8: Resetting the system: inno-native solutions?

Now there’s a whole world between the handmade chipande from Malawi and the pencil sharpener from China. We here would all love to have the chipande and cherish the beauty of the crafted object. Very Wabi Sabi, good stuff and with an interesting biography. But it’s made in extreme poverty, and as Satyendra Pakhale mentioned in his talk during the Dharavi Museum Conference in Amsterdam (2016) “We can’t glorify human suffering, there’s simply no beauty in it”. 
The pencil sharpener might also be made in poverty, we don’t know. Looking at it, we think it’s funny, but we don’t need it. Still, things like this fill toy stores and market stalls all over the world. And after a while end up in mostly unrecyclable wastefills. 

So if this is the reality, how can the SDG’s ‘encourage companies to get on board on our collective journey...’?  It makes me think of a few of the words in Chochinov’s Manifesto (2007) : stop making crap. Could it be that easy? Can we encourage companies like this Chinese one to change? To evolve their businesses and make durable items, from decent material and functional? Their products are bought by clients. Merchandising companies, shops, fun fairs and so on. They order, and then it’s produced. And bought by customers who look for a small gift.

So if companies stop ordering these things and ask for other stuff, would that be a change? It’s too easy to blame just this kind of  Chinese manufacturers, we also have to look at their clients and their clients. Customers. Here the previously mentioned 'diffusion of responsibility' (Rau & Oberhuber, 2016) pops up again. And it's fun, this car, when you win it in a game at a birthday party as a child. You take it home, put it in your room. And then? Use it a few times and forget about it probably. So in the once-a-year-room-clearing event it's probably thrown away and becomes a mess of mixed and non-recyclable waste. 

But you don't know all that as a customer. You don't realise that when you need small gifts for that party. You don't know who designed it, you don't know which materials it consists of, you don't know who made it, you don't know where exactly is was made, how it was transported and ended up in the store you bought it from. You also don't know what will happen to it once it's thrown away. 

Let's try to envisage a system to ignite implementation of SDG12. How can we invite designers, producers and wholesalers to enroll on a global scale?
There's concept which I find very interesting: inno-native system solutions, or inno-native design; locally contextualized solutions. The London School of Economics summit on Africa in March 2017 stated: 'One main challenge in design is staying true to spaces' identities, displacing indigenous groups and customs. In Africa, to overcome this challenge means that there should be the utilization of resources that are readily available and are well suited for the environmental, political, social and economic landscapes. The most remarkable aspect of inno-native design is the adaptation of local natural environment to solve social problems." Constructing resilient houses in a city in Nigeria with rising water levels, providing solar energy in rural areas or using local materials are a few of the examples in this regard.

This is another example of an inno-native solution: the dabbawala lunch delivery system in Bombay, Mumbai in India. Each one of approximately 175.000 individual lunchboxes is picked up every day from a home, transported to a central place and from there delivered by approximately the 4000 dabbawala’s -who make this system into maybe the world’s most ingenious distribution system- to the receiver at his or her desk. 

Each lunchbox  has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered. 

Looking deeper into this, it is a system which has been developed over centuries and within the local culture. In that sense it also relates to cultural biography; in this case of a system rather than an object. That makes it strong and durable. Besides that it provides sustainable food, no waste, sustainable transport, a decent job and health both for the dabbawala and the receiver of the lunchbox. (Feeding the City, Rongaglia 2013) Quite some SDG's together! 
The inno-native angle is a local angle. But could we learn from it for a global approach?