Learn through Application
As students, we are encouraged to analyze, criticize, and come up with the “right” answer. At the beginning of the course, we reviewed a few different social initiatives, including the use of a Ferris Wheels to bring up water in remote locations throughout Africa. We uncovered that although the intentions of the project were to use the energy from children playing to extract water, the project had many faults. As demonstrated in the “Poverty Inc.” documentary, this is not rare. Social programs, with the best intentions, can be failures or, worse, can actually cause harm to the communities that they are trying to help. And yet, without these programs, we would have never learned that we could have unintended consequences. As humans, we want to help each other, and we are trying to learn how to do it best.
Manny Ohonme has created a program that has taken into consideration many of the lessons learned associated with donating objects to those in need:
1) The organization is trying to educate and empower those they help. Although getting one’s feet washed may seem like a trivial matter (especially for people who often get pedicures), it emphasizes how important feet are and how we should take care of them. It also makes the person feel clean.
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2) It provides shoes, an essential clothing item, to those who would otherwise be unable to buy it.
3) It creates a biodegradable product, therefore reducing its environmental impact.
4) It has the goal of manufacturing the shoes in, or near, the areas where it distributes the shoes, therefore providing jobs and economic development for the community.
It was also stated that social design does not exist outside of the university because it is not profitable. I disagree. Every day, people design programs that have social impact. There is a co-dependent relationship between their work and our research in the university. Therefore, I am grateful to all the people who have had the courage and work ethic to create social programs, including Manny.
