This approach was undertaken by two Swedish students in a remarkable a project the called Made in Kenya that tries to engage with the informal manufacturing industry and uses IKEA inspired styling http://www.notechmagazine.com/2011/11/when-low-tech-goes-ikea.html

A great effort though I remain dubious of a totally word free approach. I find it hard to believe that all issues of clarity and interpretation can be designed out by better diagrams. Looking at the images I am hesitant to attempt building it. Given a choice between a Haynes Manual style instructions or IKEA style I would take the former, especially for complex builds.

It is hoped that eventually illiteracy is no longer prevalent. Would creating a system that allows continued illiteracy be detrimental on this front? Or does delaying the adoption of technology because it exists behind a word wall more detrimental to overall welfare?

Who is this literate person? Who would give up so much time? Perhaps the local NGO contact. Perhaps the local teacher, or if I were to take an optimistic view I could imagine teachers teaching children how to read instructions to their parents.

An alternative is a mobile phone approach, a reading service. This could take a multitude of approaches. Pre-Recorded instructions played back over the telephone. Specialised readers who bring up the relevant document on the internet and read it through with the manufacturer.

This still leaves us mired with the problems of translation. Perhaps the teachers will be well versed enough with English to provide end point translation on the fly at least until formal translations can be provided. Perhaps they can actively engage with localisation efforts. With free (in the Stalllman sense) documentation, bottom up translation can become the norm.

None of these are perfect solutions but perfect wordless instructions for manufacture is a pipe dream. It may work for simple devices and pre-manufactured flat-pack items but it will not work for far too many technologies to consider a serious solution. The perfect is the enemy of the good and as far as I can figure this hashed approach is a far more viable solution.

As always your thoughts are welcome.

I really enjoyed it and the other two talks we great.

It was the first time I had to talk about the topic so the practice was great and I now have a better feel for it. Might ask a few ewb branches if they need a speaker

You can see my notes if you download the file.

The last month has been rather quiet on both of my blogs. Why is an interesting question. It started with Richard Stallman comeing to give a lecture at Hub Westminster. Another three high profile events followed and a freelance contract.

Stallman took a great interest in the Hexayurt Project and seemed interested in the idea of free hardware. His talk about free software sparked in me a need to delve deeper into the heard of the documentation issue. The faithful reproduction of physical objects by a second party is incumbent on direction. This direction comes from good instructional documentation. This was an aspect I was  familiar with. The wider implications of the initial approach, be it from the mindset of “free”, “open source”, or “appropriate” needed further deconstruction. I had not studied these terms deeply enough before I started mapping out the problems. A large part of the problem stems from well meaning individual who had not taken due care to pay attention to minor details from the start.

Was I tackling the documentation of free appropriate hardware, open source appropriate hardware, appropriate technology, open source appropriate technology or the myriad of other combinations thrown around interchangeably? Nomenclature is important and must be approached slowly. I decided that since some folks were not paying attention to these minute details then I was tackling all of these whether or not the correct label was applied at the time. I decided that I needed to use the widest brush possible. To go back to “free” instead of “open”. It does mean I will have to rename the whole project.

When considering the distinction between free and open, some might have felt the the idea of ethics and morality imperative would have been encompassed in the fact the technologies in question were targeted at members within the world’s poorest communities. Turns out this is not the case. Whilst morality underpins many of the practices between free and developmental technology they do not necessarily overlap all that much. As this aspect of the project is explored in deeper detail I hope to blog about it

I am trying to come up precise terminology for these free appropriate poverty alleviation technologies. So I began typing up the aims and working backwards.

Targeted at those in poverty
Free to use and modify
Environmentally, economically, locally sustainable
Sensitive to the needs of the users and local conditions
Leads to increased income or substantially better quality of life
Does NOT harm

As always the list is a work in progress, but it is important to lay out a lot of non visible groundwork that pays of in the end though slightly less exciting than the maps and table I cranked out after rushing off ahead as the project tired to pull me faster than I could handle.

I hope that gave a taste of where the project it. Strained on time and returning back to the basics before too much has been built on top of a bad foundation.

Read it?

I hope to write a bit more about the delivery chain but for today I will focus on scalability. This paragraph covers the important aspects.

“In many instances, the design of a scaling strategy is not very complicated. What development practitioners usually miss is the importance of building design for scale into a project from the very beginning of the design process. For example, if you need to sharpen ten pencils, the way to do it is simple. If you need to sharpen a thousand pencils, you need to use a different strategy, but it can be done. If you need to sharpen 100,000 pencils, you need a still different strategy. Each of these problems is eminently solvable, but each one requires a different series of logical steps; it’s very difficult to efficiently change from a ten-pencil strategy to a hundred-thousand-pencil strategy if you’ve already committed your resources and your time to the former.”

The same applies to documentation. Even if the technology is inherently scalable, the documentation can go a long way toward making or preventing the practice of scaling. The way one would convey an invention to a single small group is very different to the way you’d show it to a large number of large groups. Especially when we consider that the interest of each group might be very different and they are all important parts of the delivery chain. The solution needs to meet the needs of each part of the delivery chain, or at the very least a large chunk of it so that only small segments require extra effort.

Can we make a set of instructions suitable for all? If not how much can we cover in one step? In how few steps can we cover all of the important stuff?

First this will require a deeper investigation into the needs of the delivery chain with regards to documentation. Then I will revise the simple needs map, it was a quick first attempt and would have been better termed instructional resources map, with a deeper analyses of the delivery chain to ensure that the most critical resources, in terms of achieving success as opposed to nominal functionality, are highlighted.
From here it will be mapping out the different resources, the shared source materials, the generation of that source material and the users

All of this mess in only one piece of open source appropriate technology, in one material. Plywood hexayurts are a totally different from Polyiso ones. The people with the answers and the people making developments don’t all make clear instructions. Maybe it’s lack of time or graphic design know how. Now imagine this across all of the different Open Source Appropriate Technology products.

At the base level it follows the cycle below. It can be seen the steps that all information has/should pass through are the documentors, the feedback and the polished documents

A major improvement on the design has the potential to create a new variant. Each variant has its own cycle. A variant can spawn other variants. Lessons and improvement from one variant can be applied across the range. Variants typically have a reason to exist separately from the original model. If the new variant is superior in every way it renders the old one obsolete.

These variants are still considered part of a single invention, however breakthrough can span entirely new inventions have all the same interconnectedness seen between different models of a single invention. Each can also be analysed as having the same basic information cycle across the entire rage of inventions level instead of only and the model level

These inventions can be grouped by family of technology Each family of technology also has the same basic cycle at a pan inventional level and interconnectedness across the pan family level

There are potentially many other levels above this following the same structure.

Today I took a first look at the video format. How to make video instructions collaborative friendly and open source. As said this is a first run we will return to once the project starts in earnest.The same sort of analysis will be done to every aspect and every medium.

Things to consider
Multiple resolution and aspect Ratio
No overlays
No Presenter (Value of the presenter? Complicates modification)
Narrators (how to make multiple voices feel normal)
Source Material
Padding and filler (different languages take different times to say the same thing)

What are the source materials of a video?
Editing Suite files
Animations (has own source material)
Unedited Footage
Audio
Music
Transcripts & Subtitle Footage
Time Data (unedited video cuts and activities, edited video cut and activities, and transcript)
Allow editors in other languages with enough time data
Still images

I am looking for people who produce technology, people who produce the documentation, people that train others how to use it. People who work inside appropriate technology and development and people who work outside it. So let me know if you are interested or know anyone who would be interested in joining.

Here is the simple needs map I have come up with an I am hoping to build upon in the workshop.

It identifies what we would do with all the resources in the world and what to do when we don’t have that in the three areas of operation of a piece of open source appropriate technology. Hopefully when this is finished people will be able to map out the areas relevant to their operation and minimum standards for each area can be defined.

Consider this the launch. See the about page for more