Bricolage at large
Why borrowed tools tend to beat bespoke ones
In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss coined a term for a particular kind of intelligence he saw operating outside the engineering tradition: bricolage. He was describing a “science of the concrete” practised by people who solve problems with whatever happens to be at hand. Where the engineer asks “what’s the right tool for this job?”, the bricoleur asks “what’s already in front of me that could do this job, or most of it?”.
Lévi-Strauss thought of bricolage as a form of intelligence in its own right, sometimes more rigorous and more durable than the engineering alternative, because every solution is shaped by the actual constraints of the situation rather than some imagined ideal of a clean slate.
Most development funding is still clinging on to that ideal of the clean slate. The default in most innovation programmes is still to reward bespoke kit over off-the-shelf. But a fair amount of evidence suggests that, in environments where there are multiple constraints, the bricolage approach is most effective at producing impact.
Something borrowed, something better
Ted Baker and Reed Nelson, in their 2005 study of resource-constrained entrepreneurs, found that teams who routinely combined existing materials in unconventional ways produced enterprises that survived constraints that should have killed them.
In those kinds of environments there has to be a ruthless focus on the questions of a solution’s feasibility, its viability, and if it will have real impact. And once you start asking these questions the ‘borrow and bricolage’ route starts to make sense very quickly.
To begin with, the work is much more likely to survive its real conditions from day one. Without an air-conditioned lab phase, everything that ships has already proved itself in the conditions it will need to survive in.
Borrowed tools also tend to last longer than bespoke ones because they run on skills and supply chains that already exist locally, so maintenance doesn’t depend on a single specialist provider who might disappear at the end of the contract. Additionally, bricolage almost has to happen in the room with the people facing the challenge, which means the solution gets shaped by its users, increasing the likelihood of its usefulness and durability.
Ten years of borrowed tools
Brink has spent the last decade working on the FCDO-funded Frontier Tech Hub. Last week Lea spoke at the FCDO’s Global Partnerships Conference, telling the stories of just a few of the 108 pilots the Hub has backed across 44 countries.
Some of those stories really did involve genuinely new technology. There were pocket DNA sequencers in Colombia used to identify trafficked wildlife, and satellite imagery in Mexico that helped families locate the clandestine graves of disappeared relatives. But across all 108 pilots one of the most common ingredients is an existing technology being asked to do a different job.
Take Anick Lubinda, a dairy farmer in Zambia. She used to walk 7km to the nearest depot to sell her milk. The journey took an hour and 35 minutes, by which time the milk had often soured in the heat and she’d had to sell it cheap. Through a rent-to-own bicycle scheme piloted through the Hub, the journey was cut to 40 minutes, the milk stayed fresh and Anick’s income doubled.
In Senegal, a pilot retrofitting traditional fishing boats with electric motors needed to know how far the boats travelled in a typical week. Instead of building a bespoke GPS app the team gave a group of boatmen the fitness app Strava to get the data they needed.
In Pakistan, a robotics lab designing a wildfire detection system needed to train their AI model on footage of fires, but they were struggling to find the data they needed. Their ingenious solution was to use footage from video games like Red Dead Redemption.
Designing for adaptive reuse
A few patterns that might be worth chewing on if you’re designing or funding this kind of project:
Innovators tend to do better when they lead with what they’ve borrowed rather than burying it. A pitch that says “we’ll build this from three things you can buy in any electronics shop, glued together by a piece of code we’re writing” tells a reviewer something useful about the team’s judgement.
If you’re a funder, the question is whether your processes reward this kind of ingenuity or filter it out. Most innovation panels score ‘novelty’ explicitly and ‘fit’ implicitly. Reversing those weights, even slightly, changes both the field of applicants and what they propose. A bolder move would be to write a brief that asks applicants to “borrow three existing tools and tell us what happens when you wire them together.”
And there’s a question worth asking on either side of the table before any big commitment. What could you put in front of real users in 30 days with the budget you already have? Whatever the answer is, it tends to be worth doing first, because the version that can be running by next month is usually closer to the durable version than the five-year plan.
None of this is an argument against new technology. Some problems do need new tools. But over ten years of doing this work, we’ve found that the experiments that travel furthest tend to be the ones where somebody looked sideways at the problem and asked whether the answer might already be in someone else’s pocket. Far fewer of them start from a blank page than you’d expect.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
Related: Murmurations and collective intelligence (which we wrote about a few months ago).
There are currently 1,838 of you reading this newsletter. In April 1838, the SS Sirius became the first ship to cross the Atlantic powered entirely by steam, in part because her crew burned four barrels of resin to stretch the coal supply. The newspapers preferred a more dramatic version where the crew burned cabin furniture and a mast, a story Jules Verne later borrowed wholesale for Around the World in Eighty Days. Either way you look at it, that’s a lot of creative borrowing.
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