Designing for Social Value in Difficult Countries

Debbie Aung Din and Jim Taylor are co-founders of Proximity Designs, a social venture that designs, makes and markets affordable products and services for rural families in one of the world’s poorest countries: Myanmar. Over the past nine years Proximity has sold more than 180,000 products and services and has directly improved the incomes of over 2.5 million rural people. Learn how design is being done in an environment with extreme constraints. With more than 20 years’ experience living in the developing world, Aung Din and Taylor shares their practical experience of creating a design lab in Myanmar and applying user-centered design methods on the ground in the creation of life-changing products and services. They also show how Proximity is using design methods in their research and advocacy of national policies with the new government of Myanmar, exploring how the deep knowledge and design work for rural customers can converge with the design of macroeconomic policies to create social value on a national scale.