Cooper Sloan '22: Social Consciousness Learning Competency

Engineering an Impact

Nearly all shea butter comes from the "shea-belt," which spans many sub-Saharan African nations. Women-run co-ops in countries such as Ghana are responsible for processing shea nuts into shea butter. One essential step in processing shea butter requires roasting the shea nuts over a fire in a hand-cranked rotating drum. The women in these co-ops often roast shea nuts for hours on end, all while enduring smoke inhalation and shoulder, joint, and back pains. Furthermore, due to inefficient wood burning, the co-ops are forced to use more fuel than is necessary and emit harmful pollutants into local communities. Accordingly, one of the major projects at Burn Design Lab, a non-profit engineering organization where I interned, is the development of an improved shea roaster. While Burn Design Lab's shea roaster prototypes have improved both the roasting capacity and efficiency, we knew from direct user feedback that the women roasting shea nuts wanted a less physically taxing method to rotate the drum. Upon my arrival at Burn Design Lab, I joined the Improved Shea Roaster project and was put in charge of developing a more ergonomic way to turn the shea roaster drum.

One of the biggest takeaways from my time with Burn Design Lab was understanding how the impact of a project is measured. At Burn Design Lab, we used an acronym called IPADS. IPADS stands for “Impact = Performance x Adoption x Durability x Scale”. What this means is that the impact of any engineering solution can be measured by its performance, adoption, durability, and its scale. Performance refers to how well the product works. Adoption is determined by how accepted the product is by the intended user. Durability is self-explanatory, referring to how long the product lasts. And lastly, scale is a measure of how much of a product can be made. A product might be durable, perform well, and be widely accepted, but if only one or two units can be produced then the impact of the product is minimal. Likewise, if a product is scalable, durable, and functional, but not widely accepted, then the product is practically useless. Without any one of the four qualities, an engineered solution is bound to have a minimal impact.

To maximize the impact of the projects at Burn Design Lab, we used an iterative development process that includes direct collaboration with those who the product is designed for. The iterative design process at Burn Design Lab is a repeating cycle of user research, feedback, development, prototyping, and testing.

In designing and engineering solutions for other people, the engineer and the client are equally as important in developing any solution. Collaboration and communication with the client is critical to understanding the real problem that needs to be solved. The client knows what the problem is because they are closest to the problem. Thus, the client likely knows what the solution is too. The engineer or designer, on the other hand, brings the tools to make that solution possible. The process of designing a solution should be a mutual relationship, rather than an imbalance of power. Letting engineers and designers go almost blindly into areas that they might not understand can do great harm to the clients. Thus, it is important to understand the clients to avoid “saving” them from a problem that they may not need saving from. The idea of outsiders disrupting a community to save them closely mirrors colonialism. It can cause irreversible damage when an outsider “saves” a community whose way of life is different from their own by forcing the community to adopt an outsider’s solution. As a designer or an engineer, one must be careful to not assume that no harm can be done to a community, or that the community needs to be “saved” in the first place. This empathetic approach to engineering solutions is engrained in Burn Design Lab. When it comes to shea butter, we realize that the women who process the shea butter on a daily basis are the experts, not us. Therefore, we don’t pursue solutions that would cause the shea butter CO-OPs to change their processes.

I’ve learned the concept of human-centered design not only through my time with Burn Design Lab, but also through my innovation minor curriculum. The culmination of my innovation studies was a practicum project where I worked on a small team to expand the services of a local social services organization that serves houseless individuals; the Blanchet House. We began the project by asking questions. We talked to everyone in the Blanchet House, as well as some of the people who the Blanchet House serves. Since this was a university project, however, we were not allowed to talk directly to any houseless individuals. Because of this, we decided that we would not be qualified to develop any solution to expand the services of Blanchet House that directly affects houseless individuals. Thus, our solution ultimately focused on developing empathy for houseless individuals amongst the housed population. There are obvious solutions that would benefit a houseless individual (like a house, for example), but the Blanchet House already provides food and housing services. And as much as we would have liked to create something entirely new that directly benefits the unhoused population, we felt it would have been irresponsible to “guess” and develop a solution that we think the houseless community wants, without actually talking to anyone from the houseless community.

In an increasingly interconnected and globalized world, it is important to understand the backgrounds of the individuals and communities we serve, as engineers. Designing a sophisticated solution that we personally think is ideal, may not be ideal for the client. As humans, we have natural biases about what we think will work best, but as engineers, we must do our best to eliminate those biases. It is the mutual understanding between designer and designee that will drive us toward a more equitable, sustainable, and harmonious world.