Sean Yamana Goes to Ghana

Epilogue.

2009-08-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

Well, here I am again, from the exact same spot in JFK that that earlier (and unfortunately downbeat) post came from. Since last I posted, we finished up the prototype, had our final presentations, went to Maker Faire Africa, and dispersed. Luckily, I've got some time before my next flight.

The prototype is now a mean threshing machine (not lean, not green). The treadle was a popular addition, and I think the new wire loop configuration is more effective. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm not positive about what the prototype could optimally do, but right now, it kicks rice ass.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm actually having a hard time convincing myself that I contributed enough to the project. I kind of floundered on my pictograms after finding out how ineffective they were, and there wasn't time to do the sort of feedback-heavy design that I am now positive that such a project requires. I do think I'm much the wiser for the experience, and not just about rice. My own approach to design has changed considerably, and for the better. I now believe firmly in user-oriented design, so much so that even the term seems kind of redundant. That's the sort of thing that stays with you, whether or not your career future lies in the Ghanaian rice industry. (Ha.)

The presentations went well. I'm glad we had Haz speak on it. He was able to communicate his enthusiasm for the project really effectively, and I think Felicity's translations had that element of excitement, too. The village visitors were pretty excited by the semi-finished prototype, and we got a lot of encouragement. It was nice to see everyone, too - I'd made a lot of friends during the village visits, and got to take a lot of fun group pictures, everyone smiling with the satisfaction of a long labour completed. Lots of emails were exchanged, and I'm now starting to get the first of hopefully many Facebook connections.

Maker Faire Africa was a pretty happening place to be. IDDS was a pretty large fraction of the participants, but there were still some people there that I really enjoyed meeting. Pat Delaney with his multi-machine, the homebrew radio techs, some Peace Corps teachers, the Boy Who Tamed the Wind, and lots of simply amazing people that I was fiercely proud to be counted among. I especially enjoyed meeting the one village chief whose name I somehow did not write down, who is on the brink of changing rice cultivation forever with his approach to pregermination and low-cost planting equipment. I was also pleasantly surprised at how much I had to say about rice. It turned out that all the knowledge I'd gained during village visits, interviews, and research had somehow stuck, and I was having meaningful conversations with entrepreneurial types about winnowing, of all things. It's all in what you care about.

My Ghanaian experience ended eventfully. The night of the 16th, while everyone headed to a final farewell dinner from Maker Faire Africa, I took a detour back to the hostel with Amy to discuss an idea I'd had. Traffic was unexpectedly terrible, and I wasn't able to make it to the Indian restaurant to say my goodbyes, which was a bit painful. I got to see some of the others at the airport as they arrived with my bags and two containers of samosas, which was a welcome surprise. I thought I hated airports, but I'd never experienced anything like Kotoka. Hellish.

There's checkpoints and secret checkpoints and this high-pitched, non-stop whine. You check your bags by putting it onto a broken conveyor belt, around which are scattered other, less fortunate bags. Then it goes off to the back area, which is just visible enough for you to see the guys walking around in t-shirts. I had to bribe a guard with the money I'd been saving for my uncle's currency collection. I think the single funniest thing that happened was that I was made to put my samosas into the x-ray machine, and when they came out, there was one less container. There's real finesse displayed in some areas, signs that really high-ranked demons were involved in the airport's design. I liked the occasional completely empty line-ups next to your own incredibly congested line-up with no apparent criteria for entry except that it's not for you.
(Gosh, I sure do love to complain.)

However horrible my transit experience was, it was nothing to Jake's. I'm not really sure how much of this it is permissible for me to talk about, but basically Jake got massive and dramatic food poisoning about twenty minutes before boarding and spent the rest of the flight huddled on the floor, being harangued by helpful pharmacists with best intentions. Yikes. At least it wasn't malaria. I think probably the worst decision I have made in the recent past was attempting to cheer him up by tearing Hugh Jackman's face out of the in-flight magazine and making it into a mask. That was probably [definitely] not what he needed. Sorry Jake.

I got in touch with my wonderful family at some point. Unexpectedly, my sister and cousin showed up. Surprise! That was nice. We've been wandering around Europe for about a week, feeling out of place. I need to stop smiling at everyone.

I am, as I've mentioned, terrible at conclusions, but there's something to be said about how places start to feel like home. Windsor, Toronto, or Kumasi. There's elements in each of these places that are alienating, but also elements that are welcoming, familiar. Toronto is a much bigger city than where I grew up, but there's some swell people there that make me feel a little less like one out of four million. And even though I was quite visibly an outsider in Ghana, people welcomed me into their homes, sheltered me, worked with me. I'm sad that I couldn't say my goodbyes to my compatriots and friends, but I'm bad at those too, and my excuse is that I'll hopefully be seeing them again at some point.

The way I ended that last post was a little ridiculous. Sorry! I will conclude this one with a hazily remembered joke that my father loved, for some reason.

A farm family once received a visitor for dinner. The visitor was delighted to meet the family, but in particular was intrigued by the mystery of the pig they kept, with one wooden leg.
"What happened to the pig?"
"Well, one day, there was this great fire in the house! We'd have all died, but this pig here ran through the house squealing, woke us all up, and even carried our youngest out by his teeth. We owe him our lives!"
"Ah, and that's how he lost the leg?"
"Well, no, but a pig like that, you don't eat it all at once!"

Finishing up.

2009-08-08T15:42:00.001-07:00

This time, it doesn't just seem like a long time since I've updated.
Once in a while I walk into the internet café and find someone reading my blog (Hi, everyone.). It's a lot of pressure to have an audience! Knowing that people other than my friends and family (Hi, everyone.) are reading makes it seem like such a momentous task to write about weird stuff I ate the other day. I used to co-host a radio show that nobody listened to, which was fantastic. I'll just pretend that these pages are the air space of University of Windsor (Hi, everyone.) campus radio.

I'm pretty sure that the last time I wrote something here, we didn't have a machine. Well, now we do. It's a truly monstrous device, a giant tooth'd threshing cylinder nested within an oil drum and sitting on a steel frame. Threshing rice is kind of this absurd show of strength, it has occurred to me. During the design process, we were trying to minimize the footprint of the device, thinking of ways to keep it small and manageable, until Amy made us take a step back and look at this impulse. While there's merit in keeping things small and manageable, the desire to have everything fit into your pocket is kind of a Western invention. When presented with this gigantic device with teeth rotating at something like 200 RPM, designed to just thresh the hell out of rice, the comment we received the most was:
"Yes, but make it thresh the hell out of more rice."
Bigger is better when you have an actual ton of rice to thresh. One of those things that you'd never know until a farmer looks at your machine and tells you.
I had a lot of experiences like that in the last village visits, where I presented some of the silly drawings I've been working on. At some point during our interview with Mary Owusu Marfo, the entrepreneur behind the Ofram's Quality Rice brand, she identified education as a huge barrier to the rice initiative that the Ministry of Food and Agriculture have put forward. As a result, we thought it would be interesting to have a pictographic manual, designed for illiterate farmers, that could explain some of the tenets of rice farming in a simple and immediately comprehensible fashion. It's at least a little presumptuous, but I do think it's true that there's steps that could be taken to improve quality or yield that aren't prohibitively expensive or time-consuming. If higher-quality rice commanded a higher price, these practices could generate a fair amount of increased income.

I've assigned myself to this task, as it's pretty interesting to me. It makes me feel a little strange to be wrestling with Adobe Illustrator and not rusty bolts, but the prototype is in good hands, and I'd really like to see this thing happen. As for my lack of artistic experience, I figured it might actually be an asset. I considered myself a blank slate, tabula rasa, free from the North American visual language and ready to communicate with universal human metaphors. Yes, and this turned out to not be true.

It's fascinating just how [North] Americanized my eyes are! Communicating tangible things like a farmer beating rice with a stick is difficult enough, but once you get to abstract concepts like "good" or "bad", I'm lost at sea. Color-coding isn't universal, and neither are checks and exes. If you don't drive, you don't have to read signs. Even if you do drive, you don't necessarily have a driver's license. (The checkpoint outside of Adumkrom will turn a blind eye for a cedi, which is well within your means if you're an illegal chainsaw operator with three ancient trees on a flatbed.) It's clear that what I thought was universal is actually the product of a lifetime of subliminal visual stimulation. It's weird to find that out about yourself.

However I do it, I'm going to have to do it soon, because the summit is winding down. Prototypes are starting to come in from the various workshops around campus they've been assembled in, and teams are worrying about posters and presentations. It's great to see some of the prototypes come in. These things have all come together with such professionalism, and in such a short time period, that it's hard to believe that some of the teams didn't just go down to the In God We Trust Carousel-Powered LED Shop with a fistful of bills. I'm looking forward to the presentations.

I miss home, and I miss hot showers, but I'm also really going to miss everyone here. Part of having a group of people that comes from everywhere imaginable is that they go home to everywhere imaginable too. I've got some things I want to follow up on in Toronto, like getting the Community Bicycle Network to ship some bikes overseas, and possibly pushing for the creation of a development-focused course at my university, but I'm a lone Canadian, and in a lot of ways the hardest part of the summit is going to be returning and trying to keep the excitement and passion in design that I found here going on my own. I'm comforted by the fact that this is what I'm interested in, and this is what I want to do, and if everything goes right, I'll be seeing everyone again soon enough.

It's likely that I won't get too many opportunities to post in the next few weeks, so this might be the final IDDS entry (but I promise not to let that stop me from posting if I get the chance). Thanks for reading, all.
I plan to keep the blog going after I return, but in Toronto, school kind of dominates my time. It's my hope that my education and my interests are going to start becoming the same thing, though, and I just might have things to say. In Ghana, as in Canada, I remain

Very earnestly,
Sean Yamana-Hayes

Sickness.

2009-07-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

The summit is such an intellectually engaging atmosphere that sometimes we forget about the sacks of meat that we live in. I know there's something unpleasant happening in my body, but I can't complain, especially because two participants are hospitalized with malaria, and one of them is my roommate. Joseph hasn't had much luck here, first with the foot injury and now with the malaria. This morning, I found him wearing a couple of sweatshirts and wrapped in his sheet, and it was pretty much all I could do to tell Kofi about it and hope for the best. I've also been feeling a little off, but I think it's just dehydration. Processed water is widely and cheaply available in little plastic sachets, but this is kind of a hassle, and my suite's been out of water for a couple of days. This sounds a little bit more horrible when I actually write it down. It's a good thing these oral rehydration salts taste so great.

At Haz's encouragement I spent most of the day lying in bed, trying to figure out whether my various temperature fluctuations were due to breezes or protozoan parasites. I don't think I have malaria, and I think I'd know, but I'm taking a lot of precautions now that I know there's infected mosquitoes flying around. I've also saved copies of the Wikipedia entry on malaria to my desktop, and have learned all kinds of neat things about the plucky parasite. Did you know that early doctors used to treat syphilis with malaria? It's a pretty sure method of inducing a fever, and the mortality rate is lower. This is kind of clever (also horrifying).

In a more positive light, tonight was the annual IDDS potluck! The Indians had a washing basin full of spices at some point, Ireland brought some Guinness, and the British ran around sticking little flags into everyone else's food. I allied myself with Greece (Delia), and I was pretty pleased with how the yam-leaf dolmades turned out. David Branigan (of Bikes Not Bombs) was talking to Not and Woon about some of the trials and tribulations of Ability Bikes, the local bike shop operated by physically-challenged mechanics and administrators that he'd been working with. I was struck by the importance of accounting practices in the successful building of an enterprise. Accounting was kind of the course in high school that I scoffed at, seeing it as just really basic applied math, but I don't actually know how to track income and expense, and I am still not totally sure what the difference between 'net' and 'gross' is. I think I might try to pick up some basic level of accounting literacy over the course of the summer.

I noticed this with Paul Polak, too. During his consultation with our group, he took the crucial step of actually writing some numbers on a piece of paper, based on our hazy understanding of market prices and farmer income, and it was immediately obvious to him (and us) that without a clear price differentiation between stoned and de-stoned rice, a device to remove stones would be merely a tool for convenience, without the capability of generating additional income. This led us to the conclusion that without a place in the market for high quality local rice, a destoner would be tantamount to worthless.

I'm still wide awake, so I think this might be a good time to talk about DR-100 again. I'm pretty frustrated with the way it's been going, so far. All kinds of people are extremely enthusiastic about the initiative, and I seem to have assumed some kind of leadership role. But I get the sense that my efforts are a little misguided. I talked to Paul Hudnut and Amy about DR-100, and while they were supportive, I got the sense that the movement is in its infancy. Nobody's really in charge, and all of the people who have been identified as leaders of the movement are busy teaching their own courses or running their own summits or doing whatever it is that has marked them as forerunners of international development.

What's happening here is apparently a common theme; people are very interested, but they don't have the capacity to do something with their enthusiasm. There are people that approach me to talk about the movement in general, but I get the sense that there are other people who very much want to set up something in their own university, who want concrete support in terms of funding and curriculum. And those resources just don't exist right now. My crude little signup sheet on the fourth floor is already full of names and emails of people ready to go on DR-100, but I'm not really sure what to do with this information anymore. I'm not even sure what I intended to do with the information. The original form for participant information that I tried circulating had these huge essay-format questions about ideas and visions and questions, and I don't know who that was intended for. A lot of people have talked to me about having another public meeting with Paul Hudnut about it, but I'm not really sure what he could tell us. My enthusiasm is waning on this one.

I don't feel sleepy, but I should probably make an effort.

Now I lay me down to sleep
Mosquitoes, sneaky, seek a treat
Cover myself with clouds of DEET
And wear long johns, despite the heat

Day off.

2009-07-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

After a week of Fridays we're finally at the end, and everyone's off doing fun things. The organizers, for whom I feel this weird cocktail of admiration and pity, are getting a chance to recover from sleep deprivation or the aforementioned Martian Death Cold. I think I'm writing in this new, impersonal fashion out of sympathy for Niall and Jessica, who do the PR work for IDDS. On Friday, when we went to Suame Magazine for our design reviews, they were falling asleep mid-conversation, so I think writing about the summit must be hard work. Check out the official blog of IDDS at iddsummit.blogspot.com and admire the prose and the photos.

There were a bunch of things going on today. Last night, Sule cobbled together a group of people who wanted to head out to Cape Coast, right up against the southern border and the ocean. Very tempting - last weekend, we hit the northern border, and it would have been some serious Ghana-cred to have gone border-to-border. I elected to instead use the day to walk around campus and the surrounding area (and also to sleep in crazy late). This is probably a good time to depart from narrative blogging.

STREET FOOD I HAVE EATEN IN GHANA

grilled plantain - I like plantains a lot, which is fortunate, because they appear in a lot of meals. Fried plantains are unambiguously delicious and boiled plantains are unassumingly comforting, but grilled plantain has the awesome fruity flavour with the satisfying fluffy texture, and plus people will gladly wrap it in pages from some kind of home economics textbook for your convenience.
grilled corn - This has been kind of a disappointment for me so far. Corn doesn't deal with dehydration very well, I think. Taking the water out of corn removes the flavour and the texture and all you really get out of it is the ability to pluck the kernels off and attempt to catch them in your mouth.
not-grilled corn - This makes so much more sense.
pancakes - Breakfast, for the next three weeks. There's this place on campus that sells these amazing nutmeggy greasy pancakes for something like a quarter. I think this exceeds even the goes-without-saying exciting cheapness of developing countries; I could get ten of these for the price of a meal at the cafeteria, and I think I will, too.
groundnuts - Peanuts make way more sense when they still have their skin on. They're also not salted here, whether you get them roasted, boiled, or raw.
frufru - This only kind of counts, but frufru is this weird concoction of spices into the most potent drink ever. I don't know what sasparilla tastes like, but Geoff does, and he tells me it's similar. Visually, I like it a lot; it comes tied in a plastic bag like an unlucky goldfish, and once you shake it, it turns this smoky shade of pink. I don't know that I would drink this for anything other than novelty (certainly not thirst) but it's probably really good for you, or something.
mango - The fruit whose dissemination strategy is to be as delicious as possible. These aren't really exotic, but delicious and available enough to mention.
shea fruit - This is pretty amazing. It's kind of like a sweet avocado. The shea trees are all up north, in vast fields, and apparently it's a thing where if you drive past and see some kids, it's kosher to just ask them to pick you some. Actually, I don't know if this is kosher. Worked for Sule's friend, though.
bananas - I'd previously been only a fan of the slightly-unripe ones, but I'm coming around.
waakye - I actually don't really remember what exactly this was called, but it was pretty close. This is kind of just an amalgamation of a bunch of local dishes like cassava, rice and beans, or palava, but they pack it into a plastic bag, so it's pretty definitively street food. Depending on what you get, it can be more or less delicious. As an aside, Ghanaian local rice is definitely more delicious - there's some truth to this jingle we found, developed by some Canadian EWB kids (!).

Apparently there's some new food critic on the scene who is also twelve years old or something. I admit it is difficult for me to discuss food at length, because my feelings are usually pretty uniformly positive. This kid is going to have a kind of weird adolescence.

Anyways, I wandered around eating for a while and exploring Tek Junction, the nearby market. It's very different walking around by yourself. I think I like it a little bit more. There's a sense of vulnerability, kinda. You're floating around, visually identifiable as an outsider, and you don't speak the language. But you always have to put yourself out there a little bit to experience anything exciting. And people stare at you less when it's just you, which makes me feel like I belong a little bit more.

On the way back I bumped into Amy and the gang, who were going back to the Stone Foundry in Suame Magazine. I'd been to the foundry before, for our Build-Its (the technology-based design workshops we had in the first week), but the Zambian contingent didn't make it in time. They were doing lost-styrofoam casting, which is kind of like lost-wax casting. In fact, it's only different from lost-wax casting in one aspect. We got a little lost on the way there, but Stone rolled up on his motorcycle to lead the way. (His name is probably not actually Stone.) He let me ride on the back, which I was unabashedly excited about. Also, his spedometer was doing that thing where it just whips around clockwise and makes you feel like you're in a cartoon police chase.

Casting was pretty cool, as usual. I enjoy the sand method for a couple of reasons: the meticulous aspect of the pounding (to compress the sand), the kind of fabrication considerations that remind me of the gigantic CNC machine I worked with last summer, and maybe just the amazement at how low-tech the foundry is. The electricity wasn't going too well, though, which prevented us from using the fan for the furnace, so we left the molds in Stone's able hands and went back to the hostel, just in time to be way too early for the tailor that someone wise organized to come around and take measurements and make some sweet threads for people.

The rest of the day for me was spent mostly lounging, with a brief meta-break to play some cricket. I still don't know the rules, but Sumit gave me a high-five, so I think I'm probably awesome.

Zzz.

2009-07-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hey all.
I've been feeling a little sick for a while, which is no fun. A nasty cold is making its way through IDDS. At least it's not malaria, probably. I thought I'd capitalize on my insomnia by talking about the team's latest village visit and our current plans.

Over the weekend the rice de-stoning team and Sule, one of the organizers, headed up north to check out the rice production up there. Our previous visits to Adumkrom, Kyekyewere and Mangwasi were helpful for getting a feel for local manufacturing capabilities and economics, but not too many people were actually farming or eating rice. Sule, however, comes from the Northern Region, and knew about some of the rice production or processing that goes on up there, so for us the choice of where to go for our second village visit was a no-brainer. We piled into the van for a ten-hour drive.

The drive itself was actually pretty fascinating. I kept on drifting in and out of sleep, but every time I woke up the landscape was slightly different. Vegetation got less dense, and forests turned to plains. The architecture changed from earthy red houses of wood and mud-brick to the muted brown walls of hut compounds. By the time we reached Bolga, I felt as though we were in a different country. We arrived pretty late, found a guest house, and turned in. In retrospect, I slept an impressive amount that day.

The weekend was impressively productive. Sule set up a lot of really great meetings with people at all kinds of levels of the rice industry. We talked to:
-managers and farmers from ICOUR, the government-operated rice syndicate with 3000 farmers, 3000 hectares, 8 silos and the mother of all rice mills
-staff at the Single Mothers' Association rice processing facility, which is a neat little operation that got started by Oxfam and has found a nice little niche in the market selling quality local rice
-the entrepreneur behind the Improved Quality Ghana Rice brand

I won't go into the specifics, but the trip was pretty great for getting a more concrete understanding of the rice industry. It's changed our design a lot. We're now looking at a recommendation or proposal for optimal procedures for quality rice, as well as a combination thresher/winnower which should be able to prevent the introduction of stones in the threshing process.

(We also did some slightly touristy things like sit on crocodiles and walk along the no-man's-land between Ghana and Burkina Faso. There's a couple new photos.)

(Also, Nathan's flickr photostream is pretty great.)

I admit I'm a little skeptical about the direction we've taken. It seems like a kind of circuitous method of dealing with the basic problem of local rice quality. And it's not really technology-driven; the prototype is going to be kind of novel in that it's going to combine two processes, but pedal-powered threshers and winnowers are out there, and the fact that they haven't been implemented already makes me wonder about what our advantage is, precisely.

However! We're in a pretty good position to implement whatever we come up with, novel or no. We've sat down with a lot of people who are excited about the possibility of revamping local rice production, and the good thing about having a project that isn't really transformative so much as just a good idea is that it doesn't, uh, require transformation. So there's potential.

It's good to have an idea of what we're working on, though. I'm definitely more comfortable with this part of the design process. Gathering information and setting the context is all-important, but it's hard to not feel overspeculative.

I have a hard time with conclusions.

Cheating!

2009-07-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Hello!
It's been a little while since I had a chance to post here. I do a decent job of writing and saving journal entries for when I get a chance to use the internet café, though, so I've posted two that I'd saved, and dated them back. This will probably happen a lot.
The other thing is that I just bought access to one of the private wireless providers for a couple of cedis. This is marginally faster than the café and a lot more convenient, so bloggage might increase!

There's also a possibility of uploading some pictures. I've taken some, but Nathan, who's in the project, is a very visual person (with a huge camera), and his pictures are pretty great. There's a handful that I think are particularly excellent, but I think it would be best to ask him before I start rampantly uploading them to Flickr. I'll be doing a few of mine later, though, so here you go.

So the latest incredibly exciting thing that has happened in my life is that I have met Paul Polak, who was introduced as the godfather of IDDS. He's one of the founders of the revolution in design to incorporate appropriate technology and co-creation, and I recommend his book Out of Poverty immensely (I read my free copy in about two nights).

Paul has a lot of really insightful approaches to development that basically all stem from his radical method of designing for the poor, which is to go and talk to poor people. Definitely having gone to Adumkrom for a few nights, I agree that it's mildly ridiculous to expect design to work without understanding its context. You wouldn't design a submarine without water.

He also has some serious business chops. Which is not to say that he's out to make money. On the contrary, Paul treats the creation of a plausible business model as something like 75% of the design process. It makes a lot of sense to me. The only way you're going to set up a sustainable enterprise is by tying the success of the project to its profitability. Otherwise it'll just die when the funding stops.

This is a pretty drastic oversimplification of the kind of stuff Paul has to say about development (blame it on my schedule, but it's mostly just that this is pretty new to me) and I totally recommend reading things he's written. I plan to, just as soon as I can find some internet that isn't totally ridiculous.

One thing that I for sure want to talk about here is this initiative Paul's new organization D-Rev (design revolution!) is putting forward called DR100. My understanding of it is a little hazy, and I'm planning to speak to him about it at length, but I think he's interested in setting up courses on development in at least 100 institutions around the world, preferably with at least half of them in the developing world. I am very, very excited about this initiative. For a long time, I've been lamenting that my university doesn't really have a course like MIT's D-Lab (taught by IDDS leader Amy Smith), and having an institution like D-Rev providing some kind of framework pushes this into the realm of actual feasibility. I don't know where the program is at the moment, and it might be too early to start hassling administrators about it, but I know that Engineers Without Borders has an entire committee devoted to curriculum enhancement. I also know that Mike Klassen basically made himself a degree a couple of years ago. This is definitely something I'll be following up when I get back.

One of the things that's kind of confusing me, though, is that I'm starting to develop a distaste for the treatment of development as a separate field of study. I think Paul's genius is that he really doesn't give a damn whether someone's poor or not. He doesn't pity poor people. And the fact that he's divorced himself from the kind of sentimental top-down approach to development means that he can apply design strategies and business models to development projects with the same efficacy as a corporation might in the States. So I'm no longer really sure whether there's such thing as development business. I think it might just be business. And I'm no longer sure whether there's such thing as development design. I think it might just be design. I'm definitely a staunch believer in D-Lab and I think it's produced amazing technology, but I don't think that's because Amy Smith has been to Africa a lot. I think it's because Amy Smith is a top-notch designer and teacher.

So while I don't think that you necessarily need D-Lab to do international development, I definitely believe that a course like D-Lab would be tremendously useful to anyone interested in design (business students, engineers, commerce students, and everyone else). I also believe that the University of Toronto currently has professors with the knowledge to teach a course like D-Lab, although they might not know it yet. I definitely plan on bringing DR100 to the attention of the university, and I hope someday U of T will be a big part of the revolution in design.

It should tell you something about how busy and eventful my life is now that I pretty much neglected to mention that a couple of days ago Joseph hurt his foot pretty bad playing soccer, and I got to build him a crutch out of PVC, toilet paper and bandaids. IDDS victory!

Back from Adumkrom.

2009-07-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

Only time for a short update before I go to bed, but really this deserves longer. Our team just got back from Adumkrom, which is a pretty small village not too far from KNUST campus. No electricity or water. Friendly kids, shy kids, kids who shout your name and giggle when you stutter out some Twi, kids who wander into the chief’s meetings and get offered some ceremonial schnapps. At some point I’ll have a chance to upload some pictures.
The trip opened my eyes to a lot of things - it now becomes glaringly obvious why kids would find a latrine scary, for example. One thing that sticks out is how important food is. Supriyo said it best when he remarked that people spend a long time cooking. A really, really long time cooking. Fufu, for example, is a staple dish made from cassava dough, but if you actually see it being made it’s an extremely lengthy and difficult process. From the farm, it’s uprooted and chopped, whereupon the leafy stalk is replanted. Then it needs to be peeled, then grated, then kneaded by two women working a huge mortar and pestle. Then it’s cooked, and since it’s pretty much all starch, a sauce or soup is added.
The point is that this is neither easy nor short. It looked like basically the whole day for a lot of people was either farming or cooking. The women, in particular, start cooking lunch after breakfast and dinner after lunch. Then there’s no light, so everyone goes to sleep.
I have a newfound appreciation for the simple devices proposed as design challenges like cassava graters or hydroelectric portable lights. People are poor because they don’t have enough money, and definitely for these guys it doesn’t seem like there’s any time or opportunity to make more money. From what I understood of a lot of conversations we had, people are just about breaking even (the aptly-named Patience buys eggs at about 20 cents, sells about 15 of them nightly fried for 25 cents, and has to light her stall with a kerosene lantern). Then maybe one week you get sick from drinking from the marsh-like well, and you’re in the hole. Devices to reduce the labor or time required to farm or cook, or even to extend the working hours of the day, have the potential to open up new avenues of wealth generation for poor people.
I’m now very excited about the rice destoning challenge, because it looks like it’s also got potential for a huge impact through an elegant solution. Not too many people in our village farmed rice, and while I initially thought this was just our bad luck, I now firmly believe that it’s because it’s next to impossible to turn a profit farming rice. Even if you can handle waking up at 4 every day of the week to chase away the birds, even if you can deal with the incredibly tedious harvesting process, you still can’t compete with the rice imported from Thailand or Vietnam, sold at slightly higher prices, but thoroughly cleaned and destoned. If we can come up with something that can remove the stones from their rice, preferably either before or during the milling process, we can not only reduce the labor, but also remove this obstacle keeping farmers off the market, and allow both the farmers and consumers to reap the benefits.
I’ve got to get to sleep, as I’m pretty excited to see Paul Polak speak tomorrow. I’m a few chapters into his book, and it’s already both resonating with and informing me. One of the ideas the book discussed was treating the poor as not passive recipients but customers, which is just about the best design tip for international development I think I’ve ever heard. Once you start with this mentality the kinds of questions like “can they afford it?” or “how much more efficient must it be?” go from abstract concerns about the practical extent of your charity to very real and very intuitive questions about the actual economic effect and benefit a piece of technology will have on a poor person. A device that costs ten dollars and increases the farmer’s income by three hundred a year makes sense; a device that costs five hundred to increase the farmer’s income by two thousand does not.
Sleep, though, seriously. Goodnight.

Rice destoning!

2009-07-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

We got our design challenges yesterday! Go team!
It’s pretty dope. Picking the projects I was most interested in was difficult, because I had a high level of enthusiasm for all of them. I’ll post the list later, perhaps, but some of the challenges I thought were particularly dope were: a method of cheaply electrolyzing brine for the production of chlorine (for sanitation), a portable light that can be charged via hydroelectricity, and (enticingly, frighteningly vague) a method of energy storage, which as I recall was this year’s Yunus challenge, as well as the topic of my Praxis III project last year (Praxis being EngSci’s design course).
I was pretty excited about doing some kind of energy-related technology. I’m going to be in the Energy Systems option of the Engineering Science program next year, and so I think an introduction to rural energy would have been pretty much perfect to start me off. Additionally, it would give me the chance to follow up on the project in school. It’s only recently that it has been brought to my attention that my interests and my education do not necessarily need to be distinct parts of my life, and this is very exciting for my future in general.
There was a pretty high level of interest in the energy-based projects, though, so I ended up getting one of my several second choices. Amy Smith let me pick, so I went with rice-destoning, which I think has room for elegance.
Apparently something keeping the rice farmers poor is that they can’t compete with imported rice because something about the process of preparing rice introduces stones to the rice, which are then a big hassle to remove. This prevents the farmers from getting into the market.
It’s a cool project, for sure. Rice is as ubiquitous as it gets, and it’ll be fun to try and get a sense of the whole process when we do our village visits this weekend.

Success!

2009-07-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

Did you know that July 9 and July 6 are only three days apart? It's true!
However I have so far had about a summer's worth of awe summation. The days have been pretty dense and I have not had much time for introspection, so perhaps this post will be more event-based than the previous few.
I pretty much got onto the airplane, fell asleep for ever and ever, and woke up pretty shortly before landing. I got to look out the window as we came down, which is an integral part of any trip for me. Remember how I felt all scared about being some aloof tourist and not really experiencing Ghana fully? Those feelings evaporated at about the same time as the people out the plane window stopped looking like ants. I feel like I overthought things a little bit, even though I remember very deliberately trying not to think about it at all. If I may slip, once again, into Sean Yamana's Introspective Philosophy Hour again, I think probably I should have been trying to not worry about it at all instead of not think about it at all. Because not thinking about it at all is sort of like developing a mental block where every time you start to speculate you freeze up and say "No thinking!"
It's also possible that Ghana is an easy country to stop being scared of. Everyone's really friendly, and English is spoken pretty widely. It also probably helps that I am overcompensating for being normally shy. I am probably bordering on the obnoxiously friendly, but that's okay.
IDDS is also an easy event to not be scared of! Actually, as I was waiting around in the airport for my bag to show up, I bumped into Sam, who's this amazing guy from New York who builds extremely cheap hydroelectric turbines out of low-cost materials. He asked me what my personal area of expertise was and I was a little dumbfounded. Expertise?
I'm also rooming with a guy from Tanzania named Joseph, who turns out to manufacture low-cost wheelchairs out of bicycle parts. I pretty much have to go right now, but the table talk here is pretty high-calibre, and I'm getting at least as much value out of meeting people as designing.
I'm off to the conference room for some type of lunch activity, but I will be sure to fill you in on things beyond the first three hours of my arrival at some point.
Hurrah!

A short post from JFK.

2009-07-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

My trip has so far gone wrong at every opportunity. Subway delayed due to medical emergency, reservation not recognized by airport kiosk, and now apparently the plane has a fuel leak. This last I am pretty happy about waiting for. At least there seems to be free internet.

In my haste I forgot to bring a roll of toilet paper along, which was something that came up in all the advice I’d received from people who’d already been to Africa. I was able to lift a roll from a bathroom, but it pokes out every time I open my bag and makes me feel a little silly.

There’s a lot of people milling around at the gate. Regulations dictate that we all have our travel documents checked before boarding, and the staff are constantly needing to announce this to passengers just arriving. There’s a bustle.

I wonder if any one of the people streaming around me is going to IDDS. It seems likely; I think about 66 people are going, of which at least an appreciable fraction must be going through New York, and this is the only flight out today, I think. But I’m not about to wander through the gate with a goofy sign. Too tourist.

I guess this is symptomatic of my feelings of alienation from the summit. I’m not sure why I was invited, pretty sure of why I was initially rejected, and not confident in my ability to contribute to the summit meaningfully. For sure, these feelings are natural, but I need to deal with them while I’m there.

I feel a little better when I think of the invitation as a sort of investment, and not just a kindness. It’s fair to say that I don’t have a lot to contribute. But once all the highly experienced industry leaders retire to Florida, we will be in a bind. I recognize my inexperience, and I’m desperate to correct this. I think it might be more about what the summit does to me. Amy Smith knows what she’s doing, in terms of both world-saving and mind-blowing.

Yikes.

2009-04-27T06:08:00.001-07:00

So I've been pretty horrible about communicating in the past two weeks. This is always a pretty emotional time of year for me. ("I don't even want to be an aerospace engineer! Boohoohoohoo!")

Anyways, the worst is over, and it's about time I returned some emails and updated this thing. Since the last time I posted here, Professor Murray Metcalfe, who gave the International Development lecture to our Praxis IV class, sent out a few emails on my behalf. I had approached him after his lecture to let him know I was going, because it seemed to be up his alley, and we got around to talking about the possibility of some department sponsoring me to go. One of his emails went to Lisa Romkey, the course coordinator for Praxis IV (and someone I really should have been talking to more about IDDS). She was pretty excited about me going, and said there was a possibility of getting the Division of Engineering Science to make some kind of contribution.

That's about where it ended, which is pretty terrible, but I figure the Division of Engineering Science will be more excited about sponsoring me if I am in fact still an Engineering Science student. I just fired off an email to her explaining what IDDS was in slightly greater detail.

This was actually kind of a tricky question. In one sentence, I boiled it down to "a month-long collaboration between students and professionals from around the world focused on solving common problems in developing countries through the creative use of appropriate technology", which is a little wordy but mostly accurate, I think.

I've been keeping busy with finding tickets and shots and visas, oh my. Hey, who wants to hear about how I got involved with IDDS?

It was actually mostly an accident. Last summer, my sister's boyfriend hooked me up with an internship at Formulatrix, a protein crystallization automation firm in Cambridge. I was staying at an MIT frat-turned-co-op called Pika. Pika is a super place - I was sleeping in a treehouse and biking to work and eating right, and I met some of the most amazing and dynamic people ever.

Yes. Well, anyways, some of these amazing people were attending IDDS, which used to be held at MIT, and some of them (like Laura, the superhuman girl in the photo) were organizers for the summit. I tagged along to a couple of events, got my mind suitably blown by speakers like Amy Smith and Anil Gupta of the Honey Bee Network, and got to see some of the results, like the bicycle-powered pearl millet thresher. It was a pretty inspiring event. I'd been feeling kind of down about my education - it was starting to seem like I was going to be in an academic setting for the rest of my life, too tangled up in technology to Make a Difference. IDDS showed me how technology and design could be used to solve some ridiculously common problems faced by people around the world. Some of these problems are offensively simple but also devastatingly harmful. Amy Smith's TED talk touched on one of them - fumes from indoor cooking fumes, which apparently kills 2 million children a year. That's ridiculous. Watch that video.

Well, when Laura invited me to apply this year, I was pretty excited about it. The only problem was that I wasn't sure what I had to offer the summit. I didn't have any real work experience beyond, you know, protein crystallography automation, and I certainly didn't have any experience in international development. What I thought my strengths were, and indicated on my application, was that I had worked on a proposal for a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine as a renewable energy source for developing countries for Praxis III, and would be interested in bring the work I did at the summit back to U of T to get some support from the university community in its further implementation. I'm not sure which of these things the organizers were excited about, but it just goes to show how powerful it is to be a student at U of T. With such a massive and supportive student community, there's enormous potential for collaboration. Let this be a lesson to Praxis haters.

I'm going to go do some bike maintenance now, but I'll try to keep the updates coming.

Hello!

2009-04-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

I'm Sean Yamana, a 2nd year Engineering Science student at the University of Toronto.

This summer, I'm going to be in Ghana for the 3rd annual International Development Design Summit.

I started a blog because I'm a little overwhelmed by all the new information and perspectives coming my way, and I think it'll be good for me to write them all down.

Also, I hope I'm not the last Toronto student to attend this summit. I'm not actually sure if I'm the first. But documentation is always helpful. I know I've benefitted from blogs like these from other people doing work in international development, and it's my hope that someone else will get something out of my experiences. Definitely I'm going to be starting from a pretty low level of preparedness, so it'll be a good place to start.

There's a lot of things going on with my preparation right now, but there's also a lot of things going on with exams, so I'm going to end on that note and fill in some of the details later.