Speaker: Miguel Chaves
There are two lines of research in the world about decreasing poverty in low-income communities: (1) to create solutions and share them with people living in low-income areas or (2) build the capacity of people from low-income areas to create their own solutions. Maker Spaces to BoP have showed great results to the strategy two. The lecture has the goal to expose all the experience we have learnt in the last three years to project, implement and manage a Maker Space in a favela in São Paulo - Brazil called Innovation Center Vila Nova Esperança (ICVNE).
The terms “social innovation” and “social innovators” have become commonplace expressions in technology and development fields. More people have created new kinds of businesses and solutions to create positive impact in the society instead of just bringing interests to the partners of the company. However, in the last two decades, most resources available to build solutions for international development challenges were provided to institutions in richer countries. Most of the solutions, therefore, were coming from outside the local context or community. There are very few examples that show low-income people as responsible designers for good solutions. Several reasons try to explain why this has happened, but one essential reasoning is the belief that well educated people have more capacity to reach a good solution for any context, even if these people do not belong to the local culture or context. However, the main results of this methodology are anything but understanding and positive. The four main results are: dependence, lack of user needs understanding, (and, as such) little or no sense of ownership, and lack of maintenance.
In order to address these four problems, different approaches to social innovation have started to be tested. One model that tries to explain these different approaches are called Design For, Design With, Design By. If this model is studied deeper, it
