In my talk last week at Aalto I discussed the concept of ecosystems, of which the BoPNet is an emerging one, and described how we often have to make choices of which ecosystem we belong to: Win or Mac, Android or Symbian, Western tech or now Eastern tech. The BoPNet is itself an emerging system on mini-ecosystems, each devised around the local needs, capabilities and tools available. Where we used to make choices about ideologies, religions or other social systems, increasingly we have to choose around technical platforms that will shape our social behaviors.

Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College located in Tilonia, Rajasthan is the unique starting point for a story of resourcefulness and innovation under the most adverse conditions. The liminal space where high technology meets utter poverty can arguably be one of the most creative environments churning up such inventions as an amphibious bicycle in remote Bihar, car battery cellphone charging systems or even bamboo poles converted into antennas in an African village with no running water or electricity.

Originally supposed to be a one hour documentary on the barefoot solar engineers of Tilonia, illiterate women not only from the neighbouring villages of the desert state of Rajasthan in India, but now coming on scholarships from as far away as Mali, Uganda and Ethiopia, to learn how to build and maintain solar powered cookers and generators, the concept currently under discussion seeks to expand the sharing of the knowledge gained across geographical, cultural and language barriers.

ShareIdeas.org is a recently launched initiative by Vodafone and Nokia – an open source community based social media platform intended to support and propagate the sharing of information between NGO’s and other aid workers across the world on how mobiles can be used to improve the social and economic development of those at the bottom of the pyramid. This is currently in the wiki format and in English and only for mobile handset applications. It’s reach is limited to the literate and the internetworked.

Six months ago, at the Confederation of Indian Industry/NID Design Summit in New Delhi, I spoke on theresourceful inventions and innovations that those who lived amongst conditions of extreme scarcity created as solutions to their daily needs. To quote:

What I propose is that take Prof Anil Gupta’s work at the National Innovation Foundation, where teams of field workers keep their eye open for inventions in their travels through rural India and expand this into a global network. Numerous ingenious solutions have emerged, and as they have been developed under the most adverse conditions, are as ecologically sound as possible in terms of materials, recycling, energy etc consumed. […]

This “mash up” as they say, where information meets technology meets rural innovation can arguably provide a solution to not only India’s most pressing needs but also to more pressing problems facing all of us in the world today. A two way exchange of information that empowers, permits cocreation and connectivity, communication and commerce, will ensure that the next inventor in remote Bihar who develops an amphibious bicycle would not need to travel cross country to be noticed, funded, or noticed globally. India herself would have put him on the world map.

Solutions, business models, products and services that use the minimum of scarce resources, recycle or reuse materials, leave a minimal footprint on the environment and are sustainable have been extensively documented amongst the poor. But to our educated eyes they seem crude and primitive. So they are very often overlooked or ignored. Only the latest technology can provide us with solutions for the future, we seem to say.

What can we learn from these inventions and innovations as we look towards creating a sustainable ecofriendly lifestyle?  The technically proficient, the engineering experts, the world class designers are all who practice in conditions of abundance. They create with no shortage of materials, funds, resources, fuel or energy. As the Earth’s climate changes, and the environment suffers, our material and fuel resources become increasingly scarce, we must all seek new ways to making, doing and building.

The idea is to create a multiplatform delivery mechanism for this vital information, building on the Share Ideas concept mentioned above – first to discover and record such learnings from sustainable agriculture practices, renewable energy sources, innovative use of recycled materials, and other devices that improve the quality of life at the bottom of the pyramid. Then to share this information in an open source manner, disseminated with clarity across language and literacy barriers – do we use videos? Pictograms? Simple text? Multiple languages? And to share it on appropriate delivery mechanisms to reach those who need it the most – do they have broadband access? Or just cellphones? Is WAP the best way or is sms? All of these questions and more need to be answered as well. The infohub would form the seed of a global documentary series as well. We hope to cover Brazil, parts of Africa and India if not more locations.

Written in Singapore on 5th July 2007 as background for a conversation with the BBC.

In light of the recent upsurge in discussion around "good" over "great," I thought it would be useful to repost an entry from August 2008—almost 18 months ago—I wrote over at Changeism on the topic of Just Good Enough. The JGE phenomenon was taking shape even then, though the economic crash that manifested months later hadn't truly taken hold. We had been observing subtle signs of it for some time in both observational research, interviews going back as far as 2006-2007 with consumers, particularly at the low end of the economic spectrum, and of course via the constant horizon scanning we do as our foundational research. We took it on the road and raised it in workshops and briefings, though it was a hard time to get companies to let go of the "dominant logic" of Popu-luxe, and therefore be first-movers in delivering on this emerging need.

For better or worse, this idea is now making its way up to the stage as an major force in consumer lifestyle choices in the developed world. It has, of course, been a core factor in the lives of those in the developing world for decades—sufficiency versus luxury, getting by instead of getting ahead. It's a theme we continue to explore here from both sides.

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In the past year or so, we at Changeist have been talking about the concept of Just Good Enough, or what we call JGE for short. Thinking about JGE stemmed initially from study of how technologies are being developed or modified within the developing world for use there. Where resources such as energy, money or space are constrained, the lowest appropriate level of complexity, cost, functionality, or what have you, is what's needed. Anything else is a luxury--and expendable.

So, for example, why build a $20,000 luxury sedan when all the market needs is something slightly better and safer than a tuk-tuk? Hence, Tata has given us the Nano--the one lakh (100,000 rupees or about $2,500) vehicle that is suited to the needs of a growing sector of Indian society, somewhere below the middle of the pyramid, who need basic transportation that goes from point A to point B, at a minimal cost and with some basic trappings of safety. Pragmatism trumps the need for status in this sort of environment, the polar opposite of much of the developed world, particularly the US.

Or, when you have a house that is 75 square meters, share it with several generations of family, and don't have much privacy, why spend a huge portion of your salary for a desktop PC when your mobile phone does just what you need it to, well enough? If it carries an address book, has adequate basic Internet access for lo-fi text browsing, and allows you to stay in contact with friends and loved ones, then it IS a PC.

Only now, in the face of peaking technological and system complexity as well as against the backdrop of an entrenched economic downturn, is the idea of JGE catching in North America above the level of lower-middle class households. When disposable incomes are high, consumers are drawn to shiny premium features, always looking for a way to trade up to a higher level of product or service to show status. For the last 40 years, Americans bought because they could, even acknowledging economic trade-offs were being made by saving here for a premium service there, or Trading Up as Boston Consulting Group calls it.

Now, in the cold light of economic contraction, attention has turned to JGE: living with just enough money to get by, buying only what you need to be moderately happy or simply get through to the next paycheck. Buying vehicles in terms of tonnage has been replaced by buying ones that can do the basic job with a minimum of necessary styling. Basic coffee in a cup has moved into the space where exotic beans from obscure rift valleys used to sit. Inexpensive, low-end laptops look attractive alongside high-cost, bulky widescreen models. Consumers aren't going out buying expensive mountain or road bikes in the face of rising fuel costs, but basic cruisers are flying off the racks at bike shops.

These are only weak signals at the moment. The vehicles and laptops cited above are signals that have come from elsewhere. Europe and Asia have had low-impact city cars for some time, though R&D efforts to create not only cleaner but lighter vehicles for global markets has given this sector a boost. Lighter weight, cheaper basic laptops emerged in large part from efforts to create affordable devices for developing countries. Intel's competitive actions in the face of the OLPC helped spur OLPC clones for developed markets at just the right time.

Nonetheless these signals are coming in greater numbers, showing a growing demand for products and services that are appropriate for their circumstances and fit available resources in place of premium for the sake of premium. Prime areas of growth for JGE are housing, clothing, household items, personal care, consumer electronics, financial services, food and beverage: all areas where premium services exploded in the past decade, but which are seeing innovations in developing markets that can move to the developed world to suit the growing need in increasingly strapped developed markets.

Implications:

• Slower replacement cycles for products. Consumers will hold on to both costly and everyday products longer, from smartphones to running shoes. Lower cost durability needs to be engineered in, with the potential to upcycle -- use the same platform and renew components as needed.
• Greater interest in the simple choices. All-you-can eat services with high pricetags are set aside for basics at a manageable, transparent cost.
• Greater need to focus points of delight. With most frills stripped away, companies will need to focus on points of delight such as hidden utility to provide consumers with clever functionality at a low cost. Think "virtual" GPS on the iPhone, or fold-up back seats in the Honda Fit.

Keith Hart, best known for his work on "informal economy", defining the vitality of the urban entreprenuerial spirit he encountered as a young anthropologist in Ghana in the early 1970s has just posted an essay called The Digital Revolution and me. While enthusiasts should certainly read the whole, here are a few snippets that I found thoughtful observations that relate to the explorations on this blog.

We are living through the first stages of a world revolution as profound, in my view, as the invention of agriculture. It is a machine revolution, of course: the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital system whose most visible symbol is the internet. It is a social revolution, the formation of a world society with means of communication adequate at last to expressing universal ideas. It is a financial revolution, the detachment of the virtual money circuit from production, linked to the West’s loss of control over the world economy. It is an existential revolution, transforming what it means to be human and how each of us relates to the rest of humanity. It is therefore also a revolution in anthropology that will make everything we have done so far seem like the prehistory of our discipline.
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At about this time, in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web was making the internet more visual, personal and interactive. For two years I headed a Cambridge committee to explore the uses of audio-visual aids and information technology for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. People said there was no point in Cambridge University entering this brave new world; we were too old-fashioned and places like Middlesex Polytechnic had much more experience with online techniques. But I argued that over the centuries we had accumulated lots of beautiful stuff that could become a rich internet resource. In any case the digital revolution is not a linear development. Everyone enters it with their own bundle of specific advantages and drawbacks at a particular moment in time. The technology evolves, so that early users may be too adapted to older techniques, while latecomers can make more creative use of software that requires less specialist knowledge than before. The society made by the machine revolution is a river and you can never step into the same river twice.
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And so to the last few years, to the social networking revolution and Web 2.0: Google, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Flock, Wave and all the rest. This is the heart of the revolution I want to join. I love Twitter for the chance to project myself as an editor of sorts, sending the best economic journalism from Europe to American traders, gold bugs and currency freaks. I meet an interesting class of anthropologists there. And I hone my subediting skills on the 140-space limit. Social bookmarking really turns me on. Classification of knowledge was hitherto done by experts and every piece of information had its unique place in a folder somewhere. Now tagging makes it possible for anyone to leave a mark on something they like or consider useful and you can find their guidance with increasingly sophisticated software. The people are generating the categories; and even a search engine like Google is becoming obsolete because its millions of hits are impersonal, less attuned to the user’s own profile.
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People ask me how I find time for my work with all this stuff. But, since exchanging Cambridge University for a Paris chambre de bonne 12 years ago, I have doubled my rate of publication over that of the previous three decades. My productivity as a writer benefits enormously from being online 12 hours a day. I can check anything in a fraction of the time. I stay at my work station longer when I can answer an email message there, keep an eye on a football match, surf the OAC for the latest developments. Sometimes the speed and diversity of my online connections generates a wave motion that carries my writing into unexpected regions of discovery. If this is the virtual social life, it will do for me. Bring on the revolution!
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What have I learned from all this? I could quote from the introduction to this website:

The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of goods through money are now converging in a single network of communications, the internet. We must discover how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our common task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.

Scott has written extensively on the shift towards "small" taking place referencing elements as diverse as the influence of the emerging BoPNet as well as incremental improvements. Now, McKinsey has released their research on the shift in consumer preferences in the packaged goods industry which ends with the following paragraph supporting this trend.