4 Students
Project Overview
6 Months
To support and understand social and Supportive Engineering
From April To September 2018 in India
Based on the values and principles of the social economy, how could we define a Social and Supportive Engineering ? What should be the role of Technology and Innovation in a Social and Supportive Engineering ?
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Because of the challenges India is facing ( Demography, rural integration, health care , access to water etc.), plenty of visions and models are developed there, such as the Low-Tech Economy or the Human centered Engineering.
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We, The Odyssey's team will travel during 6 months over India to meet this people who are proposing new models. We will try to understand their methods, visions, and obstacles to learn and share their knowledge.
Goals
The Social and Supportive Engineering is a huge topic, so we decided, based on our readings and personal experience to focus our project on 3 main research questions.
1) Social and Supportive Engineering in Rural Integration Context
What is the role of Social and Supportive Engineering in rural integration ? We believe that the rural area is playing a key role in many issues in India. We believe that a lot of actors of the rural world are already Social entrepreneurs or social Engineers. We want to meet them, learn and share their experiences.
2) Involvement and social entrepreneurship
Several types of structure are getting involved in social entrepreneurship: NGOs, start-ups, self-sufficient communities... We want to understand how these actors : CEOs, project leaders, mayors are talking about social economy to involve people in. How knowledge is spreading locally in these structures? What are they're strategies ?
3) From Local to Global ?
Our researches show that many local initiatives are launched over the world to contribute to the Social economy or Social Capitalism (Pr. Muhammad Yunus). However, we do not know how this ecosystem is working. How does this network of local solutions, companies, associations or NGOs is structured and organized ? What are levers of change from local to global scale ?
Methods and actions
During the travel
Before the Trip
Readings, COnsulting
"Galileo : You can see Indeed ! What can you see ? Nothing at all. You just gawp. Gawping isn’t seeing"
Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
As Galileo explains, before the trip, we need to develop our vision and prepare our minds to "see" what we believe impossible or inapropriate.
They inspired us...
“Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.”
Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality
Philippe Bihouix is a French engineer who published, " The age of Low tech" in which he develops the ins and the outs of Low Tech techniques.
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“India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
"Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest."
Muhammad Yunus
