<p>Dear Crispin and Gordon,</p>
<p>As a some time stove anthropologist and long time collaborator of Crispin in southern Africa I can only concur with his call for more in depth collaboration between stove designers, testers, standard setters, funders, fabricators and the ORIGINAL human beings who choose to build, buy and use what they discover to be radically improved domestic stove. </p>
<p>From where I sit on the side lines, I see that stove buying/using publics are often interviewed only as an after thought to determine whether they like or dislike what the stove makers have innovated. Many of the new stoves are pure technocritic fantasies...or is it a chimera?</p>
<p>The human/social/cultural sciences can help the stove hardware engineers and testing scientists by helping the stove designers/standard setters/testers to describe what identifiable stove using publics see as the preferred (or sometimes mandatory) functions of their household stoves (both manifest & latent/conscious & intuitive functions). </p>
<p>If a comprehensive baseline study of well identified stove communities is conducted before new & IMPROVED stoves are designed, fabricated, and field tested then the stove innovators at least have targets to aim at. Right now domestic stoves are designed and fabricated to meet the stove performance objectives of influential interest groups and powerful institutions involved with (1.) human health (clean indoor air & outdoor air pollution), (2.) gender liberation & security, (3.) environmental protection (deforestation, reversing climate change), (4.) international stove funding & promoting agents including influential global NGOs, and (5.) the PR minions of world corporations defending & expanding their turf (future shaping?). It is impossible to design and deliver a domestic stove that simultaneously meets the demands of these powerful interest groups and as well as the primary demands of the stove using households. Whose stove performance preferences is a stove innovator going to privilege? </p>
<p>Whose demands are preferred? The introduction of the subsidies to induce the original primary clients to "buy" or use & eventually adopt a particular cooking or heating stove is simply a bribe. So now we get a highly politicized economy of dueling stove interest groups and the resulting influence peddling and partisanship corrupts domestic stove "science" to the point that the needs and interests of the original stove users is strangely (perversely??) forgotten. </p>
<p>The poor amongst us are being force fed stove innovations that they do not know. Where is the justice, socio-economic rationality, or programmatic feasibility, agency, and justification for imposing novel cooking technologies such as char producing TLUD gasifier stoves. The TLUD gasifier is not binge singled out here ...it is simply one of many examples of force feeding innovations to captive populations of poor households and struggling communities because they help reduce CO2 in the atmosphere or solve other planetary challenges.</p>
<p>The anthropologist in me demands we respect the intersect of multiple dimensions of culture in a traditional operator-stove-fuel-cuisine system as the first step in starting an incremental process of in situ stove innovation. Such a radical bottom up process of stove innovation is the beginning of a largely endogamous (insider led) process of socio-technological change where the insiders discover the superiority of - say - gassifier stoves and spontaneously embrace a new technology because it better serves their own interests. Such endogamously led processes of stove innovation can move along rapidly once they get started. </p>
<p>But as CP Snow alerted us in the 1960's we Western folk suffer from two culture schizophrenia - the humanities and the sciences. My view is we must stop inflicting our two culture madness on to the search for improved stoves.</p>
<p>Healing this culture war requires strong spiritual medicine. If we get lucky we can synergize and cohabitate with the enemy ....and pacify the "others" who ever those pesky others may be. "Don't close your your eyes.....God made them to synergize, synergize, synergize!"</p>
<p>in search,<br>
Cecil the Cook</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sep 4, 2017 6:01 PM, "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <<a href="mailto:crispinpigott@outlook.com" target="_blank">crispinpigott@outlook.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div class="m_-5378639095763872401m_682499224004485200m_-4789690696721134893WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Dear Gordon<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">- What are people trying to do?<u></u><u></u></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Invent cool stuff and get it adopted to help save the world.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">- What problems are getting in the way of your success?<u></u><u></u></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ignorance about how to invent cool stuff and get it adopted.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">- What collaborations are possible?<u></u><u></u></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The best one would be for the ‘stovers’ to approach social scientists to find out in much clearer detail why people behave the way they do when they use domestic energy and apply it in their lives.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is usually a gulf between the wanna-be designers and the potential users, as large as the gap between marketing people and the self-same designers.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A three-way collaboration between marketing, design/engineering and behavioural scientists would produce products that would naturally attract funding.
<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At the moment people seek funding first, technical solutions second, marketing expertise third, and a deep understanding of the users last.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hence, the current mess.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Regards<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Crispin<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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