Base of the Pyramid

In designing for the Base of the Pyramid, Whitney and ID research associate Anjali Kelkar boldly explored the contributions design could make to informal economies in disenfranchised parts of India. Ensuring a consistent content format, the team used a modified version of the POEMS framework, which stands for People, Objects, Environments, Messages, and Services. Developed at ID, POEMS helps document how people interact with the designed world and provides a user-experience framework that helps analyze physical, cognitive, social, and cultural aspects of daily life. For the Base of the Pyramid, the team generated a system of concepts with a high-level design criteria, such as access to credit, economic opportunities, and secure earnings, and then mapped them first to a list of needs for basic living standards, such as employment, safety, shelter, and water, and then to design criteria to ensure that no concept existed independently, and each was intrinsic to the system.