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

Wed May 16 09:12:38 CDT 2018

Dear Cecil

You are exploring our idea of a book called, "Steal This Stove". The best I can do at the moment is to put everything on my website www.newdawnengineering.com in the Library where there are numerous sets of plans for how to make really good stoves. 

You are correct that there are in the world of stoves and stovers 'forces' that are antithetical to certain ideas, people and places. In a sense, the distribution of technologies can be paralleled with the distributions of the fruits of technologies. It can be re-phrased as access to knowledge, where the tension is over who gets to have access, and who gets to provide it.

Over the past five years it has become clearer to me that controlling access to knowledge has benefits to certain people or institutions in certain markets because careers are built on it. Obviously suppressing some knowledge and promoting other things helps shape a paradigm in which some have power and others do not.

The Vietnam story of distribution is classic, and imaginative. Suppose we put primary school readers or internet-enabled cell phones into a similar distribution channel. 

The Steal This Stove (STS) movement is one way to break through the agendas. Consider the work of "Larry" the sheet metal worker and list subscriber here who made a large range wood burning stoves with ever-higher heat transfer efficiency. He was/is very imaginative and in all cases, made this work accessible through videos. He had no intention of making a career out of it. 

What you and I have been discussing for 40 years is the Steal This Development Approach (STDA) creating and sharing ways to think about problems and the organisational structures needed to permit that to happen. The bun fights happening now over testing metrics (stove evaluation as if cooks mattered) are merely an appendage of a delivery system that has a large STS component. As soon as I say, "STS" there is an embedded anointing that the stove has some accessible benefit inherent in it. 

The Vietnam story is an example of extreme resistance to the source of the 'goods' for ideological reasons, and how the well-intended on both sides overcame it. There was  Brown Bag Lunch (BBL) on line yesterday at the World Bank discussing the Bangladesh stove market. It is a high profile place to have a stove project these days because so many organisations are trying to 'do something' and they are on multiple levels, in each other's way. The Dockside Distribution Theory, formalised as STS, might work best in the long run. Who knows? What promotes it, potentially, is the insistence by Nikhil and you and others that the stove must first cook properly, offer time and convenience and effort benefits, and if possible last a long time without loss of function.

Things like smoke fall under convenience. Fuel efficiency may or may not be an effort benefit, depending on the fuel. I recall the drop in effort needed in Swaziland homes headed by children was not related to using less fuel (though the stove did save fuel) it was that it burned things not considered fuel at all by other people, so it was just lying around: cobs, twigs, chips, stalks. Convenient collection is a lot more important than fuel combustion and thermal efficiency.

The STS approach might work well for artisanal production, and undermine large scale manufacturing of complex products that take a long time to design. Not sure. Let's continue to try both approaches.

Regards
Crispin

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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc%2Farticles%2FPMC1322240%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ccb915bf5a65a4dcc87e508d5b77ca52b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636616668327171812&sdata=u5LtZglxaK%2BiIpXz5MVM%2Bs0BBrPsvieaNi1UajKrG1c%3D&reserved=0

Regards
Crispin at tea time

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