural Transport. Led by the SABS Design Institute, in
partnership with the South African Department of Transport, it was held over two weeks with about 100 designers
and academics flying in from all over the world to explore issues of rural transport in the former apartheid home-
land of Bophuthatswana, currently the North West Province. Participants were divided into teams focused on Ani-
mal-drawn Carts, Alternative Modes of Transport, Bicycles and Tricycles, and Communication.
The participants were bused into isolated communities where designers would disembark with camera in hand,
clicking away, as they documented the lives of rural marginalised South Africans. The bus would then return to our
conference venue in an upmarket hotel in Rustenburg to discuss and compare experiences in order to conceptualise
solutions to the rural transportation problems we had identified.
I will never forget overhearing a Professor from a European design school exploring one of the participating
communities asking, when the typology he was witnessing did not meet his preconceived ideas, “Where is the vil-
lage?” After two weeks of furious yoyo design activities, the Interdesign came to an end with many of us aware that
the time spent exploring issues of rural transport was insufficient to arrive at anything sustainable.
With two of the Department of Industrial Design’s staff having worked on the bicycle & tricycles and donkey
cart teams, a year later we decided to integrate a continuation of the project into our students’ curriculum for the
next 2 years. In order to overcome the superficiality of the first workshop we home-stayed with community mem-
bers from Pitsedisulejang for two weeks with the support of the community’s young and enthusiastic local chief.
I was dropped off by bus with 5 students and no other means of transport. This embedded experience proved far
more insightful. We ate the food that was locally available, walked where we needed to go, collected water from the
communal standpipes and bathed in galvanised tubs at the end of the day. On one of the days we realised that we
had forgotten to bring bolts for one of the prototypes, in this experience the lack of rural transport was crystallised
with the realisation that this relatively simple task would require a full-day trip on municipal buses to a hardware
store and back.
Being hosted by and living with people from the community lead us to develop much deeper relationships
with them in comparison to the parachute design approach of the first Interdesign workshop. And even though the
time period was similar in duration, being embedded meant that you were less of an outsider, and with your design-
ers’ eyes, practically better able to explore the lived-experience of those you were designing with. Additionally, in
moments of connection, often over a meal, external designers were able to discuss and compare with our local hosts
what seemed to be our completely different worlds. The relationships we built with some of the community mem-
bers, were deep enough for me to continue to remain in contact with a few of them, even though I do not believe
that the carts, or bicycles we prototyped for them were ever delivered by the Department of Transport. For deep
connections with any person or community to be made, designers need to be open for them to emerge, from my ex-
perience this requires a deep self-reflection and mindful presence during engagements.
LAY DESIGNERS & LOCAL EXPERTS
The next aspect of sustainable design I will explore is the identification of lay designers or local experts in projects
in order to arrive at outcomes that are firstly driven by local enthusiasm, and secondly, amplify existing local actions
as opposed to imposing external ideas about what may need to be done. This results in endogenous or localised sus-
tainable change.
An example of the importance of lay design happened on our final trip of the extended Interdesign project,
which took place in 2008; this time to the community of Dwarsberg. We stayed with a local convenience store own-
er, with our time there kicking off with a collective bang at the local annual donkey cart race. Donkey cart owners
021 | angus donald camPbell | SOUTH AFRICAN KEYNOTE SPEECH FOR LENS WORLD DISTRIBUTED CONFERENCE DESIGNING SUSTAINABILITY FOR ALL
travelled from all around the area to compete for the coveted trophy. In the hive of activity, as they began to fill up
the yard awaiting the beginning of the race, I became immersed in the pride and creativity the local donkey cart
owners had for their carts. These were not basic carts, but the ingenious reuse of available resources creatively cus-
tomised into South African chariots! This was sustainable rural transport made by lay designers - people without
any training in design, but still following a clear design process to meet a need with the resources available to them.
In line with Schumacher’s concepts of appropriate technology what was also clear was that much of the manufac-
tured design of our cart prototypes needed reconsideration to be able to be maintained locally. We also realised that
if we had worked with these donkey cart lay designers right from the outset, we may have had more resilient design
outcomes.
Another example, which shows the importance of identifying embedded knowledge took place in 2006 when I
was provided with the opportunity to spend 2 weeks at Jahangirabad Media Institute in India. Here we worked with
budding documentary film makers to explore local issues experienced by rice farmers. As South Africans we had no
understanding of the inherent social complexities of having students from multiple castes within a single student
group. Early in the project we brainstormed what aspects of rice farming were most pressing, as a means to focus the
students’ efforts. During this process a commotion arose in the back of studio with a group of students clearly ag-
grieved by our brainstorm process since the more privileged, English speaking students were hogging the input, and
biasing the projects focus. We had to ask one of the English-speaking students to translate what was going on – all
we could understand was the repeated mention of the word “seeds”. What emerged was that this group of students
were all children of rice farmers, they therefore had the most experience to share with the group but were not in a
position socially or in terms of the language of communication to share it. Thankfully they were brave enough, and
felt comfortable enough, to ensure their voices were heard. We soon all learnt of their familial narratives around the
problematics of the introduction of hybrid versus traditional self-seeding rice varieties in India. The new technology,
coming up against tradition, ultimately led to crop failure for farmers who tried to replant seed only designed for
one planting cycle. The impact of this was brought into stark reality when crop failures were ascribed to the largest
majority of the 17 000 farmer suicides in India that year. This was a significant contextual issue, that we would have
completely missed if it were not for the experts already in our student group. In our current student cohorts, we also
have a very diverse group of students and it is important for us to create a safe environment for them to share their
experiences, which may be very different to others in their class. A diversity of voices, although more complex to
manage, will almost invariably result in more resilient outcomes.
The idea of working with lay designers or local expertise may seem obvious, but in practice it is not always so
straightforward. A few years ago, I was taking a Professor from one of the world’s top design schools through an ur-
ban farm we had been working with in Soweto. On viewing a few sparse vegetables, he asked me “… but, where is
the design?” I was not prepared for the question, for to me it was clear. But for someone looking for design in a tra-
ditional sense, there was no visual marvel, but rather actions that merged much more subtly with the environment.
In this particular case, it was a shallow hole, a few pieces of clear plastic, and come coir, all used to speed up seedling
germination, ease watering and reduce water evaporation in a highly innovative and sustainable seedling growing
system. Such an observation concurs with Paul Richards (1985) who acknowledged that many of the most success-
ful innovations in food-crop production in the 20th Century had indigenous roots.
As per this example, in many cases the design is already there, as designers our role is therefore to develop our
senses to carefully listen, and to look for it. Our design training can then be used to amplify local lay design endeav-
ours. One of the difficulties that designers have with such an approach to sustainable design, is that in many cases it
is not something that is going to win them any design award or stand out in their portfolio. Much of this work, for
it to be sustainable, is inherently about starting small.
SMALL & INCREMENTAL
In 2008, we travelled with our final year students to Groupo Desportiva de Manica in Mozambique. They are an
“integrated community [football] club that uses sport for social good”. One of the student teams focused on explor-
ing the use and impact of charcoal stoves - the standard means of cooking in the community. Building on our prior
positive experiences of working with local artisans, we easily found incredibly skilled local fugão or stove makers.
They were utilising old steel railway sleepers and their bolts to fabricate their products, whilst the local government
updated the provinces railway tracks to sit on concrete sleepers. The student team, partnered with Chris Bradnum
from our Department, who is an expert on fuel efficient stoves, and together with the local artisans, began a process
of refining their existing designs using basic emissions testing and temperature sensor equipment we had brought
with. The scientific equipment was valuable to measure improvements in efficiency for us, but for the local stove
makers, all they needed was to see a reduction in the time it took to boil a litre of water. With deforestation for
charcoal becoming a major problem in the region, this small design intervention could help marginally reduce the
need for charcoal. An additional benefit, with far greater impact, is that a more efficient stove can significantly re-
duce smoke and particulates, and hence create a much healthier cooking environment for those using it. Working
with the local fugão makers meant that when we departed our knowledge remained.
Many large-scale collaborative design projects, particularly those that need external funding, such as the Inter-
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design, are wasteful in their use of resources. Smaller, more targeted interventions require less and due to their focus
are generally more successful in arriving at appropriately sustainable outcomes. Nabeel Hamdi beautifully explores
Small Change (2004) through the example of the positive impact created by simply moving a bus stop to route
through a community as opposed to skirting it. The reason that small interventions can have much wider impact is
that they are embedded in wider human relations and technical systems.
SYSTEMS & NETWORKS
However, not understanding broader social, cultural, economic, political and environmental contexts can lead to
projects completely missing the mark. One of the other student groups we took to Manica worked directly with the
football players. They noted that the boots they used, which were designed for plush grass pitches, were complete-
ly impractical on African dirt. Partnering with local cobblers our students explored ways to re-sole the boots using
discarded car tyres. This seemed a fantastic solution, reusing waste to make much more durable football boots with
much improved grip. However, when they got to a final prototype, they could not get even one of the football play-
ers from Groupo Desportiva de Manica to test them on the pitch. What had gone wrong? Even though the students
had followed a participatory design method of developing the new soles with the football players, what had not
emerged in this process was the unseen power of social status and aspiration for these local sports stars. They would
rather have gone to the local market with the little money they had to buy new football boots than repair their shoes
in a way that only the poorest of the poor would do. The football players eventually told our students that if they
wore their resoled boots on the pitch, they would be laughed at by everyone. What we all thought was a wonderfully
sustainable and functional solution to the problem failed due to our lack of understanding of the broader social dy-
namics at play in the Manica community.
Another more successful example of how we used design as a means to facilitate broad systemic change is Iz-
indaba Zokudla, or Conversations About Food, a project I helped conceive in 2011. It is focused on exploring ways
to make the food system more sustainable in Johannesburg and began from a series of multi-stakeholder events
bringing together academia, not-for-profit organisations, enterprise, government, and urban farmers to discuss the
problematics of our city’s food system. One of the key activities of the project is the Izindaba Zokudla Farmers’
School, which is enthusiastically convened by Naudé Malan. It has run about once a month since 2015 and now
also functions as an Innovation Lab. With over 1000 attendees in total, and on average 150 people per session, it
allows for urban farmers, farming experts, food enterprises and innovators to converge at the University of Johan-
nesburg’s Soweto Campus. The power of the Farmers’ School is that it is a platform for networking a whole host of
stakeholders in the local food system. This benefits all those involved in terms of new connections, new and more
sustainable farming knowledge, shared opportunities for funding, and new technologies. It also benefits us as de-
signers in that disjunctions or contradictions in the food system become opportunities for design intervention.
Two such interventions were projects developed by final year Bachelor of Industrial Design students in part-
nership with local urban farmers. The farmers initially identified the need for something to keep their harvested
produce fresher for longer and something to more efficiently convert seed into seedlings. The outcomes were an
evaporative cooler and a self-watering seedling growing system. Both projects were funded by the National Research
Foundation, however neither of them made it to market. The main reason for this was that although our Universi-
ty’s Technology Transfer Office were interested in supporting the projects, neither of the students themselves were
prepared to take the projects further; and such projects cannot easily be handed over to someone else without a
personal investment in their success. This had the unfortunate result of the urban farmers, with whom we had de-
veloped such positive relationships, feeling as though they were used, since their time and effort did not lead to any
direct benefit on their part. This is the crux of many of our student projects, even with all the great ideas towards
designing a more sustainable tomorrow, many of them are unrealised. This happens in design schools the world over
and we do not want to continue this trend.
CONCEPTS & REALITY
After many years of iterations, I believe we are getting to a point where our design research is finally resulting in
appropriately sustainable outcomes. A recent example of this is the Beegin beehive. In 2015, Ivan Brown began de-
veloping prototypes for appropriate beekeeping technology for local urban farmers as a final year Bachelors in Indus-
trial Design project. Honey is a valuable resource, which can add diversity and resilience to the livelihoods of small-
scale farmers. Additionally, having hives on a farm improves productivity through the pollination of crops by bees
and this is a major consideration for the long-term sustainability of food production in the world.
Initial prototype beehive outcomes from Ivan’s project needed to be field-tested and further refined through
their use, towards wider implementation. In order to do this, the project was expanded into a Masters’ research proj-
ect by providing 5 small-scale farmers and 6 expert beekeepers with beehives to test over one season. The small-scale
farmers showed their interest in participating after a presentation by Ivan at one of the Izindaba Zokudla Farmers’
School sessions. As part of the project Ivan became a licensed beekeeper to assist the emerging beekeepers to manage
their hives and to share appropriate knowledge with them to continue their beekeeping activities after the project
finished. Theories of Appropriate Technology, the Capabilities Approach and Designing for Outcomes were used to
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create a theoretical framework which positioned the project philosophically and encouraged the delivery of tangible
benefits through the research. Following an iterative Human- and Bee-Centred Design approach, the appropriate-
ness of the beekeeping technology was evaluated, and the hives improved. The final outcomes of the project were
two lightweight concrete beehives and their moulding tools.
Beegin is now a registered company in South Africa with aesthetic and functional design registrations to pro-
tect the designer’s IP through a business model that focuses on selling the mould, and ultimately distributing the
means of production of the beehives. This allows for localized employment in what is a very widespread industry.
The moulds enable relatively unskilled individuals to produce hives easily, at low-cost, using a lightweight concrete.
This material improves both the safety and health of the bees, being fireproof and resistant to pests, but also increas-
es the hives productivity by almost 40% due to its insulation allowing the bees to focus on making honey, instead
of heating or cooling the hive. Nothing is perfect, and surprisingly Ivan has struggled with seed-funding to get his
business off the ground, eventually resorting to selling his car to pay for the first container-load of moulds. The
moulds themselves also had to be manufactured in China, since no local South African manufacturer had access
to the material thickness needed for their vacuum-forming. However, all participants in the project still use their
prototype hives, and the orders are rushing in for hives and moulds alike. This is a story of success both for Ivan as
a graduating student immediately becoming a business owner, for the small-scale farmers who have diversified into
beekeeping, for the beekeepers who praise the hives for increasing the bees’ productivity, and ultimately, for the bees
who seem far happier in their newly designed homes!
IN CONCLUSION
At the end of the day, this is how the Department of Industrial Design and my own ideas of sustainability have
evolved.
If I had to choose an overarching philosophy that drives our approach to sustainability in our Department, it
would be respect. Respect for the people you are designing for and with, acknowledging their knowledge, design
expertise, and systems they already have in place. Respect for resources including the environment, finances, and the
time and energy all participants have put into the process by making sure projects are taken to completion.
