Lessons in a Flash(light)
A flashlight shaped by lessons in STEM and co-designing (image: Fabian Frinzel).
Flashlights come in many shapes and sizes: slick cylindrical metal tubes that can bestowed in backpacks or drawers for emergencies; moulded chunks of heavy-duty yellow plastic with built-in handles suited to camping; head-torches mounted on elasticated straps for nighttime adventurers; or smartphone torches that double as camera lighting. Flashlights, in all their guises, are a classic example of the oft-repeated design mantra “form follows function”. But what form might a torch take if its function extends beyond solely providing light?
The DIY Flashlight, produced by social enterprise Ambessa Play, acts as both an educational kit to teach children STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and a tool for displaced children living in refugee camps. Branching into these new uses, Ambessa’s founder, Sara Berkai, knew that her ambition needed to be embodied in a suitable form. As such, she approached Jon Marshall of Pentagram, asking him to help develop a design for a torch that could be built from scratch by anyone aged eight and upwards, to be distributed through a one-for-one business model in which, for each flashlight sold, another would go to a displaced child.
To find the final form of the DIY Flashlight, Ambessa and Pentagram undertook a process of co-designing with input from children in refugee camps in Calais, France, alongside weekly sessions with children seeking asylum in the UK. Sessions were facilitated by charities that advised on donations and recompense, and Ambessa followed the International Bureau for Children’s Rights principles for child participation. “In the initial stages we had so many cool, different shapes,” explains Berkai, recalling the presentation of the first prototypes to the children. “There were some shapes where I thought, ‘This is amazing,’” she says. “But then the kids hated it!”
Instead of choosing triangular, cylindrical or more playful shapes that resembled lighthouses or dumbbells, the children leaned towards rectangular models and made pragmatic suggestions. The flashlight must be wide enough to stand up by itself for ease of reading or doing homework without electricity; it needs to be compact enough to be transported in a child-sized pocket and protected during the frequent police raids on refugee camps. A lanyard, they advised, would help users navigate nighttime bathroom trips hands-free. “And obviously,” says Berkai, “they’re the experts, so we go with what they say.” That children are experts in how to design for such a hostile environment is heartbreaking. “Their notion of how they use a flashlight was different from our preconceptions,” says Marshall.
Testing prototypes with children revealed other unexpected design challenges, too. Off-the-shelf connectors,for example, were too springy for little digits. “So we had to invent our own type of connecter that is easier for children to use,” explains Marshall. Other more tactile and graphic elements such as satisfying-to-clip clips, the bright orange winding mechanism, the layout of the internal cabling (which needed to be both intuitive and challenging), and the pictorial instructional manual designed to be legible to speakers of any language, similarly went through many rounds of testing and refining with the children before getting their thumbs-up.
Packed into this little flashlight’s playful yet instructive body are many lessons and many functions. Beyond in-built lessons about kinetic energy and electrical components, and the emotional lessons of self-efficacy and empowerment, there is a more subtle and broader lesson for the design community – form can (and often should) follow function, but function must first follow advice from future users.
Words Lara Chapman
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.