[Stoves] How to conduct research on hardware with a strong social involvement (like stoves)

[Cecil Cook]

Help me out a little here Crispin regarding the point you are making about a scientistic tempest in a proverbial teapot over disappearing teaspoons.

We want stoves to "appear" rather than to "disappear" and except for one interesting strategy I heard about long ago during the war in Vietnam ... where the removal of all promotion resulted in more not less "progress". It involved a program by USAID to distribute new seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides to S Vietnamese villagers under wartime conditions. At night the VC killed the leaders and heads of families residing in fortified "strategic villages" who collaborated during the day with USAID operatives. Perhaps by mistake or by an inspired decision, USAID decided to intentionally leave shipments of ag input packages unguarded on the docks of Huey. Criminal gangs would then steal the ag input packages and sell them at very affordable prices in markets and to the villagers at zero cost to USAID. USAID saved lives and money by pursuing such a less is more technology transfer strategy. Remember in those days it was dangerous for villagers to accept ag inputs from agents of the SV government.

Maybe there are some valuable lessons here about how to stimulate spontaneous technology transfer by identifying the least costly and most feasible paths for introducing and "effortlessly" institutionalizing improved stoves in particular kinds of households and targeted populations of stove users.

Unfortunately it is the stove engineers, stove financiers and stove economists who - together with often highly politicized national gov't officials and politicians -  typically make all or most of the important "strategic" decisions about what stoves and which roll out strategies to use when introducing and institutionalizing (indigenizing?) improved stoves.

How do we change this typical process whereby stove selection and distributional strategies are asymmetrically decided by a profoundly unrepresentative team of stove strategists.  Is it not possible to experimentally determine the easiest and least costly way to accelerate the "disappearance" of stoves and/or Tspoons into the households of stove & Tspoon deficient families and communities?

Is the "frictionless" or low friction introduction and institutionalization of improved stoves into a stove deficient target population more complicated than an an Appollo moon landing in terms of the complexity of the systems engineering challenge? It seems to demand a radical reconfiguration of the teamwork concept relied on to differentiate and then organize the responsibilities of the agents representing the different domains of competence which must respectfully combine forces and work together to arrive at the one or more potentially optimum solutions that ideally all of the local actors buy into!

The only way I know to describe what I am imagining here is to speak of an upside down mini-Manhatten Project in which a representative subset of local stove users, fabricators, and distributors are provided with the science & technology capacity needed to successfully design, fabricate and introduce a radically improved stove that minimizes resistance to adoption with respect to fabrication by local producers, acceptance by local users, and popularity with local policy makers, trend setters, and marketing agents, and then I am willing to wager there will suddenly be higher levels of political and financial support for a powerful bottom up process in which the innovative stove on offer is too good to resist because it has systematically minimized most or all the major sources of socio-economic, cultural, political, fabrication, and distribution resistance. My hypothesis is that higher levels of official political and economic support follows stove demand rather creating demand for super duper new stoves. 

Something like that Crispin. Remember Abbie Hoffman's "Steal this Book"? You know your mini Manhatten Stove Project has reduced resistance (friction) among producers, users, marketers, policy makers, and financiers to a tipping point when the improved stoves being fabricated are literally stolen or pirated before they are ready for release and mass marketing in targeted communities. If your improved stove is not being stolen from the factory or the lab it is not ready for low friction spontaneous adoption. Therfore keep improving the fabricator, user, and marketer interface until your stove is too good not to be stolen!! 

Just keep on truck'in!

Cecil the Cook

 from my BlackBerry - the most secure mobile device

  Original Message  
From: crispinpigott at outlook.com
Sent: May 11, 2018 6:05 PM
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Reply-to: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Subject: [Stoves] How to conduct research on hardware with a strong social involvement (like stoves)

Dear Friends

Teaspoons in the office:

This study was done ethically and reported professionally. I found their explanations about where teaspoons ended up a tad speculative.

As is often the case with cooking stoves, there was a high level of dissatisfaction with the level of service provided by teaspoons in terms of their availability.

"The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/

Regards
Crispin at tea time

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