MOSAIC
Secondary education through woven craft
BACKGROUND:
An estimated 250 million adolescent girls live in poverty worldwide. Many of these girls are responsible for labor-intensive household chores; their economic independence and human potential is often greatly constrained by complex and interrelated cultural and socio-economic factors such as limited access to education, child marriage and teen pregnancy.
THE CHALLENGE:
To envision and develop an ecosystem of access to tools, products, and services, “an ecosystem of access to things,” with integrated scalable and sustainable business models and strategies.
THE IDEA:
Inspired by the Girl Effect – the unique potential of adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world – We designed Mosaic. The Mosaic program encourages girls to continue their secondary education through a crafts collective where their creativity and artistry is valued along with their schooling.
☛ This project was sponsored by Nike Foundation and was done in collaboration with Fuseproject and Yale school of management | Fall 2014 | Pasadena, CA
Click here to learn more. You can also download the Girl Effect book here.
The Design
System overview
In the Mosaic ecosystem, NGOs would oversee the program to make sure that revenue collected from sales would finance the girls’ education. Transparency is a must to overcome any child labor infringements.
The toolkit: Loom + Needle + Comb
The tool kit has various features that makes it exceptionally different from existing looms in the market and suitable for usage by adolescent girls.
1- Portable:
The tool is light-weight and easy to grab on; Therefore it can be carried around and be used in between tasks.
2- Safe with integrated blade:
In order to reduce the injuries caused by sharp and heavy cutting objects that are usually used for weaving, Mosaic has an integrated blade that is safe and won’t get lost.
3- Easy to use needle
The needle does not have a hole. Instead, it has a dent that the yarn can be tied around. This allows girls to use the needle in places where there is little light and with yarns made of different materials and thickness.
4- Material: Polypropylene
This material makes the loom light, flexible and long-lasting. Also, it is inexpensive to manufacture.
5- Flexible loom with outward needle
Flexible material makes it easy to get the piece out of the loom with no need for knot tying. Also, due to outward teeth of the loom the piece wouldn’t slip out.
6- Multipurpose comb
The comb can be used both by the girl and for the weaving.
7- Longer needle
The longer length of the needle makes the weaving faster as they can weave each row in one go.
Final Pieces & Reward Cards
Girls have a lot of freedom when making their weaved pieces:
- They can follow a pattern or use their creativity to make up a new design.
- They can use any material that they can find including yarns, beads, wood, fabric, and etc.
- They can make it a group activity and collectively make a larger piece.
- And they can share their learnings and techniques with one another.
When they return their finished pieces they with get more weaving material and a story card as a reward. These cards are also given to girls when they first get the loom as an intro to Mosaic is and how it works (like an illustrated user manual). Here are the values these cards bring and photos of a few examples of these illustrated story cards and some finished weaved pieces.
1. Building community
The illustrations and the fact that each girl will get a different card makes it a piece that girls would feel proud of and want to gather and share their stories with one another.
2. Sustaining engagement
These cards can help keep girls motivated to make more craft and feel rewarded for it.
3. Goal building
All these cards depict stories of girl power and the influence that they can have through their education. Thy also inform them about the various paths they can have to be successful, making sure that they don’t have a tunnel vision about their role in their environment and the society. This will motivate them to create long-term goals, know their value, and feel energized to achieve their goals.
System Transparency
The woven pieces will be scanned or photographed in order to get uploaded to NikeID system to be used as pattern for customized shoes. There is also a link to the Girl Effect website so that people can learn more and donate as well if they are interested. This will bring the following values to the system:
It makes the system sustainable and less dependent on charity and funding.
It will add local patterns and unexpected designs that can appeal to various markets around the world.
Give more exposure to the Girl Effect program. Right now it has very limited exposure on Nike’s website and lives on its own separate website.
Creates a sense satisfaction and loyalty, as user sees that the brand they are shopping from stands for something positive and they can be part of that mission too.
Stories and transparency of this feature makes the brand a Lovemark!
The Design Process
As part of our design research and conceptual development process, we explored many “A Day in the Life” scenarios and considered the current tools girls use daily for sewing, mending, cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood, as well as other tasks.
1- Picking a category to focus on: Making
Insight 1:
Girls are not seen as worth the cost of secondary education, which leads to higher chance of marrying early, early pregnancy, loss of potential income and future opportunities and continue the cycle of poverty (Domino effect).
Insight 2:
“Making” is the only category that gives girls the skill set and ability to be financially beneficial for their family (short-term impact) and themselves (long-term impact).
What if girls could self-finance their own education by making craft?
2- Narrowing down on one craft: weaving
Weaving is a girl-specific craft found in many countries and cultures, many of which are developing. Also, weaving is very time-consuming, low paid, and tedious yet there are many colors and materials and patterns used around the world. Due to so much potential for improvement in this craft we decided to focus on weaving.
3- Issues with current looms and weaving tools
According to Good Weave :
“The weaving and handmade rug industry is mostly dominated by girls ages 6 to 16. These girls are paid very little and are subject to malnutrition, impaired vision, deformities from sitting in cramped loom sheds, respiratory diseases from inhaling wool fibers and wounds from using sharp tools”.
Other issues with looms and weaving tools are:
1- Boring work environment that does not allow for creative expression.
2- Weaved pieces take a long time to finish and does not offer them time for education or play.
3- Lack of transparency and workplace abuse.
4- Defining the opportunity and ideation
I our ideation we focused on ideas that combine education, skill-building, and community.
5- Product development
In this phase we went through an iterative process in which we tested as many as 7 different looms and weaved with every single one of them to get to our final design.
The following were our main considerations for designing our weaving tool:
Health and safety
Bringing an ergonomically designed loom can help prevent various health issues that current looms cause.
Mobility
Designing smaller looms that can be carried around by young girls, enabling freedom of mobility
Community
Creating a sense of community through collaboration will bring girls out of isolation, and empowering them through connection
Flexibility
Allow girls to make on their own time, i.e. in between tasks during their busy schedules
Creativity
Craft making allow girls to be creative and is a form of self-expression
6- Testing
We tested our prototype by sending it to a girl from Burkina Faso. We only gave a brief introduction to how Mosaic works and let her use whatever material she had to weave a piece with it.
Here are some notes from our experience:
1- We were pretty impressed by how beautiful and ornate her work was and realized that these pieces don’t necessarily need to be patched together in order to build a bigger piece. Rather, they can be used and sold as a piece of art by themselves. While this is extremely valuable for financial health of this system, it somehow diminishes its community aspect and increases the risk of exploitation.
2- The girl who made this piece really enjoyed being free and creative to make what she wants yet find it hard to use our needle with this type of natural yarns as they were slippery, hard to knot and thick.
3- Nike team found the idea of using the patterns in NikeID very smart and creative, however, due to their past history of child labor in their factories, they prefer to not give the press any reason to revisit those news.
