ages of aid. Providing often leads to dependency, and in the worst case to de-skill-
ing (Hamdi 2004). Instead of a monologue aid of “be like us”, a forced and speeded
modernization, a small change approach is harmonizing small efforts to reach a
wider aspect of improving the livelihoods and assets of in the relief-development
continuum (Hamdi 2006). This means enabling rather than providing and learn-
ing to build rather than get things ready-made.
For Hamdi, small change as a design and development practice has no end point.
It is a starting point for empowerment, but the output of the process can indeed be
small scale, community based, visible and tangible. “Start small and start where it
counts.” (Hamdi 2004: 139) By co-developing themes, theories, tools and tech-
niques the participants are engaged in the process and able to influence it through
every step. Not only to support the building of houses but also improving health,
providing security, building community and generating income. It is a practice
supporting self-organized informal markets as well as the shipping of material,
closely participating with the inhabitants. As shown in many of the examples in
Kirkby, O’Keefe, & Timberlake’s Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Development,
keeping the project flexible is a key issue for this type of development, letting it
merge into larger programs or in synergetic modes emerge into new shapes (Kirk-
by et al 1995).
Nevertheless, the small change project needs something with which to be flexible
from or around. The small change needs a proposal or an initiating discussion. The
risk is otherwise that the small change just becomes a patchwork of haphazard re-
forms with no aim or just being indifferent. This is where designer competence be-
comes a crucial asset to the project, because the designer can design proposals to
discuss and ideas to lift the discussion from the actual to the virtual – the possible.
The sketch, model or prototype of the designer has new possibilities actualized in
it, possibilities that before only existed virtually, as a potential state but out of sight
for us. Here the skills of the designer are to summon the virtual into an actualiza-
tion, into a model. Often it is not enough to come with a simple proposal, but it
must also contain a leap into the unconsidered or perhaps the forbidden - a slight
provocation. The designed model thus becomes a “provotype” (Mogensen 1992), a
radical and generative prototype threatening the short sighted “taken-for-granted-
ness” of the routine. In Mogensen’s proposal the designer, or system developer in
his case, takes the role of the benevolent provocateur, being expert, facilitator, and
provocateur in a single designer role, to “provoke discrepancies in the concrete”
(22). This approach challenges the preconceptions and “blindness” of the partici-
pants in the design process and puts new alternatives on the table (Mogensen 1992:
15f ).
This “provotype” design is a hands-on reduction of the risk of dialectical small
change, the change where the improvement of conditions are stuck in the “anti-
mode” or reduced to a small NO. Instead the designer helps with the actualization
of the virtual through small steps and participatory discussions. This is what brings
the small change forward. It is a model where design not only changes things to the
more desired condition (Simon 1996) but in addition brings forward what does
not come naturally, and proposing the realizable (Krippendorf 2006). Here the
designer is provoking the naïve, playing with the virtual to open new action spac-
es.
Development projects are a matter of safekeeping assets built by the participants,Ithaca Hours is a local currency in
Ithaca, New York, and a version of a Local
Exchange Trading Systems (LETS). It is an
example of a complementary currency that is
based on a local, non-profit exchange network.
LETS works as a “public transport” of
values when official currencies are lacking or
are wanted to be kept out of the local curcula-
tion. Hours-based LETS facilitate exchange
amongst people with little money but more
time, such as unemployed or retired people or
in rural settings.