Water Wellness

Today marks a great sadness as Steve Jobs, one of the great designers and innovators of our time, passes. Amongst the vast homage being paid to this great man in the online community there is the recurring theme of his design principles of going beyond just what something looks like while still creating something that retains sexiness and brings joy to people.

I recently wrote to colleagues about designing for glee and it is only now, on reflection, that this was Apple’s influence on me incarnate. I’ve had a Mac laptop for a few years now, been through several generations of the iPod, and what was the common thread between them? They were all a joy to use.

I was recently asked by a District Government Officer to help him design a database that could track information that was arriving in his office on sanitation indicators across different health centers. It was a simple excel spreadsheet, but design principle was still there: it had to be a pleasure to use. In particular, Mr. Mbowe wanted to calculate the percentage of villages that were “Open Defecation Free”, a status conferred upon a village when each household has a latrine, handwashing facility, and a cover for the latrine hole. If all three conditions are met, the village is considered ODF.

In excel, this is a simple thing to automate. If columns 4, 5, and 6 all equal 100%, make column 7 say “ODF”. In fact, I set it up like this initially, but it didn’t seem quite right. ODF status is a big achievement for a village, and no less of an achievement for Mr. Mbowe, who oversees the implementation of the program. So I asked him about it: would he prefer if it was automated, or would he like to punch “ODF” into the database himself?

A smile crept across his face. “I want to write it in,” he replied.

And that was it: the glee factor. It wasn’t just about having the database. It was also about him reveling in a moment of success as he watched the stats come in – a quiet fist pump that he could enjoy in his office. Automation would have diminished that for him. He wanted to punch it in himself, savoring every letter of O-D-F as he did it.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Mr. Mbowe. At 7 PM. On a Friday. Even I had checked out for the weekend. He called to tell me about how well things were going with the database, and how much he was enjoying using it. It was the kind of call I never expected to get at that time of day from a local government employee, let alone one with enthusiasm about an excel spreadsheet. But he was thrilled.

Whether it be graphic designers in Chicago, hipsters on iPhones in London, or District Officers in a remote district in Malawi, we all have the desire for the technology we use to contain fun, glee, sexiness – you name it. The point is that it goes beyond a pure utilitarian function. Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that, and the legacy of design that they began is sure to continue, to the benefit of us all.