I was at a Wellbeing in Low Income Communities workshop at Helsinki School of Economics this week, where we got to grips with one of the field’s core challenges: ethics.
Businesses entering into BoP markets are often faced with an ethical dilemma. How does their offering match the market’s culture? Will their offering have an undesired or even negative effect because it fails to address the value gap?
Prabhu Kandachar, professor at TUDelft, told a story that illustrates this ethical dilemma perfectly. A company developed an affordable ultra-sound scanner for the Indian market. It was meant to improve pregnancy healthcare and pregnant women’s quality of life. But the company soon discovered that the scanners were being used for gender selection.
How should the company deal with this? Stop designing? Seek answers from the ethical experts? Keep designing, learning and trying to solve something that seems unsolvable? Or proactively attempt to design new behaviour patterns and value sets in the country so the product is used as intended? That’s according to a western value set, at least.
As a designer, I think the way forward is focusing on context. Address and understand the underlying contradictions – whether they be cultural, economic or social – and make the solution fit. And most importantly, remember that policies and visions alone won’t bring tangible differences to users’ everyday lives – to achieve this, we need well-designed products and services.
But as we all know, this takes time. And doing something is far better than doing nothing – especially in healthcare, where a well-intended product can suddenly affect basic human rights.

“These people have a high bullshit meter,” said Niti Bhan, founder of Emerging Futures Lab, at Designit’s Business with the Poor seminar last week, referring to the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day at the base of the socio-economic pyramid (BoP). The aim of the seminar was to provide a fundamental understanding of new BoP markets and how design can be a strategic tool in this new context. We had a great turnout – with participants from the corporate, non-profit and academic world – proof of the growing interest in the field.
Everyone quickly had an aha-moment: this isn’t merely about making products cheaper! It’s about understanding a life of adversity – and developing solutions to meet these needs.
Which brings me to Niti’s point about the bullshit meter, a cynicism engrained in the unique mindset of the BoP customer. And how design consultancies can help companies target BoP markets.
BoP projects are design intensive. The market is demanding. And for all the wonderful visions currently emerging from businesses and policy-makers, one thing is missing: results. Designers go the last mile – materialising visions in a way that is meaningful, relevant and valuable to the user. This is what we do in collaboration with Emerging Futures Lab.
And yes, that means getting companies past the bullshit meter…

Rubbed my eyes an extra time checking out from my local IKEA Saturday morning. No manned check-out counters but 100% self-service. So… I scanned my purchases, paid them and simply walked out. Looked back over my shoulder a couple of times to check if someone was following me, but no. Strange how honesty can make you feel criminal – please control my bags somebody! No really, good thinking, IKEA and thanks for reintroducing simple stuff like trust! I’m sure we’ll get used to it. And that you will manage to almost double your check-out throughput (an IKEA employee told me from 45 to 75 clients per line per hour) by letting us do the job.