[Stoves] cheap = ugly ?

[Cecil Cook]

Building on Marc's point, I have found in a number of circumstances it
makes sense for the new thing to masquerade as the old thing even though it
embodies many innovations.  My experience is with a range of village
technologies including stoves.

Also, beauty in in the eye of the collective beholder.  What I consider
beautiful, someone else considers ugly or ungraceful. One element that may
tie beauty and functionality together with economics is the concept of
cultural 'branding' by which I mean if the technos looks traditional, it
gets a name and immediately becomes familiar and even trustworthy.  The
trick is to incorporate innovations in a way that leaves enough of the old
appearance in tact so that a product can use the old brand and name.

That way the new thing becomes the old thing and visa versa.  I believe it
is helpful for modern western people and powerful professionals to restrain
the understandable urge to  remake the world according to their 'modern'
ethos and aesthetics of the moment, but let's face it ... there are many
convert and overt wars going on under the disguise of globalization.

Here in Indonesia where I am at this moment, I have the perception that the
incredibly dense self governing urban villages - called Kampongs - in its
cities have discovered the social, economic and political institutions that
are desperately needed in places like the South Bronx in New York, the
collapsed inner city areas of Detroit and the South side of Chicago.

We have to study the old thing very carefully before we decide that it
looks ugly.

In search,
Cecil Cook

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Marc-Antoine Pare <marcpare0 at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Yeah, I've always thought this was an interesting conversation.
>
> One anecdote:
> In designing gasifiers for rural brick-makers, I found that "ugly" in the
> sense of "looks industrial" was not necessarily a bad thing: the operators
> and mechanics were happy to see that the device *looked like something
> they were familiar with*. Hence, they could maintain it, modify it, etc.
>
> Of course, this was a product for small industry, not for consumers. The
> same reasoning may not hold for a household customer.
>
> -marc
>
>
> On 3/22/13 12:22 PM, Josh Kearns wrote:
>
> Thought stovers would like to know of a parallel conversation going on in
> the WASH sector....
>
>  http://www.source.irc.nl/page/77512
>
>
>
>  --
> Josh Kearns
> PhD Candidate, Environmental Engineering
> University of Colorado-Boulder
> Visiting Researcher, North Carolina State University
>
> Director of Science
> Aqueous Solutions
> www.aqsolutions.org
>
>  Mobile: 720 989 3959
> Skype: joshkearns
>
>
>
>
>
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