REVIEW

The model used by Design That Matters and KSE Medical seems to have a common pattern. Other social enterprises in sustainable technology use a similar model of collaborative partnership, such as:

IDE, a social enterprise that design farm technologies and services to improve small farmer productivity and income around the world, again with a mix of ethnography and engineering to design technologies and services for developing country farmers so that they are robust enough to cope with those climates and are sustainable in the materials they use and maintenance.

CATAPULT DESIGN, who work in many different sectors, also claim to use ethnography to assess client needs, by visiting the field to spend time with technology end-users, observing their lives and conducting interviews. With this research in mind, existing technology solutions are evaluated and a range of concepts explored with the goal of proposing a workable technical solution and taking it to market. So their design cycle would be

                                 DESIGN --------- MARKET -------- ASSESS

But who are the actual organisations involved here?

·         The client - which could be a social enterprise or a charity

·         The engineers - seems to be donated time from profit businesses and/or academics

·         The marketers - manufacturing and logistics companies, for-or-not-for profit

·         The social enterprise - who acts as “piggy in the middle” juggling all these interests

Such partnerships seem to be essentially targeting a ‘(not) fit for purpose’ problem.

Technology is often not fit for the environment in which it must work so is easily broken; broken parts cannot be easily fixed or manufactured locally and often require an expensive part to be bought from overseas; equipment is trashed or sits unused rather than repaired; health facilities petition charities or individuals to donate more equipment; equipment that can’t be used constitutes rubbish so the rubbish piles up.

On the other hand, manufacturing and maintaining medical equipment have socio economic outcomes - educating technicians and engineers (expanding skills base); employing local people; using and recycling locally available materials (jobs and innovation creation) as well as reducing waste during the life cycle of equipment as well as at the end of its life.