After receiving heavy publicity in the early-mid 2000s, the project became sensationalized — attracting subsequent funding in the tens of millions. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this is starkly evident in the case of the PlayPump.

Despite having such international recognition, the water pump systems themselves were designed and implemented in such a way that later proved to be unsustainable; in some cases only to be later replaced by traditional handpumps. Some of these issues encountered could have been prevented: if the organisation were to properly consult communities at hand, as well as designing the units and larger system itself to leverage local resources, the PlayPump may not be seen as a failure of international aid.

The conditions that created the PlayPump

The PlayPump in its first few years worked well for several reasons. One of which was the original inventor, South African water engineer Ronnie Stuiver, worked on the ground — shaping the systems development from the quite literally, the ground up. The several initial rollouts were funded by Stuiver himself, and the project showed promise. In 1989, Trevor Field, a South African advertising professional, purchased the patent from Stuiver when he came across the design at an agricultural fair in Pretoria, South Africa (MacAskill, 2015). Field would later quit his job to focus on this project full-time, and by the turn of the century had fifty systems installed across South Africa.

It was in this same year the project gained international recognition, winning a World Bank Development Marketplace Award, for projects which showed huge potential and scale (Brand South Africa, 2008). This, in partnership with high-profile business people, and contrastingly a scathing feature on American TV-network PBS’ Frontline in 2005 which (ironically) rose the project to prominence. One year later in 2006, then First Lady of the United States Laura Bush, awarded a $16.4 million USD grant, as well as launching a fundraising campaign to recoup $60 million USD to install 4,000 more units across Africa by 2010. (MacAskill, 2015).

How does it work?

1. Drives a conventional borehole pump
2. While children play
3. Water is pumped from underground as the children spin;
4. Water is pumped into a polyethylene tank, seven meters above the ground
5. A simple tap provides easy access for the mothers and children drawing water
6. Excess water (overflow) is directed from the storage bank back down to the borehole
7. Four landscape billboards screen the tank to create a unique advertising site. Two sides are used for community awareness messages and the other two sides for commercial advertising messages.” (PlayPumps Zambia, n.d.)

However, shortly after this a report by UNICEF (2007) signalled the PlayPump’s fall from grace (MacAskill, 2015). This document detailed failures from numerous perspectives — examining operational, technological and administrative errors that resulted in the project’s demise.

At 63% of sites in Zambia, users reported they were not adequately consulted, and were presented with no choice of technology to install (UNICEF, 2007). The implementation and later maintenance of these units was outsourced to other NGOs, as is the case with Mozambique where units were placed in unsuitable sites, and Save the Children failed to respond to repair requests (Obiols & Erpf, 2008). Due to components being sourced from South Africa and transported across the continent, the cost of these systems rose from an initial $6,500 to an exorbitant sum of $14,000 USD (UNICEF, 2007).

In PlayPump’s day-to-day operations on a micro-scale, children reported injuries due to the merry-go-round not being designed in such a way so that it would protect them if they were to fall off, also reporting that they became tired very quickly after pushing the play device, as constant torque was required to continue pumping water. There were also reports of children being paid to “play” by adults in the community (UNICEF, 2007). As estimated by an article by The Guardian, in order to provide a typical village’s water needs, children would need to “play for 27 hours per day (Chambers, 2009). This is only hampered by the fact that traditional hand pumps, which were removed in favour of the PlayPump, could provide nearly five times the water at a fraction of the cost (UNICEF, 2007).

What caused the failure?

In five short years, the PlayPump went from having fifty units in South Africa to being granted over $16.4M US (with $60M more in the pipeline) and an expected rollout of 4,000 units across several quite sparse African nations (UNICEF, 2007). Having been gifted money as part of a US government grant, there may have been various milestones in place in order to secure further funding. For lack of better terminology, Trevor was chasing the proverbial carrot.

As described by PBS Frontline journalist, Amy Costello in her 2010 report Troubled Water:

“I think the haste to get pumps in the ground in order to fulfill an ambitious and arbitrary goal from Washington, likely contributed to instances of poor site selection and/or lack of community support for the device.” (Costello, 2010)

One perspective may reveal that while the PlayPump was a marketable, and clearly well-sold idea, holes could have easily been poked through its logic and foundational concept. In its implementation, stakeholders were not consulted with adequately or extensively, nor given a suite of options for their communities to consider (UNICEF, 2007).

From the start, PlayPump was put on a pedestal as a one-size-fits-all solution. This is simply inaccurate as described by Stellar (2010), “there is no panacea for… meeting water challenges”. Providing access to water is a complex challenge, and only in some may a PlayPump be the right solution. This is only hampered by the fact that in order to install a PlayPump system in a site, this involved the removal of existing handpumps “to make way for the PlayPump” (UNICEF, 2007), thereby restricting the communities in practicing a sense of agency.

Similarly in the project’s implementation, third party organisations were contracted out in areas such as Zambia and Mozambique, as reported by UNICEF (2007). These on-the-ground staff lacked community-based water sector experience, leading to the end result not being compliant with both national water policy, as well as issues of community ownership, a crucial faux pas in enabling communities to take claim of the system.

Maintenance of existing PlayPump systems showed a lack of user involvement in the communities, as well as little-no engagement in the management of their own facilities, again breaching national policies on regulations. This was only worsened by the fact that PlayPump International dictated the maintenance, and production of parts, originating from South Africa and transported across the continent. Not only did this lead to exorbitant costs, but also significantly reduced communities from being able to enact their own maintenance and repair work.

In 2009, then CEO of PlayPumps International, Gary Edson (2009) penned an open letter to share updates of the company’s operations. In this letter he acknowledged that maintenance was a considerable challenge, and in order to focus on this they would transfer all remaining inventory to Water for People, who took this onboard as a portfolio of offerings in providing solutions to water access.

So, how could the design be improved?

A large component of why this project is deemed a failure of international aid (Murphy, 2013) could be played down to a lack of integrating appropriate technology principles. As defined by Francis Vanek, a technology can be deemed appropriate when it is:

“compatible with local, cultural and economic conditions… utilizing (sic) locally available materials and energy resources, with tools and processes maintained and operationally controlled by the local population” (Hazeltine & Bull, 2003)

The major flaw that stems from not adopting this (or similar) frameworks, is deeming a problem to only exist within the technological sphere. As emerging designers, we must recognise that the problems we work within are viewed with an inherent bias, and from a certain lens — often technological above all else.

If the PlayPump were to be considered within these principles, we can start to see many changes to be made. During the project’s lifetime, the cost increased by nearly three times, when many partners expected the cost to drop by a third. One way we can reduce this cost is if we are to look at decentralizing manufacturing; and instead rely on local resources, local industries and local skilled workers. Not only would this heavily reduce transport costs, as well as logistical barriers; but would promote using locally-sourced materials. In circumstances where skilled workers may not be available, a culturally-sensitive consulting process could determine if there is a market for training unskilled citizens to work within manufacturing. For all of the aforementioned points, this would increase a sense of community ownership, further developing whole communities.

As stated by UNICEF (2007) in their damning report, communities experienced a sea of operational issues, such as children injuring themselves in the process of “play”, as well as women having to use the play equipment as their needs for water outweighed how much children would use the merry-go-round. Instead of applying a one-size-fits-all model to providing water aid, a more user-centric model could have been promoted, allowing levels of customisation relevant to the cultural and operational needs of the community.

Examining the project from a macro-level, PlayPump completely eclipsed the market in international water aid. Given PlayPump’s status and prestige within the international development stage, they could have not only promoted their own product suite; but also broaden their organisational scope by acting as a leader in uniting efforts in providing water aid in developing countries, facilitating knowledge sharing and bettering the profession as a whole.

While PlayPump’s aim of providing “all children with the right to clean water” had noble intent, this does not always translate into ethical action. It’s important to recognise that while the PlayPump was intended to operate in a particular way in certain contexts — we cannot control how people use our designs. What we do have control over though is how we choose to respond to these dilemmas, in a manner that considers the community and stakeholders we are designing for.

What could be a better first post than trying to define the playing field that this and following articles will operate within? As someone who gets stuck (delightfully so) in these conversations about what design is, I feel it’s important to outline how this working definition is different from the connotations and understandings you may have in mind.

I’ll admit, when I first started writing this I was sucked into first defining how design has progressed from a historical context. While this undoubtedly has weight, there’s plenty of material out there that explore this aptly enough for me to try to do it justice.

Design has evolved to simultaneously operate as a word, action–and encompasses entire industries. It goes without saying, that the world we live in today considers it in a very different manner to the initial definitions given to the word.

Let’s dive in.

First, some context.

While design can be thought of as creating with stylistic or aesthetic intent,
a definition broadly applied by society at large. Some might define this cohort as ‘non-designers’, although design as a practice is not as black and white as this term implies.

For the sake of this article, let’s disengage from ideas of aesthetics and broaden our perspectives to focus on how it is practiced in our current day.

“No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.”
 — Bruce Mau, Massive Change, 2007.

In this definition of design, this could be moving from an existing to future state, by which a clearly-defined problem can be marked as resolved.

If I’m hungry, and formulate my intentions into a set of actions which result in a cooked meal–is that design? In this framework, yes.

Perhaps this seems counter-intuitive, as design cannot be all–encompassing, right?

Richard Buchanan, a design theorist, expands on this concept of design to be action that articulates desires and/or needs of the human psyche:

“Design is not merely an adornment of cultural life but one of the practical disciplines of responsible action for bringing the high values of a country or a culture into concrete reality, allowing us to transform abstract ideas into specific manageable form.

Design is the way we create all of the artefacts and communications that serve human beings, striving to meet their needs and desires and facilitating the exchange of information and ideas that is essential for civil and political life.

Furthermore, design is the way we plan and create actions, services and all of the other humanly shaped processes of public and private life. These are the interactions and transactions that constitute the social and economic fabric of a country.

Finally, design is the way we plan and create the complex wholes that provide a framework for human culture — the human systems and the sub-systems that work either in congress or in conflict with nature to support human fulfilment.”

– Richard Buchanan, Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design, 2001.

So, design is action? Fulfilment? Self-actualisation?

If we are to reflect on this idea, design is every act in which we imbue with the intent to make our lives easier, to develop society; to shape our individual and collective future(s).

The other important distinction with this idea is the zooming out to examine how design takes place at a macro level. Then, not only is it action that takes place on an individual level, but it is the methodology and action enacted by groups, corporations, even your countries’ government. Design is what is shaping both our individual and collective future(s).

Design is deliberate.

If we can create a new meaning, which is defined by intention, action and a vision for the future; let’s look to the following:

“Design is when designers design a design to produce a design.”
 — John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction, 2005.

Clearly, that’s a lot. Let’s break it down.

In Heskett’s phrase, we have four different instances of the word ‘design’.
Let’s go through what each individual usage means:

• We can look at the first instance of the word to be a noun [n.¹], framing the field of design as a whole in a very general manner;
• The second as a verb [v.¹], meaning the action or thought involved in the act of designing;
• The third is also a noun [n.²], this time connoting a plan or intention;
• And lastly, the fourth usage is again a noun [n.³], this time meaning the finished product, or end result.

What’s most exciting about this phrase to me, is that it encompasses the myriad ways the word is used in our current day.

“Did you design[v.¹] that?” / “How did you design[n.²] ! that?”
/ “Design[n.¹] is SO interesting” / “I love that design[n.³]”

It’s no coincidence that I’ve used the word ‘love’ in the last example, as design is one those words which have the same variance in meaning and understanding–and with it different cultural, academic and experiential emphasis.

All the usages have very different meanings, yet people continually slip between them, seamlessly moving from one meaning to another without ever much distinction.

What is constant in all of these definitions though, is that design is applied as a general lense to view and experience the world, and life through.

We can try to limit the definition of design as one type of practice or profession — shield it off as ‘ours’, to demarcate where we feel the boundaries should lie.

In doing so, we are denying the fact that design as at the very core of our beings; it’s in the actions that we execute every day, the problems we try to solve.

At the end of the day, it’s a conscious effort to move towards a better future for us all.

Defining design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.