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

nari phaltan nariphaltan at gmail.com
Fri May 11 23:26:30 CDT 2018


Fit work for Ignoble!

On Sat 12 May, 2018, 01:52 Cecil Cook, <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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