This internship has been full of little daily epiphanies. Sometimes they’ll hit me on our morning walks, during our long talks at dinner or when we come up against a challenge at work. I had an epiphany recently when we were brainstorming ideas for some kind of casing or way for our suction pump shut off device to interface with the actual suction pump machine. Charles and I were sketching out and talking about different ideas. Mine were usually rough geometric depictions of a device from indeterminate materials, while Charles’ included very specific materials and methods of assembly. His first question after I described one of my ideas to him was usually, “But what would it be made out of?”

It hit me that in the US, I was taught to brainstorm and approach projects with the unarticulated but nonetheless present assumption that available resources were not an issue. I think the idea is to promote unbridled creativity and to leave the realities of procurement, assembly and cost for a later stage in the design process, (but with the knowledge that barring prohibitively expensive components almost any tool or material is often just an Amazon order away.) Here, the feasibility of the idea from a procurement/cost/assembly of materials perspective is an ever-present consideration, and often the first determinant used in whether or not to pursue an idea.

At first I was very frustrated by this reality in relation to the design process. It seemed that by necessity, a resource-blind phase of the design process where innovative ideas are born in the US was being skipped over entirely in Malawi. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the scarcity of resources wasn’t something to be ignored; it was something to be embraced. If we fully accept and understand the resources at hand, then they become just another set of design criteria. And well-quantified design criteria don’t hinder design, they foster better, more relevant, more effective design.

To clarify, “locally sourced materials” and “sustainable practices” are buzz words I’ve heard a lot at Rice when talking about global health products. I guess I’d always just looked at them as things that were barriers to good designs rather than as gateways to better designs. It was a little epiphany, to be sure, and one that seems blatantly obvious to me now, but since I started thinking about resources as a design criteria, it has transformed the way I look at engineering in Malawi. Now I see that it’s only through fully embracing challenges rather than ignoring them that we are lead to sustainable and meaningful solutions.