For 8 weeks in 2020, I lead a team of 4 designers through a project in partnership with the Eastern Africa Grain Council and the Rockefeller foundation to reimagine open air markets in Kenya; with the hope that this work would foreground similar exercises in other African countries.
If you have visited markets in Kenya, you’ll probably know that they are places where contact is nearly inevitable, with little distance between the people working and shopping in it, which in the context of a global pandemic, calls for a reimagining of how these spaces are built.
In the first week of research, we asked ourselves: Has anyone tried to do this before? To what extent? What can we learn from them? We quickly realized that reimagining open-air markets on the continent is an extremely delicate endeavor. In fact, we learned that there had been several failed attempts to build new markets in East Africa - ghost structures which have been rejected by vendors who preferred to sell outside. According to our partner, there are currently at least 17 of these empty markets in Kenya alone, but in general, these failed attempts go largely undocumented.
Research process
We chose a qualitative approach and focused on listening to the stories of market participants: vendors, operators, porters, shoppers, market leaders and administrators. With covid 19 lockdown measures in place, we had to adapt our research methods to conduct design research from afar. We also worked with community participants to conduct research with us by sharing a research workbook with comprensive guides for the 4 key areas we were interested in. Through remote phone and video interviews, observations at low-traffic times, WhatsApp chat conversations, and socially distant focus groups, we were able to gather insights from over 80 people in 7 markets in Nairobi, Kiambu, and Nakuru.
We also learned from secondary research and explored markets beyond Kenya using satellite imaging. We visited markets in places like Morocco, Japan, and Turkey; and were able to learn from some of the world’s oldest and most resilient markets. We gathered insights on how their structural design solved problems related to space, interaction, and day-to-day operations.
Learnings
We realized that the preconception that open-air markets in East Africa were disorganized stemmed from a misguided belief that organization has to be visible to the naked eye, meaning an industrial system with rows, categories, labels, signage, etc. However, this type of ‘modern’ organization only applies if markets operate on neoclassical economic principles, with supply and demand as the driving forces behind the choice of stock, pricing, and consumption. Which, we found not to be true. We learned that many ‘good’ market projects fail to be adopted by vendors because they don’t structurally enable mutualism - which is how vendors prefer to do business.
We believed that our role as designers was actually to unearth the relational practices that are foundational to how vendors do business. To illustrate these practices to our partners, we used the following methods:
Animated video: In this video, we use illustrations to share the idea that a functioning market is a delicate balance of 3 building blocks: people, space, and economics. The way these building blocks interact on a daily basis is highly contextual and has spatial consequence which varies by location, community, time of day, and commodity.
Inspiration: Throughout this project, we virtually visited 25 markets from around the world. We presented what we learned from them and showed some of the features that inspired us most, such as the lightweight multipurpose and stackable containers used in the former Tsukiji market in Japan, or the adaptive floor plan of Jemaa El Fna in Morocco, which is many different types of markets in one single day.
Insight stories: We also used storytelling to share the behaviors of market participants which had the most spatial consequence. We tried mapping out these behaviors through illustrations, diagrams, and collages. We explored interpersonal relations between market participants and their impact on physical interactions and density in the market.
Concept sketches: It is nearly impossible to talk productively about a space without being able to visualize it, especially when neither our team, nor our partners can go to the field ourselves. Our deliverables featured many sketched out concepts responding to market participants’ commercial practices and aspirations. We sketched all our concepts and shared these sketches with market participants on Whatsapp to get their opinions on the strength of the concepts. We created a rating scale for each concept that we handed over to our partners so they could see for themselves which concepts resonated most or least with market participants.
Implementation playbooks: We also handed over a series of playbooks to accompany our partners’ implementation journeys and offer a blueprint for community participation, continuous learning throughout the process, and an experiment based approach to implementation (start with features and build up to a full scale market as opposed to build a complete market). (include playbooks pages).
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