Creating Technology for Social Change

Scaling the unicorns: Diverse perspectives that serve the public good

In a room of urban planners, architects, engineers, data viz experts, designers, programmers, and media professionals, we asked, “how do we scale the unicorns?”

Unicorns are those perspectives we need, the ones we easily demand but are hard to find. Women coders, technologists in local government, architects in humanitarian aid, geographers in newsrooms.


Unicorns, by rahuldlucca on Flickr

In this case, we were a room of open government, civic technology junkies. Some were former Code for America fellows, the hot coder-public partnership right now. We’d all seen disastrous public-private partnerships. Private will parachute in without a proper needs assessment or codesign process. They hand off a sophisticated tool that may or may not address an immediate need, but Government doesn’t have the capacity or in-house talent to maintain what they’ve been handed. Everyone is disappointed.

There needs to be unicorns in-house! But there is a crucial cultural difference between public and private, which compounds capability: Government doesn’t hire for talent while Private is unicorn driven.

I was in a room of architects listening intently to a former humanitarian worker. We looked at refugee camps and their impact as a holding strategy. The starting point was this: Humanitarian organizations’ most critical goal is to preserve and protect “bare life.” Once that’s accomplished, organizations shift all efforts toward the next population whose bare life is in question. In the meantime, survivors live in one-size-fits-all camp layouts stamped across host countries. Camps are usually isolated and have an enormously destructive impact on the environment. Refugees who leave the camp and try their luck in the closest populated town are denied anymore aid, and they are often scorned by host country nationals who view refugees as leeches. Some refugee camps last for a few months. Others still exist after decades, which means generations were born and raised in refugee camps. Camps can contain hundreds of thousands of people who are forbidden to work, whose social ties aren’t honored by camp layouts, and who may never be repatriated or relocated.

Located some 300 kilometres from the first Malian town, and 400 kilometres from Tamanrasset, Tinzaoutine is ‘a place where God does not exist’, as one survivor put it, ‘where there is all the suffering on earth’. Survivors described their walk for a week through the desert until they reached the first Malian posts, and their survival thanks to the milk given them by some nomads that they occasionally passed.
—Michel Agier,
Managing the Undesirables

Preserving bare life is only the first step. Once that’s in the bag, we have to recognize people’s humanity.
Spatial design can play a crucial role in that humanizing effort, creating culturally appropriate layouts without adding to construction costs. We need architects in humanitarian organizations, I thought. More unicorns!

This isn’t to say there isn’t talent in government, nor humanitarians who wish they could do more. More than that, it’s about baking in the critical mass of diverse perspectives. Bringing it back to my area of interest—economic security that enables meaningful independence—I see one of the most obvious problems as debt and income insecurity. If the snag is enablement, what holds people back?

It isn’t reasonable for government to offer competitive salaries or have the gamut of field experts in-house. Many of the brightest people in local governments are there because they care so much they can’t imagine not applying their talents as part of their civic duty. They knowingly take lower salaries, but not everyone who has the passion and the talent can afford to make those decisions. The humanitarian architect is probably a naive suggestion, but I believe they both share an obstacle, along with everyone, regardless of socioeconomic background. People are held back by their circumstances, and much of that circumstance derives from economic insecurity. Till we address that, we can’t began to figure out how or even whether we should scale the unicorns.