This project is a collaboration between Cardiff School of Art & Design and Cardiff Medical School’sZambia Collaboration, which supports Zambia’s Chongwe region community in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. These goals include reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and achieving universal primary education.
Its aim is to improve the lives of people in rural Zambia through the development of new knowledge, techniques and insights. The team are employing disruptive innovation based on rapid, prototype-based ethnographic appraisal techniques and plan to use the knowledge acquired in the development of radical but culturally, politically, economically and legally appropriate medical product solutions.
The people of Chongwe are active participants in this process. Cardiff Met’s Academic Associate has joined the Cardiff Medical School-led multidisciplinary team. Last year she began carrying out a needs analysis with Zambian staff including healthcare professionals, volunteers, government officials and charities and has now started to design prototype product solutions. A major reason Chongwe was chosen was its impressive record in introducing innovative initiatives despite its peoples’ lack of resources and poor living and working conditions.
The project will achieve sustainability by ensuring that the solutions it offers are based on a close understanding of the needs of the people of Chongwe, their resources, capability, culture and knowledge. The plan is to develop solutions that can be produced locally using practical and available materials and processes.
The team at Cardiff School of Art & Design is contributing design and ethnography expertise. It is comprised of Dr Gareth Loudon, Professor Steve Gill and Clara Watkins. They are working with Professor Judith Hall (OBE) from the School of Medicine, Cardiff University who leads the Zambian Cardiff Collaboration initiative