Design Thinking for Africa

What would it mean to create systems and structures with Africans in mind? To view the people of this place as more than just end stage users of global products of human progress. To be co-creators of their reality? Where progress and development do not require so much deep unlearning of what it is to be from this place. Where we are doing more than importing and slightly modifying the ideas of the rest of the world. 

What part of the African experience has been designed by the people from this place for the people of this place? Historically not a lot. The very dimensions of our modern nation states were largely determined by a group of European colonialists, our present day systems of education were established in a time where very little was imagined for the African mind. So many of our cities were modeled after the ideals of people who did not seek to understand the needs of locals of this place. And now in our modern times with more Africans seeking to make life better for the people of this place, there are still vestiges of thinking that does not have the African in mind.

In design thinking, the first step is often to seek to understand the people you are designing for. Many modern African societies are formed on the base of cultural systems and then layered with colonial structures that amplified inequality and marginalized so many Africans. We have inherited ways of being, knowing and doing that never really had us in mind. 

It’s very telling that so often we speak of the ‘African’ part of us as what holds us back. That negative traits, attitudes and behaviors that are often quite universal to the human experience are what we call the ‘African’ within us. 

What if we could use our education to stimulate creativity and curiosity for the future of Africa as opposed to a desire to make ourselves ‘marketable’ to the global world? What if we dared to critique so called ‘norms’ that mute the African in us? University of Cape Town Vice Chancellor, Prof Phakeng speaks of a kind of radicalism needed in African higher education that has lessons for design thinking for Africa: 

We need a radicalism that does not use the American and British university as a model of what our higher educational system should be. Radicalism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally critiquing what was never critiqued. We must stop reforming and modifying the old and sometimes the West. It is time to be radical in our understanding of what higher education should be about. And maybe doing that will actually make us stand out in the world rather than being a sub-standard Oxford. 

The challenge therefore, is to create systems that serve people not the other way around. Be it health care innovations that are only accessible to a few, to esoteric technological advancements or even how many of our roads do not really consider pedestrians (of which there are many, many in Africa) - there is a lot left to be desired in how we design for the continent. So the next time you see Africans “misusing” an American product or students protesting their education maybe stop consider that the problem may not be the user, but that the product was never designed with them in mind.