The Yale School of Management has done an interactive case study on Project Masiluleke, the project I was working on in South Africa in 2008. It walks through all the missteps and changes of plans as well as the successes of the project, and it’s a more compelling read as a result.
I’m featured talking about design research - I am delighted to be associated with the headline “Design Starts With The User” on YouTube! And as I sort of get at in the interview, one of the great values of the trip ended up being the fairly massive case of culture shock I got from it.
The questions you ask about a place when you haven’t been there, and you impose your own rhythms and patterns and expectations on it, and the questions you ask when you have at least scratched the surface, those are different things. And I don’t pretend we were able to do anything more than scratch the surface in the ethnographic research I did in Kwa-Zulu Natal, but the depth of the local knowledge, and quantitative scientific expertise, of our partners at iTeach meant that all we needed was someone who knew enough to have a sense of where they were coming from.