A normal day for me takes place in two languages, spans multiple cultures, and is in a world unlike anything I knew four months back. But despite all these obvious ways in which I have had to adapt to a new environment, the hardest thing to adjust to has been realizing how the local education system hasn’t fostered the same thinking skills that I picked up throughout my life. Taking a step back from the world of farming that I have been rapidly learning about, this entire experience has shown me how the mental tools an education equips, or fails to equip, someone with can make all the difference.
I started dwelling on the rote learning education system in Myanmar as we used design thinking in our project. When I joined the team, this project was loosely framed as Proximity’s first step into precision agriculture. But unlike many precision farming contexts, farmers here are not looking to install automatic, weather-monitored irrigation systems and run their farms with GPS programmed tractors. We’re working with smallholder farmers who still do everything manually. Their land size is too small to justify investing in advanced technologies or machines. But even without selling complex gadgets, we can still design tools for them to improve their efficiency and efficacy. As we tackled understanding farmer needs and potential solutions, some parts of the process came naturally to the Myanmar team members and others seemed terribly confusing. One day, I gave a presentation on how a certain sensor technology worked, and my teammate quickly created a working model from scratch, demonstrating that he grasped everything I said. The next day, I found him collecting data with no understanding of what the data was useful for. In pieces, the design process makes sense and they excel. They conduct and discuss user interviews with incredible attention to nuance. They build and test with great creativity. But connections to the big picture are often lost. The next steps after an interview or the highest priority data to collect are harder to identify. So where does this ability to think more abstractly come from?
Throughout my schooling, I was taught to ask questions and not blindly accept everything that the teacher said. I was taught to acknowledge when I don’t know something and learned how to find the missing information. I was taught to compose complex answers to open-ended questions rather than being told what to think. But here, things are quite different. Children are taught to memorize answers and recite what they know. They are handed information, not taught how to seek out knowledge on their own. Growing up in this way, following clear procedures and repeating what you know is far more natural than exploring a vague design process or learning through collaboration. Even the process of researching (or using Google) is a skill I have developed through years of practice, an opportunity most educated people here haven’t had. Realizing how these problem solving skills are vital but untaught, a group of my colleagues and I joined together to teach design thinking in a more accessible way for all Proximity employees.
Proximity is already at the forefront of using human centered design, yet not everyone within the organization understands how this applies to their work, practically speaking. On the design team, we use this process more often, but even then, people know design thinking is important without understanding why. To begin tackling this gap, we created “design boot camps.” During the course of a day-long workshop, employees go through the design process from beginning to end. They conduct interviews and brainstorming sessions, all the while learning new tools to approach problems. We completed the first of three workshops this past week, and I was blown away. We haven’t suddenly made everyone fluent in design thinking, but we affirmed that these skills can be built with practice. Here I was living in a different country, teaching people of all backgrounds, running these workshops in two languages, and still it reminded me so strongly of my human centered design class in college. When I looked around and saw every team moving post-its around on a wall, discussing (in English or Myanmar or both) user needs and solution spaces to explore, the creative energy made me giddy.
As I have been observing the various thinking patterns within our design team, I’ve also been observing how these patterns are prevalent outside of Proximity. Some colleagues and I recently attended a conference discussing soil health and fertilizer recommendations for farmers, a future area of interest for Proximity. This conference in Nay Pyi Taw (Myanmar’s capitol) was hosted by a foundation who has developed a hand-held soil nutrient reader. The conference was intended to combine the knowledge of private and public stakeholders and explore room for partnerships. But as the conversations progressed from informative to dysfunctional, I saw these rote learning patterns of thought emerge.
During the conference, I facilitated a small group brainstorm which can be best described as a shouting match. I was leading a group of 15-20 government agriculture researchers. As they shared their knowledge, they stood in a circle around me and spoke simultaneously, each eager to put forth more knowledge than the next. If I managed to get the group’s attention and ask a question, they would pause momentarily. Because as soon as I stopped speaking, they resumed exactly where they had stopped, as if I had never said anything at all. I managed to condense this chaos into some shareable insights, but I came away exhausted and sympathetic to how difficult a partnership with them could be if every discussion went similarly. Every person from the government that I spoke with was eager to help and cared adamantly for farmers, but they were more focused on sharing what they knew best rather than learning from anyone else. It was easy to feel frustrated. They weren’t seeing the bigger picture and they weren’t thinking about the underlying needs of the farmers. If we could just approach this whole problem with a human-centered-design approach, maybe we would develop really impactful solutions. But that isn’t fair of me. They were problem solving with the mental tools they were taught. It just so happens that these tools may be highly limiting.
Getting engaged with human centered design philosophies was one of the most exciting steps I took as an engineer. It opened my eyes to what problem solving could look like with a wider solution space, more creativity, and a greater concern for user empathy. Even beyond my life as an engineer, I am convinced that these attitudes and ideas should play a role in addressing issues of any nature. When we finished the boot camp, someone said they could use these skills to improve the way they write reports. Someone else said they wanted to go home and redesign their closet to be more user friendly. Many people said they were suddenly seeing scope for design interventions everywhere. As I’ve worked at Proximity, I’ve realized how these flexible ways of thinking are such a huge advantage. Breaking free from the limitations that rote learning imposes could be a huge step in unleashing potential and capacity building. And as I saw in Nay Pyi Taw, could play a huge role in opening the floor for much more cooperative and functional partnerships. Yes, I’m hugely optimistic about these ways of thinking and maybe they just feel like buzzwords, but when you see how transformative this process can be, I think you may understand my enthusiasm.
The first row of photos are from the Chinese New Year celebration in Yangon. My friend said it was bigger than the festivals she had experienced in China.
The next row and the top photo are from Nay Pyi Taw. This was the strangest place I’ve ever visited. The roads are 14-20 lanes wide and deserted. The hotel we stayed in had built a restaurant inside a plane, calling itself Sky Palace. The rooms themselves had enough empty space for a few more beds. The Parliament building was a palace made up of 30+ mini-palaces. And it has a moat.
The two photos below are from the design boot camp. As an intro activity, everyone split in pairs and had to sketch their partner. We have some artists in the mix!
Lastly, two old and random photos. The first, an old photo from my trip to Pakkoku. Compared to all the government and private company staff at the conference, we stood out as having much stronger ties to farmers. The second, a moment caught by Jim (the CEO and photography hobbyist). For those of you who remember me working/sleeping in obscure places in college, you can rest assured that I still do it.
