Design for the Many®: rethinking innovation for the many

Most innovation in the world is still designed for a minority of humanity.

Design for the Many® explores how to create products and services that truly fit the lives, needs and realities of lower-income populations.

From "FabLab in a Box" to EKAII, this is a story about shifting innovation from charity to dignity.

Most innovation in the world is not designed for most people but for a very small part of them : the leading middle and higher middle class of developed countries.

That is the uncomfortable reality.

Today, nearly 5 billion people live on less than or equal to 8 dollars a day - around 250 dollars per month. Yet most products and services are still imagined for a minority of the global population, with different homes, infrastructures, habits and purchasing patterns.

As a result, millions of people are asked to adapt to products that were never really designed for them.

This is not only a market blind spot. It is a design blind spot.

More than twenty years ago, C.K. Prahalad, in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, helped shift the conversation by showing that these populations should not be seen only as recipients of aid, but as a major part of the global economy.

That was a crucial step.

But today, we believe we must go further.

Because the challenge is not only to see the “Bottom of the Pyramid” as a market. It is to understand that people living on low incomes have specific needs, specific constraints, and specific ways of living — and therefore require products and services designed from their reality, not merely adapted after the fact.

That is the starting point of what we call Design for the Many®.

1. Design for the Many®: designing what is right

Design for the Many® is an approach developed through our work at Inovora, including several years in India, focused on designing for lower-income populations.

It is not about “low-cost design.”

It is not about doing less.

It is about designing what is right :

• Right for the context

• Right for the usage

• Right with the culture

• Right for local production and maintenance

• And right in terms of technology: « just enough technology », only the necessary and sufficient to serve the usage with the involvement of the user.

The best product is not the most advanced one : it is the one that naturally fits into people’s lives.

This requires a fundamental shift:

from designing for people to designing with people.

It also asks companies to rethink the way they innovate. Beyond traditional R&D, they may need to develop a more contextual and human form of customer R&D, grounded in listening, observation, immersion, and culture as a source of inspiration for innovation.

We experienced this very concretely when working with Saint-Gobain to help shape a more contextual form of Customer R&D within their Research Center in Chennai. Together, we explored what affordable housing could mean if it were designed not simply to lower costs, but to truly respond to people’s ways of living and contribute to eradicating slums.

Traditional Indian houses, a century ago, were often remarkably adapted to the climate through architectural wisdom we have partly forgotten. How can we imagine a modern home while still respecting Vastu, the role of the Indian kitchen, or the ancestral tradition of an open-to-sky inner courtyard at the heart of the house?

This is what Design for the Many® means in practice:

not importing solutions from outside,

but starting from what life, culture and reality are already telling us.

And once you take this seriously, another question naturally emerges:

How do you co-create with people who will never come to your innovation lab?

That is where the second idea was born.

2. FabLab in a Box: bringing innovation where life happens

When looking at the very bottom of the pyramid - people living in slums, often struggling every day to improve their habitat and their conditions of life - one thing became obvious:

Their needs are real, but products and solutions are rarely designed for them.

And yet, these people are not passive.

They are creative.

They are resourceful.

They are capable of expressing needs and imagining solutions.

This is where the deeper philosophical shift begins:

from charity to dignity.

People living in slums do not only need objects, blankets or ready-made solutions distributed to them.

They also need to be recognized as human beings capable of thinking, expressing needs, imagining, creating and making.

That is where dignity begins. This led us to a simple question:

These people will never come to innovation labs.

Why don’t labs go to them?

From this idea emerged FabLab in a Box - a portable design thinking and prototyping space brought directly into communities and slums, to co-create solutions with people where they live.

Because waiting for people to come to the lab would have meant staying far from their reality. If we wanted to design with them, we had to go where they lived.

So we brought the process to them.

We started with home visits in slums to understand the major issues people were facing in their daily habitat. Then we began organizing workshops inside homes, in the heart of the slums.

And what happened was always striking.

Within minutes, people would begin sharing their daily challenges, expressing frustrations, generating ideas, debating, sketching and co-creating.

Creativity does not need to be explained.

It needs to be revealed.

Listening, in this context, is not only about identifying needs.

It is about recognizing dignity : acknowledging that people are not only lacking solutions, but already carrying knowledge, skills and the ability to create.

With FabLab in a Box, people are no longer only seen as beneficiaries. They become participants in the creative process, and ultimately:

actors of their own lives,

makers of their own lives.

One of the most powerful insights from this work was that slums are not only places of constraint : they are a place of true innovation.

They are also places of making, repairing, adapting, reusing and inventing : the slum is a true open-sky FabLab.

The role of FabLab in a Box is not to replace what already exists. It is to connect what is already there: needs, ideas, local skills, craftsmen and available materials.

It acts as a bridge between what people need and what they are already capable of doing.

This led to very concrete products.

One issue that came back repeatedly during our visits was the question of privacy for women’s hygiene and bathing. In many slums, women cannot find the intimacy they need within overcrowded homes. Many are forced to wash outside.

Their bathing ritual often requires little more than a bucket of water and soap. The real need was not sophisticated equipment.

It was dignity.

That is how we co-created the bathing tent: a simple, foldable, low-tech privacy cabin that could be assembled with a few pieces of wood or metal and one or two old saris used as curtains.

Another example was a multi-purpose table, designed for highly constrained living spaces where one object often needs to serve several daily functions, like cooking, learning place for children. 

But the real test was never the prototype itself.

The real test is life.

After workshops, prototypes were left in people’s homes. Weeks later, we came back to observe how they were being used, how they had been integrated into daily life, and whether they truly solved a problem.

And what we saw was essentia : people were not only using the products. They were proud of them because they had created them.

There was something visible in their eyes: confidence, dignity, ownership, and a simple but powerful feeling: “This is ours.”

At that point, design stops being only about products. It becomes about confidence, capability and the power to act.

And naturally, this led to the next question: If these solutions work locally, why should they remain local?

That is where the third idea emerged.

3. EKAII: from local solutions to shared knowledge

EKAII was imagined as a digital platform capable of documenting useful solutions, sharing them, allowing others to replicate and adapt them, and connecting local creativity across different places.

Behind it was a very simple principle:

“Stop giving us things. Show us how to do.”

EKAII is about a fundamental shift:

from charity to dignity,

from helping people to enabling them,

from giving products to sharing the ability to create.

Because people are not only beneficiaries.

They are actors of their own lives.

They are makers of their own lives.

EKAII was imagined as a way to make local solutions travel from one slum to another, from one community to another,a way to transform isolated inventions into shared resources.

And once this idea exists, a broader possibility opens.

4. Could this become a new mission for NG

The next question was obvious: how could this FabLab in a Box approach be replicated and scaled?

How could it help shift from charity to dignity, and enable people to become makers of their own lives?

And beyond that:

A new mission for NGOs?

What if NGOs could develop a new kind of activity: animating local FabLabs in the heart of slums or migrant camps, where people could design and build the products they truly need for their daily lives?

Such spaces would not only help improve living conditions in a practical way. They would also give something deeper: dignity.

Because they would start from a different belief: that people are not only in need, but also capable of creativity, problem-solving and making.

By recognizing their ability to imagine, adapt and build solutions for themselves and for their community, these FabLabs could help people become makers of their own lives.

In that sense, EKAII was imagined as a way to extend impact: not only by helping people receive solutions, but by helping them create, adapt and share them.

Linked through a shared digital platform, these community-based FabLabs could also make useful ideas travel from one slum to another, from one camp to another, from one community to another.

Not as a replacement for humanitarian action, but as an extension of it, from providing support to activating local capabilities.

Beyond practical problem-solving, this is also about something much deeper. It is about helping people reconnect with their own dignity, restoring hope, and reconnecting them with their skills and know-how.

It is about enabling them to contribute more directly to the well-being of their family, to find a role within their community, and perhaps, in some cases, to discover new vocations or even imagine how these capabilities could become a source of income.

In that sense, making is not just about producing objects.

It is also about rebuilding confidence, purpose and possibility.

Rethinking innovation

Designing for the many is not about doing less.

It is about doing what is right.

There is probably more human value in helping millions of invisible people respond to their basic needs than in dedicating so much of our innovation energy to inventing one more gadget for a handful of happy few.

Innovation does not only come from laboratories.

It also comes from everyday life, constraints, culture, ingenuity, and the human desire to improve one’s own condition.

And perhaps this is where the future of innovation truly begins:

when we stop seeing people only as beneficiaries,

and start recognizing them as makers of their own lives.

FABLAB IN A BOX by Design for the Many ®