Preface

I’ve never written an essay or post that had a preface before - there’s a first time for everything! The piece below is more personal than my normal approach, and when I had finished the first draft I realised that it represents in many ways my current world view. A view arrived at over a fun and trying journey, told in bits and bobs throughout the piece. As a “state of Irshaad’s world view” it does a good job of tracing the past to the present, but I do wish I had previous “states of Irshaad’s world view” to compare this to. I hope to write one like this every few years, to plot the evolution of my world view.

It’s also not a particularly heavily researched and referenced piece, despite making very grand claims and proposing large ideas. Instead it relies on accumulated thoughts over a long period of time (and was itself written over a period of four months).

Additionally, I grew tired of this piece towards the end and it is reflected in the spotty editing. Some parts are dull and even worse, occasionally confusing. They say however that “perfect is the enemy of the good,” so I embraced the recklessness that accompanied my impatience and I’ve put it out there, warts and all.

I was always a builder

Sometimes my Nani (maternal grandmother) reminds me of how, when I was around 6 or 7 years old, I used to play at the back of my grandparents little linen and habby store in Potchefstroom11 A little South African town 150km away from Joburg, with a deep Apartheid history building all sorts of things with the empty cardboard boxes that stock used to arrive in. It was habby/material/linen shop, and as all proprieters of habby will tell you, you end up with enough cardboard poles, plastic reels, and material off-cuts to keep a (aspiring engineer) kid happy for days. Mostly I built housing type stuff, but none of the cardboard structures maintained any structural integrity.

Figure 1: My primary school dart-gun

A few years later, in my Mayfair West Primary school in Johannesburg, my friends and I made and sold darts (see Figure 1 in the margin - I rebuilt it and oh the nostalgia!). A sheet of paper, a needle, four matches and some thread was all you needed for a (useless)22 Despite reasonable sales, I doubt we managed to make one stick in any target dart. Mrs Meyer put an end to that, but not before I thought of connecting the dart to the inside of a Bic pen, which has this spring in it that when opened, allows you to shoot a white plastic cap quite some distance. Essentially a dart gun. Again, I never managed to make the integration between Bic cap gun and dart work, but I remain quietly chuffed at the idea.

We moved on from low key arms dealing after Ms Meyer’s intervention, to using a small pocket knife to cut patterns in erasers. Our most popular design was an erasure with a Rockford Fosgate(yes the car sound people) logo cut into it33 I still wonder at why the RF logo was culturally dominant in our age group, but the logo itself has lovely straight lines to work with in this kind of sculpting thing.. Even here though, it was a very rough product.

In high school, I only built a mild tea drinking habit.

In my first year of engineering, I remember standing in the North West Engineering Building at Wits University, with some lofty words of what an engineer does inscribed in large writing on the east wall (at least this is how I remember it), trying to build a vice-grip. Not one to easily relinquish a pattern of failure, my vice-grip wasn’t very good. I kept that vice-grip for some years, but have since lost it. What I have kept until now though, is my memory of what I thought of those words on the wall. The words that described what an engineer did.

I don’t remember the exact words - it was something about an engineer “adding value to society” - but I do remember thinking how utterly boring that sounded. Especially given, just a few meters away, hung a real life fighter aircraft suspended in the middle of the triple-volume lab. I was there to build fast, beautiful cars and planes and machines, because as that most inspiring BMW advert reminded us: “the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”44 See Theo Jansen’s BMW advert here and a fascinating New Yorker video about Jansen’s work here So I was there to build “cool” stuff, not to add what-what to society. Who was society anyway?

At my time at Wits, I finally moved on from a “builder who always fails” to a “builder who sometimes succeeds.” In particular, I built many “charitable” projects with many teams, some of impressive logistical complexity55 Selling raffle tickets (the original crowd funding) to raise R1mn and then packing thousands of food parcels on the library lawns over multiple days with storage facilities all over campus, all done by hundreds of volunteers, was my highlight of 2008. A glorious time indeed.. I was drawn naturally to these “do good” projects as both an aspiring industrial engineer (logistics! optimisation! fun!) as well as a long family history of involvement in non-profit work.

The industrial engineering curriculum itself at Wits at that time, particularly the design66 Hello Dr Hattingh! and ops research courses, was in introspect invaluable in helping me become a “builder who sometimes succeeds.” I remember fondly our first project of third year design to redesign a informal recylcer trolley. Looking back now on the design solution (see Figure 2 in the margin), my naivety is glaring and cringe-worthy.

Figure 2: Trolley project

The charity projects and my final years of study helped me find my strength as a builder: systems. I learnt quickly that I excelled in being able to zoom in and out of design work, and join the details of one sub-system with the broad framework of another. I discovered that I could be incredibly detailed and thorough when required, but I was (and remain) particularly drawn to what I now know as “systems architecture.”

It was in this period that I first started exploring the idea of marrying the “social” and the “technical”, although I doubt I used that framing at the time. My involvement in non-profit work, already embedded in my identity, provided rich material for my “socio-technical” interests. After all, I was both a keen builder and keen to make the world a better place (a theme that runs true to this day).

My track-record of hit-and-miss when building continued into my early working career, but thankfully less due to me and more due to “politics.” A few years into my working career, I found myself in the pleasant but surprising situation of being the lead systems integration engineer for Eskom’s77 South Africa’s electricity utility which generates roughly ~45% of all of Africa’s electricity first Concentrating Solar Plant plant. I had become a professional systems engineer, and I would later go on to become the “Engineering Design Work Lead” for the company’s second and third CSP plants. Sadly, none of the plants were ever built, due to the energy politics of the day.

However, a great deal of design work went into CSP 1 before it was “cancelled” and it afforded me many learning opportunities. I spent much of that project learning from and working under Dr. Xavier Garcia-Casals,a privileged time. The work that, in retrospect, most shaped my “building” approach was our work on Performance Guarantees and Acceptance Testing (PG&ATs). Since we were planning to build what would have been a plant that pushed the boundaries of what CSP was capable of as a technology, innovative PG&ATs were necessary. The PG&ATs were required to balance contracting risk (Eskom is infamous for mismanaging construction projects and we were determined to avoid that situation) with technical risk. How, for example, would we test the thermal performance of a central receiver88 Which was being asked to achieve performance never before commercially requested, such as in the event of the plant following a “load following operational strategy,” would the receiver integrity be maintained or would it be compromised by excessive incident solar flux directed onto it? and tie this performance to financial consequences?

It took me some time to recognaise it, but this delicate balance between risk management (itself a balance between many factors like organisational risk appetite and market willingness) and technical performance is a classical socio-technical problem. What the CSP construction market could provide, what risks and financial penalties they would be willing to agree to, what risk Eskom was willing to accept onto it’s balance sheet, were all primarily social factors. On the other hand, the maximum solar flux that a central received could endure without sustaining permanent damage while still allowing quick reaction times is primarily a technical challenge. Bringing these worlds together, which was essentially the job of the system integration team (Xavier basically, with some assistance from me), was formative in what is my current “building” approach.

The latter years at university and my early working career gradually brought me around to the realisation that building “cool stuff” that pushed technical boundaries was perhaps not where the greatest progress could be made. For example, developing a thermally superior material for a CSP receiver in a lab is one thing, and an important thing certainly, but perhaps providing the commercial/funding framework to bring this technology to the direct benefit of people is where the heavy lifting and bigger progress lies.What gradually became more interesting to me was not the boundaries between “art and engineering” but rather the boundaries between the “technical” and “social.” Over the years, the “socio-technical” lens has come to dominate my perspective.

I still find technical boundary pushing amazing, having watched in awe at the achievements of SpaceX and GPT3, but am now more naturally drawn to the social (hello “ethnography” and “sociology”). Other than being more sorted to my “building systems” talents than cutting edge technical work, it’s also easier to disguise (explain away) failure in social sciences :)

Technology sometimes sucks, sometimes not, but we can do better

Having carried this “socio-technical systems” perspective with me since those early years, and armed with my desire still to “build a better world” I have found myself exploring many different fields of ideas. In more recent years, I found myself captivated by the world of Science and Technology Studies (STS).

The STS field of study is one I find fascinating - it has significantly impacted my outlook on technology. For a while I made what is seemingly a very engineering mistake when reading STS literature - I took the critical analysis of technology that STS provides to describe the way things are always made. It left me quite deflated - all i saw was this concept that I once found exciting, called “building”, result in all kinds of harm and inequality. From the impact of highways on black communities, to coal-plants impact on the climate, to algorithm impact on gender maters, and the list goes on. I was, for a while, disillusioned by the whole idea of building anything.

Figure 3: Ratatouille

It took me a while to realise that while STS’s central job is to provide essential critique of technology99 I can’t help but capture my favourite quote about critics here, from one of the greatest movies of all time: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends” - Anton Ego, Ratatouille, that does not mean technology is, in fact, entirely bad. Here’s a tweet that captures my initial journey in STS:

Figure 4: Prof Danya Glabau on engineers and STS

Prof Glabau (who has the awesome job of being an anthropologist of Medicine and Technology!1010 Her intro course to STS is really worth checking out here) makes point here, I think, that while STS describes how tech is done, this is not the only way it can be done.

A similiar sentiment is expressed by Prof Sasha Costanza-Chock in their book on Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, which is an absolutely absorbing read for people interested in trying to “build a better world” (their words). They write, ever so eloquently:

“Popular narratives of design, technology, and social change are dominated by techno-utopian hype about ever-more-powerful personal devices, “intelligent” systems, and “Twitter revolutions,” on the one hand, and totalizing, pessimistic accounts of digital surveillance, disinformation, and algorithmic injustice, on the other. This book strives to ground our understanding of design, technology, and social change in the daily practices of activists and community organizers, who have always struggled to amplify the voices of their communities “by any media necessary.”1 As I hope to demonstrate, new information and communication technologies (ICTs) not only take shape in Silicon Valley, they also emerge from marginalized communities and social movement networks, both during waves of spectacular protest activity and also in everyday life. My broader goal is to advance the growing conversation about the pitfalls and possibilities of design as a tool for social transformation."

— Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice (Information Policy) (pp. xvii-xviii). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

There are then, both “possibilities” and “pitfalls” in employing technology to improve people’s lives. In my much less elegant language, technology sometimes sucks, sometimes not, but we can definitely do better.

Prof Chock (whose book I’m still reading) writes extensively about the concept called “Design Justice”1111 The Design Justice Network’s Website is a super intro to the idea. which she notes also goes by many other names - “social impact design” or “design for good” etc. There’s also the term “public interest tech” which I think is a very descriptive name1212 There are some interesting resources on this page worth exploring.

All of these ideas and concepts collectively seek to provide guidance on building a better world, through the use of technology and design. This objective, in broad terms, sits at the intersection of my personal interest in socio-technical systems and “doing good.”

These fields of knowledge and practice, organisations of people, actual technology and much more provide rich and encouraging input for someone like me. However, as a set of guidelines for me personally, there are other questions that remain personally unanswered in my general objective of “building a better world.”

I explore some of these questions in the sections that follow.

What does it mean to “build a better world?”

So let’s all become politicians, then.

Wearing a systems hat, as I almost always do, it does seem like I’m implicitly advocating for people to become politicians in order to build a better world. The architecture of society seems to be heavily determined by politicians in a democracy, with the “elected representatives” making decisions that decide the weight of competition versus government intervention in all manner of cases.

I’ve seen activists say, many times, that the only answer to is to organise.Tweets like this one from the now popular US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (who exemplifies the idea that to make a difference, one must become a politician, having been bartender as recently as 2013, but also a life-long organizer), support this idea:

Figure 5: AOC tweet on organizing

You can detect a similar (but also slightly different) vibe around an online debate that occurred last year related to March Andreesan’s essay, “It’s time to Build.” It was met by a predicatable response. many builders loved it. Many STS scholars didn’t. And many people countered that it was not a shortage of building appetite or capacity that was hampering progress, but rather a lack of the willingness to act. Here’s an insightful essay from Ezra Klein where he says: “So let me end with my answer to Andreessen’s question: What should we build? We should build institutions biased toward action and ambition, rather than inaction and incrementalism.” Klein is advocating organizing and activating and being politcal, rather than building actual tech, as the key mechanism to progress.

I find this argument a much better one than “down with capitalism” but still not persuasive enough to be an absolute position. I think that there is ample evidence that organizing political power can yield tremendous results in improving society. There is sufficient evidence to prove that politicians themselves can be a major force for good. After all, I’m South African - the country of Nelson Mandela.

But not everyone can be Nelson Mandela, or AOC. In fact, organizing and activism and politics are all specialised skills in their own right, requiring specific skills and knowledge. Not only do I think that everyone can’t be activist or politician or organizer, but I think that relatively few people can.

We still need builders. And accountants. And plumbers. And maintainers. And everyone in between.

But I’m especially interested in the builders, since I consider myself from among this tribe of people, if at the fringes. More specifically, my own set of skills have left me asking probing questions like how might engineers be more politically aware, and even politically active? How might builders build systems to work with politics and not against it?1414 This sounds very pop psych, and it recalls to mind an article I read years ago about how the Dutch learnt to embrace the sea and not fight against it. In every cliche there is usually some deep seated meaning You can always rely on me to introduce the socio-technical approach.

My view then is that we need to both build and act to make the world a better place, each person cutting according to the cloth of their talents and resources. I also suspect that there is potentially a magical space in the overlapping space between the two, but that is a post for another day.

It is worth clarifying, very quickly, my view on the “activism” involved in my framework and advocated for here when I say we must “act”. As is probably clear from my position on capitalism vs. socialism, I’m not in favour of any brand of activism that seeks to “burn everything down and start afresh.” This is mostly due to being unconvinced that there is a better way to rebuild, should we burn it all to the ground. Social democracies like the kind that exists in many places in the world are maybe not great, but I still believe it to be the best we have (yes, I do sound a little like Churchill1515 Who said: “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” here). I am then an advocate of “changing the system from within” rather than burning it all down, because I can find no evidence that a bloody revolution will yield better results. Also I am remarkably ill-suited to armed struggle - irritable bowel syndrome and all the rest.

Tools and Tea

So far I’ve made a decent case for what is in truth a somewhat bland argument: we need to build, and act, to create a better world (or more specifically, socio-technical systems that benefit everyone). Not exactly new, or controversial, or significantly different to the mainstream view.

Despite the argument’s lack of novelty, I believe it to be important. The most important tasks for humanity are often in plain site. This call, to build and act to create better systems, is a call to tackle of the world’s biggest challenges.

As a broad goal, this call is good, I think. It’s also personally very useful for me as the process at which it’s arrived at dealt with some hard questions ("what about capitalism? What about politics? What about revolution?). However, it does feel like it requires expansion to be more useful, particularly for engineers like myself. In aid of greater usefulness for engineers and specifically myself then, I want to propose two specific steps:

Have more tea

And that brings me to tea. Tea is my beverage of choice, and a super facilitator (in my view) of honest conversation. Engineers need to have more conversations, open-ended ones, difficult ones, with people from all walks of life.

My friend Noma, board member at EWB-SA, shares my enthusiasm for wholesome conversations powered by tea. She recently started a series of conversations called #teawithnoma that tackles difficult conversations - the first installment was around “Black Lives Matter.” It’s really worth following her for up-coming conversations.

But tea conversations are really a short-hand for “learn more about the world by embracing it.” Embracing is used here in a “wide” fashion, and this could be achieved by reading more widely, or watching more diverse TV, or listening to a broader range of music. Essentially putting ourselves in the spaces of others, with humility and permission, such that we may learn.

But nothing beats conversation over tea to learn more about other people. I wonder, for example, how often senior transportation engineers in South Africa have open conversation with the people they’re designing for, say a security guard in their own offices(designing with people is better than for, but I’m fairly certain this is rarely the case in South Africa at least).

And learning is the first real step to developing opinions on what the tools we build should look like.

It was, for example, a conversation with some friends in Harare some years ago about Tanganda1919 A brand of tea popular in some places in Zimbabwe and Rooibos2020 A plant that grows in South Africa, and from which tea and other beverages are made tea that catalysed my interest in the “political economy” of tea. And here I ask you to indulge me with another meandering anecdote, so that I can demonstrate the value of “embracing the world.”

Figure 6: Five Roses Tea

Tea, my daily hot beverage is, to no surprise of any reader of STS literature, deeply intertwined with power, colonialism, and global trade. My daily drink is a brand of “Ceylon tea”2121 I drink a brand called Five Roses which to my fascination still refers to Sri Lankan tea as “Ceylon” brewed Indian style of course, and already in the names (Ceylon is the colonial British name for Sri-Lanka) and method (brewed with milk) of my daily tea prep, the impact of colonialism is clear. But my home, South Africa, is famous for it’s Rooibos.

Rooibos tea, like any South African commodity has a complex past and present. The book, “Steeped in Heritage” by Sarah Ives (which I cannot claim to have finished, a failure not related to its excellence) paints the complex picture. Originally enjoyed by the Khoisan people in what’s know as the Cederburg region near Cape Town, it’s now a big global business. Ives notes that in 2011 Rooibos was a $70 million dollar industry.Yet, the herb is the center of “fierce contestations over nature, race and heritage” (Ives). Marketers often promote Rooibos as an indigenous medicine, but the question of indigeneity is fraught with complexity. Here are a few lovely extracts from the book that provides the context:

“Rooibos’s global commodity chain brought farmers and workers into dialogue with transnational movements centered on indigenous products. By examining the industry’s emphasis on the plant/ commodity’s indigeneity, I explore the effects of combining indigeneity and the market— in an area where both heritage and the market were hotly contested. “Rooibos tea is a fabric of society,” a white farmer said as we sat in his office sipping tea and looking across his fields. In tension with effusive narratives about rooibos’s nativity, the region was peopled with two groups who do not fit easily into discussions of indigeneity: “white Afrikaans” and “coloured” South Africans. Coloureds, a South African racial category, were often considered impure and denied nativity to anywhere, while Afrikaners espoused a “white African indigeneity” that was itself fiercely contested by coloured and black South Africans who stylized them as “settlers” from Europe. 2 Afrikaners could trace their history in the region as far back as the seventeenth century."

— Ives, Sarah Fleming (2017-10-19). Steeped in Heritage (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) (Kindle Locations 227-236). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

“Both coloured and Afrikaans residents appeared trapped in a liminal state— neither unequivocally African nor European, yet intimately connected to the indigenous ecosystem that they cultivated and called their home. They were the people of this place, but also the people of no place.”

— Ives, Sarah Fleming (2017-10-19). Steeped in Heritage (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) (Kindle Locations 246-248). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

“Today, commercial farmers— who are almost exclusively white— oversee the cultivation of approximately 93 percent of rooibos, while small-scale coloured farmers, unable to access significant amounts of land, cultivate less than 7 percent (Sandra Kruger and Associates 2009). 5 Commercial farmers expressed their own feelings of connection to— even love of— the land.”

— Ives, Sarah Fleming (2017-10-19). Steeped in Heritage (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) (Kindle Locations 276-280). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

It’s worth noting here, for any international readers, that the word “Coloured” is a formal SA racial category, and has a distinctly different meaning in South Africa to other parts of the world. I have a fun story to tell about how this was navigated on an EWB-SA project - see End Note: On “Coloureds”

But really, what does all this social complexity around Rooibos the commodity have to do with engineers?

Well, I beg your indulgence for yet another anecdote, which, as is the case with my style, meanders its way to making a point at the end.

My previous conversations with people about Rooibos tea that led to my exploring the dynamics of Rooibos led also to me taking the picture below. The picture is of a Rooibos drink being sold at the till point of a Nandos restaurant in the UK.

Figure 7: Rooibos at a London Nandos

Being in the UK, at a global restaurant chain that originated in my home town (Joburg)2222 Many of my British friends are surprised by this, but yes, Nandos started in South Africa, and now has over 1000 stores in 35 countries., and armed with some ideas of the complexities around Rooibos, the drink naturally instantly reached out to my imagination. My first instinct was not the social however, but rather the economic.

While I hesitate to go as far as Bill Gates does when he calls himself a “card-carrying capitalist,” I’ve already declared myself above as a fan of markets and a even bigger fan of entrepreneurship. They create value and jobs, in my view. So this new brand of Rooibos drink brought me some happiness - this meant jobs for people in Cederburg, in SA, and somewhere in the world. A good story.

My second instinct was to think of the technical, of the engineering2323 Having trained as an industrial engineer, it’s tough to shake off the supply chain perspective. I wondered at the supply chain that enabled the transport of the flavour of a bright needle type bush on the tip of Africa to a liquid drink sold at restaurants in one of the world’s biggest cities, thousands of kilometers away. I knew instinctively that to supply Nandos in the UK with product for a Point of Sale (POS) promotion, the drinks company would have had to demonstrate the ability to consistently deliver some minimum quantity of the product. I wondered vaguely that such a contract would mean having to rely on some minimum number of Rooibos bushes to be grown back in SA. I wondered idly how variances in plant quality would require recipe adjustments. All technical challenges - challenges an engineer is readily available to put their skill set towards solving.

Finally, and embarrassingly late, my thoughts turned to the social. I wondered how much of the astronomical price I paid for the drink2424 No shade meant for the drinks company - everything in pounds is painful for someone that earns in Rands would be captured by the farming community back in SA. I wondered further how much of that value would in turn be captured by the labourer on the farm, as opposed to the farm owners. I wondered ever so briefly whether this kind of scale of promotion was agriculturally sustainable2525 Much later, I would go on to reflect on the weird alignment of Nandos having once made an advert to combat xenophobia by demonstrating (controversially) how everyone other than the Khoisan are immigrants in South Africa, and the same for-profit company now marketing the “taste of South Africa” as something that was for centuries the exclusive knowledge of the Khoi-San people.

At the time my thoughts stopped there. But there’s much, much more to be reflected upon here. Taking, as is my nature now, the socio-technical systems perspective, we can link this anecdote to the role of engineers. Employing the techniques of system architecture2626 See this super book on System Architecture that cover some of these techniques and some of the theoretical frameworks supplied to us by STS2727 See this page called “before you make a thing” in the Theories and Concepts section, we can begin to encourage a supply chain engineer in the Rooibos industry some questions like:

• how might the total addressable market (TAM) for a Rooibos drink impact upon the agricultural sustainability of the plant itself?2828 At what point, if any, might demand for a Rooibos drink force farmers into only growing Rooibos, thus damaging the bio-diversity of Cederburg
• how much of the retail price is captured by each stakeholder in the supply chain? And where are the lumpy bits?2929 Could a supply chain engineer introduce competition(markets!) or encourage protection (government!) in strategic parts of the chain to enable a more fair distribution of value?
• how might the marketing power behind the health benefits of Rooibos, together with the purchasing power of a business like Nandos, be used to bring greater benefits and representation to the farmers of the plant?3030 like previous programmes like the Nando’s chilli initiative.

The questions above proceed from more “engineering-y” (i.e. technical) to more social. The first question is something a supply chain engineer would be comfortable building an Excel model and writing a report on3131 Complete with the necessary disclaimers that market data came from the marketing department so “trust it or don’t, Senior Exec”. The last question is far further outside the comfort zone of a traditional supply chain engineer.

This last question is also an example of how an “opinionated tool” might be useful - lets assume that the supply chain engineer takes the position that more of the value should be captured by farmers rather than say, shipping agents, they can look for greater efficiency in the latter portion (a typical optimisation analysis) and pass on the gains to the farmers.

The larger point behind the shift from a technical emphasis to a social one, is that this is a journey is only possible for a supply chain engineer if they deliberately broaden their perspective. If they choose to look beyond the technicalities of supply chain and ask question of the social nature of that same process.

The only way the engineers even begin to start asking some of these important question, is if they start “drinking tea” with people unlike themselves.

#toolsandtea

I made the call earlier to “build, and act, to create better socio-technical systems.” I then expanded that idea to be more useful, by proposing two (slightly more specific) steps. Firstly, build more opinionated tools. And secondly, “drink more tea” to understand people from all walks of life.

To end, in true new economy style, I propose to attach a hashtag to this call: #toolsandtea. While I could not find any STS work on how hashtags change the way we think (and not just how we communicate)3232 No doubt someone has worked on this and I simply haven’t found it - but the closest thing I did find was this piece on hastags being cultural forms, I feel like hashtags can come to represent a particular way of thinking about the world3333 Take for example, the #selfcare tag.

More specifically, I would like #toolsandtea to come to represent a way of building for a better world.

Words: ~6000

End Note: On “Coloureds”

The word “Coloured” refers to an official racial category in South Africa, along with others like “Black” and “White.” During the first implementation of EWB-SA’s Design Challenge in collaboration with EWB-UK and EWB-USA, the community we worked with was a South African one called Makers Valley. This meant writing a Design Brief for international consumption that contained the word “Coloured.” As we quickly learnt, this led to a ton of challenges since the word is fairly offensive in the UK (ironically, since the existance of these categories in SA is in no small part due to British colonialism) and even the US. It was, to my mind, a fantastic instance of how language and power and history all brush up against each other in the 21st century. Ultimately, we resolved this tension by using it as a “teaching opportunity” and included the following text in the Design Brief:

Figure 8: EWBs Makers Valley Design Brief, 2019

One of the best explainers of this complexity is this essay “Don’t tell me who I am, black man” by a South African writer and radio show host, Eusebius McKaiser. Work checking out to learn more about this complexity.

Bibliography