So a story from a designer friend of mine, Dan Saffer, has me thinking. This article (nd this one via Changemakers) describes how Arunachalam Muruganantham is helping women get access to sanitary napkins, and how his extraordinary persistence and vision included truly getting to understand what a woman goes through with menstruation. (I’ll save the surprises for the reader). There’s also more about his idea on Changemakers. I also think of my own experiences, and in particular my enthusiastic brand devotion to the Diva Cup, a fantastic product with multiple benefits both personal (healthy for the woman wearing it, low cost as well) and political (healthy for the planet by cutting down on resource use). I love that social entrepreneurship is helping to facilitate product design and how we as a society create products and services. What I would love to see is the next step in the transition from good, better and best – good in this case being the current solution (rags or whatever resources are available) better being the next solution (access to napkins, ideally reusable – or perhaps access to tampons) – and best being the ultimate solution – that of a world where a woman has choice to what she wants, including the ultimate, best solution, that of a menstrual cup like the Diva Cup. As designers, though, this can raise just as many questions as answers. What does it take to get us to that Best Solution, aside from the personal factors involving stigma against tampon use? Where does the role of manufacturing play in helping to change product behaviour? If a Diva Cup became available, would women use it in India? What organizations would be available to help reduce the stigma of using it? If the costs of manufacturing Diva Cups are expensive, is there a way to reduce the costs by recycling silicon (IBM apparently thinks so).
The main, and epic question for me is this: Is there a way to connect the dots between inventor (Arunachalam), existing product creators (DivaCup), manufacturing resource (IBM/someone connecting the dots), and the actual resources (sillicon, ideally recycled) and distribution (i.e. Planned Parenthood or NGOs on the ground) for address the social issues of our time? Kickstarter is all about getting money to finance a project; what’s the equivalent for when there are pieces of a project, but no ‘glue’ to get the project started, or no way to connect the dots? That to me is the true design challenge – not only to design a solution to a problem, but to facilitate the infrastructure to implement the solution. I don’t know if that’s systems design, design thinking, or the crazy inventor’s spirit, but there’s got to be a way to connect all the dots. There has to be a way. There’s a site called Spark the Rise that’s working to give Arunachalam the resources he needs; let’s hope we can continue the next step and continue finding the dots to connect and get them what they need. These sites that are marshalling resources (human and other) are the next logical generation after the ‘Open Innovation’/crowdsourcing movement as found on sites like OpenIDEO, which focus on innovation and sharing of ideas around invention. The success of those resource sites are hopefully the next area of focus for social entrepreneurship – it will be fascinating to watch how this next chapter will evolve. The whole ‘taboo against sanitary products’ issue that comes up (i.e. tampons and menstrual cups and the perceived feasibility of such solutions) is enough to merit a separate post – but that’s a more complicated issue than trying to figure out how the supply chain of manufacturing can help solve the production of a basic human product need, and one far more depressing than I can talk about today. Suffice as to say, I hope someday to live in a world where the taboo against women’s bodies will not stand in the way of a woman’s human right to control her reproductive health.
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