Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

Panthea Lee, co-founder of Reboot, spoke today about post-disaster work in Pakistan at the A Better World by Design conference at RISD/Brown. Reboot works with governments and social institutions to redesign their systems and services. Lee is a game-changer to watch in the newest generation of social designer-innovator-entrepreneurs.

Core77: How did you get involved in working with international governments?

Panthea Lee: All my life I had wanted to be a journalist, I grew up writing: done deal. I was all psyched to go to journalism school, had my bags packed, and then my parents go, 'We did not immigrate to Canada and struggle for twenty years as poor immigrants so that you could go on and be a starving journalist!' So I wound up in business school. After that, I did the business school job for a while in management and consulting, then went off to China to go be a journalist.

I was traveling a lot in the developing world. Being young and stupid, you're like, 'Why does stuff not work? Why don't people have things? Why don't people have food and healthcare systems?' So I started reading up on development and trying to understand the structural aspects of what was going on. I think it started out of youthful anger and then instead of just reporting about social problems, why not try to work on social problems?

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

Prior to Reboot, you spent time working with UNICEF and other NGO's. What did you learn?

I think we've agreed that capitalism is not going away in the near term, so what is the role of big business and how do you do development sustainably? If they actually treated poor people as actual customers instead of people who just wanted aid, they would actually design things that people wanted. You realize that in the public sector and in NGO's there's no accountability.

So a company makes a lousy product. They put it out to market and people don't like it and the company has to make a better product otherwise they go out of business. With a lot of these NGO's, people assume they're doing a lot of good work and then they design a program poorly or design a bad service and they put it out there and beneficiaries have to use it because they don't have any other options. There's no accountability.

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

So what skills do you bring to the table? You're not exactly your average designer...

I think I bring the understanding of the development practitioners and the policy makers. Design for social change is a very "sexy" topic and you see a lot of design firms now going to the public sector and to NGO's saying, 'We're designers, we're here to help you!' And they're like, 'What are you talking about? You don't speak our language, you don't know development theory, you don't know our approach.' It helps to know why things are the way they are today because so much of the time you see people jumping in and saying, 'We're going to design for change and things are going to be better.'

But what's the context around why we have these problems to begin with? What has already been tried? I think design firms—well-intended, very talented—don't always understand that and so I think governments look at them a little weirdly. With most of the people from Reboot, we come from those kinds of organizations and we know what we don't know. I think that is an advantage for us.

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

It seems like every design firm these days has some kind of product that's going to change third-world countries. Is that really what the world needs—more products? Even if they're better-suited for third-world countries? Or do people just need to learn to make do with what they have?

I think the challenge with a lot of these products is that people say, 'We've gone in and done our research. We understand the local context.' And then they go and design something for that existing context: 'Oh, there's no energy, there's no clean water.' That's a good temporary solution but... why don't people have clean water? Why are people hungry? Someone said, 'Let's make this emergency food with nutrients so people can have just one meal a day.' That's not a solution!

People get really excited that they can do something to help poor people. I think the best thing you can try and do is change that system, whether that's working with government actors or with communities to unearth insight embedded within. I think that is much better than designing a new product that will solve some temporary thing. Ideally, it'd be great if all these products were obsolete—if these problems didn't exist to begin with!

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

And is that what's great about service design? That you're not adding on any extra waste or products—you're just taking what exists now and rearranging it till it works?

I think part of it is an environmentally sustainable solution and I think things could be better if all the pieces worked together in a more efficient way. It's a tangible way to improve outcomes.The resources are here between us all. But how do we design a system that takes advantage of that, rather than a new thing to do it? I think the realization about the linkages between human rights and services isn't well-articulated.

Image courtesy of Jan Chipchase

What needs to happen—what do you need to do—for the world to be a better place, a week, a month, a year from now? What is that massive change?

This is kind of naive, idealistic 13-year-old Panthea, but I think if we just had a better understanding of the repercussions of our actions, that would have impact outside just enlightenment. If you realize the decisions that we make and the actions that we take have repercussions for people all over the world, I think we would learn to change both our individual day-to-day habits in what we do and we would learn to channel our energies to reverse some of the effects of the damage we've caused.

I think it's just really sad how a lot of the world gets screwed over by the actions of a tiny, tiny minority. I don't think people are inherently bad. We make bad decisions because we're trying to satisfy the needs of the corporation, of the institution, of the masters that we serve. We benefit our corporations, but at what cost to everyone else? [If we understood our actions] I think we'd make better choices in our careers, in our personal lives... we'd make better choices as people. It's not a new thing we're going to develop.

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See all of our Better World by Design 2011 coverage:
» Day One recap
» Day Two recap
» Day Three recap