Developing sustainable applications

From The Collaboratory

Contents 1 Personnel 2 Criteria 3 Planning process 3.1 First things 3.2 Know where you are 3.3 Think it through 4 Processes and materials 4.1 Choosing for sustainability 4.2 Compromises in prototyping 5 When you are on a site team

Personnel

• All Groups and Teams depend on the commitment of an advisor who makes a long term commitment to the client and team. An advisor:
  • is the Group or Team's memory between generations of students;
  • empowers student leaders while also protecting the long term interests of the client and team;
  • makes hands-on professional contributions to the work while mentoring team members.

Read about our commitment to shared leadership and guidelines for a beneficial relationship with your advisor or student leaders.

• Peer mentoring.
  • The Collaboratory experiences 100% turnover of student personnel every 4 years. Members of a sustainable project team will help recruit and peer mentor their own replacements.
  • Student leaders and their advisors are encouraged to name assistant Leaders and Managers, so that current leaders may peer mentor them for a semester or more prior to a leadership transition.

Criteria

The Collaboratory is committed to developing sustainable applications that local people can use, maintain, and, when appropriate, replicate. Sometimes it is important to meet an urgent need whether or not the action is sustainable in the local culture and economy. To the greatest possible extent, however, we strive to satisfy the following criteria for sustainable design:

• Availability: Are the needed material (parts and supplies), personnel, and capital resources available in the local community, or could they be readily introduced?
• Know-how: Does the client already possess or have access to knowledge needed to execute processes related to the application, or is there a plan to transfer knowledge to the client?
• Reproducibility: Can the application be managed, maintained, and reproduced by local personnel using available tools and know-how, or is there a plan to equip the client with these?
• Affordability: Is the client able to pay material, fabrication, operation, and maintenance costs, or have access to capital, and do they receive a net benefit?
• Local Units: Do any physical artifacts called for in this application use dimensions and parts in the local units of measure. Note: local units in most of the world are metric.

Planning process

First things

Sustainable problem solving:

• Begins with humility that enables us to be students before we are servants:
  • to learn about the priorities and resources of local people.
  • to discover and protect what God has been doing in the community before you arrived.
  • to work hard to insure that your work does more good than harm.
• Works through all of the development phases listed below.
• Requires multiple generations of dedicated student workers.

Know where you are

Developing sustainable solutions is not a linear process, but a team generally focuses on one or two of these areas at a time, and must work through them all for a good outcome. You must know the phase you are working in to know what priorities should govern your present work.

1. Research - This project phase WILL take time, and it is time well spent!
   • Learn from people in communities where you hope to work. Is the project a response to their self-defined needs and priorities?
   • Use library resources and internet search tools to identify documents that describe the state of the art and best practices for your application. Do not overlook works published by government agencies and NGOs.
   • Identify other organizations working in the same field and contact them to develop contacts and gather documents they can make available.
   • Write a "literature review" report on the state of the art.
     • Summarize enough detail about facts, theories, and processes to equip future team members with a solid foundation for their work without repeating your research.
     • Back major points with reference citations, and attach a comprehensive bibliography.
   • Upload a pdf of your report to your Group's wiki name space and add a link to the file from your Team's project page.
2. Design
   • We hear the word "design" and often think of artifacts like cars, toasters or computers, but all applications require design: writing a newsletter, building a data base, crafting a business plan, developing an educational curriculum, and creating a process for making bio-diesel all require design.
   • A good paper design is a good beginning, nothing more. The design is unfinished until it has been shaped and reshaped by experience gained through testing, prototyping, and client feedback. Read on!
3. Testing
   • The purpose of testing is not to learn if your design will work once, it is to determine if it will work again and again.
   • Testing puts your design to work under simulate use conditions, deliberately seeking to identify weaknesses and learn from failures.
   • Physical artifacts should be tested over time and/or under accelerated stress conditions until they fail, so that we can know the failure modes and improve the design to avoid them.
   • The importance of testing is proportional to the consequences of prototyping. If a failed prototype puts life and limb at risk, or poses a significant financial threat, then extensive effort is warranted in testing.
   • International Site Teams are expensive, so when a Site Team plans plans to implement a prototype then extensive testing is required before the team is authorized or assembled.
4. Prototyping
   • Prototyping is an extension of test-and-redesign loop of the development process, only now you expose your application to the actual use environment, where factors impossible for you to simulate or predict are encountered.
   • Through prototyping you learn form the actual use experiences of your clients and improve the design accordingly.
5. Manufacturability (artifacts only)
   • Artifacts that will be reproduced, including most engineering designs, go though the critical development phase of manufacturability.
   • A well designed, tested and prototyped artifact amounts to very little without a manufacturing process that others can execute.
   • Developing a sound manufacturing process can itself spawn new design projects for equipment, fixtures, and processes that will enable reproduction of the design.
6. Implementation
   • Implementation is the process of putting into use an artifact or process that has been previously designed, analyzed, tested, and prototyped.
   • Implementation is very significant for projects with large, single-copy artifacts (such as solar power installations or irrigation systems).
   • Scheduling and time frame:
     • Implementation often (although not always) involves a short period of focused work, such as that of a site team on location.
     • Other times, implementation is gradual and is embedded in other phases of the project, such as modifying existing tricycles as improved designs become available.
7. Sustainability
   • Applications become sustainable in other communities as we give away away knowledge resources, financial control, and management oversight so that others may reproduce the work on their own.
   • The goal of sustainability demands that we work ourselves out of a job, to avoid dependency and preserve the dignity and self-determination of the local community.
   • Empowering others is serving with an open hand, insuring that we do not unintentionally gain unwanted power over others.
   • The work of sustainability must be accomplished through relationship building and partnership through ALL phases of the application development process.

Think it through

• The enthusiastic beginner often bypasses the research phase entirely. Preferring to roll up their sleeves and "do something", they end up doing again the work of others.
  • Until your team has done the hard work of studying AND documenting the state of the art you are not ready to move on to design.
  • Don't let a few years in the laboratory save you a few weeks in the library.
• Many beginners think they are done once they have put their first design on paper (No kidding!), and we have struggled to convince new student members to take up the work of testing, prototyping or reproducibility. Without completion of all phases no real service is rendered.
• Today, most Collaboratory Groups and Teams have matured to recognize the important role of testing, but too little testing is happening in our local facilities and too much in the field.
• Prototyping is a crucial development phase that follows testing.
  • Without a working prototype the team has no practical knowledge of how well their idea satisfies the need.
  • Following the initial field research, a Site Team should NOT be considered before there is a working prototype.
  • A prototype is not a finished product! Prototype artifacts or processes must usually be further tested, refined, and analyzed for manufacturability prior to being implemented.
• Few Collaboratory project have yet recognized or pursued the sustainability phase, or reproducibility aspect, of development.
  • This phase generally leads to a new slate of sub-projects to facilitate local reproduction of the idea or design.
  • For technologies this often means developing manufacturing processes, fixtures, and tools that will enable maintenance and reproduction of the technology in the local culture and economy.
  • Even for projects with a single artifact as the deliverable, the project does not end with implementation. The project team needs to continue working with the client to ensure that the artifact is sustainable prior to declaring the project complete.

Processes and materials

Choosing for sustainability

• Sustainability requires the use of locally available materials.
• Introduction of new materials, parts and tools to the host community is permissible and may be desirable so long as the following criteria are satisfied.
  • Introduction of the material, part or tool does not violate local values or damage existing markets.
  • The creation of a supply and market for the new material is sustainable within the local economy, often by incremental advance.

Compromises in prototyping

Keep the need for material and process sustainability in view at all times, but these concerns should not keep you from timely implementation of an initial prototype. Prototypes help a team gain practical understanding of use patterns and design criteria, and they can provide clients some immediate help with their need. Implement a functional prototype first and work to remove compromises on sustainability through the iterative design process.

You need not finalize material and process sustainability until you get the to the reproducability phase of the development cycle. Until then reasonable compromises may be made to keep things moving forward. For example, you might use a non-sustainable material or import a part now if you think it reasonable to expect that a sustainable alternative may be substituted later. Prematurely limiting the design to local parts and processes has hindered many in the essential work of developing a prototype.

Bottom line: the long-term goal of sustainability is sometimes superseded by the near-term necessity of a prototype.

When you are on a site team

A Site Team’s time is limited and the expense in time and money of transporting them to the field considerable, so the “cost” of not completing prototype work for lack of materials is very high. Our local partners are more adept than we at securing needed tools and supplies, and improvising when needed. They will do so if we are thorough in teaching the construction of new designs, and enabling construction by creating assistive fabrication fixtures and leaving good documentation.

• Take what you need. - Even when materials, parts, and tools are locally available, finding and purchasing them on site takes time, often a lot of time if your team is traveling outside of the US. Moreover, many item are not consistently available. It is a small problem for local people if their "corner shop" runs out of something for a few days; but it is a huge problem for your site team if they are out of it on the day when you need to buy it, especially if you are buying in an urban area today for three weeks of rural implementation.

• Take more than you need. - For the same reasons, Site Teams should take more than the minimum materials and parts than needed for their projects, so that a single error, malfunction, or lost tool does not jeopardize the mission and considerable cost in time, effort and money to place a team in the field. The team may consider, depending on your budget, leaving duplicate tools as a gift to help the client with maintaining or reproducing the application.

• Build in redundancy. - Expect the unexpected. Local conditions can and will thwart your plans so that a tool or process you planned to execute is rendered useless. If there is an alternative way to get a job done bring what you need for that possibility, again to protect the investment of time and money made to get your team to the work site. Common tools and supplies for the kind of work you plan should be packed whether or not you have an identified need for them.

BOTTOM LINE: Plan to use local resources, but carry ALL of the materials, parts and tools needed from the US to complete construction of prototype work; carry EXTRA materials and parts in the event of error or loss; and when possible carry ALTERNATIVE tools and supplies for key parts and processes.