Yiiya, Rethinking Product Design

A Documentary Journey into African Product Design and Innovation

By Merlijn Lewerissa

We hosted our first Product Design Workshop on the 19th of September and had a great time engaging with product-based entrepreneurs. We'll be sharing some insights from our time together, but interacting with those product innovators had us reflecting on our experience with Emile Waterkeyn and Merlijn Lewerissa, two passionate Industrial Design Engineering students we had the privilege of working with a few years ago. They developed a powerful documentary, Yiiya, challenging the industrial design industry in Uganda by highlighting the importance of designing appropriate products that meet the needs of third-world countries. Here, Meriljn details their experience.

What does design mean??

It was near the end of our Product Design program in Delft (The Netherlands), around 2 years ago, when me and Emile Waterkeyn asked ourselves this question. It was a question that marked?the beginning of an eventful year.?

For us, design was something that should be universal. A process capable of creating new meaning in the lives of people, no matter the context they are in. However, we realised that the projects we worked on through our program were all focused on one specific context: where a capitalistic system ensures that the ones capable of paying, determine how things get made. We realised that this excluded a very large part of the world, purely based on their levels of disposable income. This made us question our role as designers. Did we want to be a part of this system, or were there ways we could better cater to inclusivity and contextual nuances? We went looking for an answer to this question, and we documented the journey toward it into a film: Yiiya.?

Yiiya: Rethinking Product Design is a documentary that explores the role of design in low-resource areas, with a focus on Uganda. It was through Design Without Borders that we learned that product design is also being practiced in Uganda; in a way that doesn’t focus on profit, but puts the user in the center. Together, we spent a few months working on a project involving Kangaroo Mother Care, and experienced firsthand what impact human-centered design can have when applied in the right context. It was also through this project that we found out how important contextual nuance is when designing products, especially when you, as a designer, are not native to the culture. We saw how most of the machines and products used in hospitals were actually donated from Western countries, and sometimes had more negative effects than positive.? We realized how important the human-centered design approach is when designing solutions for resource-poor areas, and it also made us question ourselves a little bit: were we supposed to be here?

But this was not the only thing we learned. We noticed differences in the way the design process works, as well as in the meaning it has in society and the appreciation of it. The faculty of Industrial Design in Delft has existed for over 50 years now. At the time of our project, Uganda didn’t have an institution that teaches product design yet, which meant there wasn’t really an understanding for the practice of industrial design.

However, as we continued to learn through our project, we saw things moving in the right direction for Uganda. We discovered that the first Industrial Design school in the country was being set up close to Kampala and we were able to get in touch with different Ugandan designers who are working towards a more established product design space, with a better appreciation for the craft in all industries. They are fighting Uganda’s import culture and trying to promote the production of local products. It was encouraging to see that Uganda is slowly building its own design capacity.?

This piece fit perfectly into the puzzle. With Yiiya, we tried to show the past, present and future of design in Uganda, through the lens of local artisans and designers. We hope that it will be able to inspire more Ugandans to help build up this design capacity, and challenge the global design industry to rethink the way they’re designing solutions for other contexts.?

With that said, we still didn’t have a yes or no answer to our question: should we be here? And unfortunately, we found out that there wasn’t one. However, before we made the final edit, we did a screening together with the people involved in the documentary. Like with any human-centered design process, we asked for feedback. Although we didn’t get a simple yes or no, we came close to an answer, but for that you will have to watch the documentary.

The full documentary is available through the Yiiya website: https://yiiyadesign.com/. We hope you will enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.