I can’t any more. I just cannot. The next person who asks me to review a tool or design one is getting punched. Hard.
Aid workers love their tools. We love tools so much that we need tools to help navigate our nifty overflowing toolboxes/super humanitarian utility belts but please, make them alphabetical and by sector and showing where it’s cross-sectoral and what level of field person can use it, at exactly what time in the emergency – 2pm on the fifth day of a flood but 4.32pm on the seventh day of an earthquake.
There’s a separate insertion for this tool in a protracted refugee crisis for the 686th day in an urban non-camp environment but day 937 if in a camp but only if used before 11am and it’s not a Friday. Also, make sure it’s in four languages but don’t change the formatting since the same space that English words take up works for every other language, obviously. User-friendly, nice graphics and four pages max, please.
Here’s the thing: a tool isn’t going to solve the underlying issue here – which is that you are too lazy to use your brain and figure out the problem, and adapt to the context and situation. Have you even tried to speak to or involve the local population you are there to assist?
Read. Digest. Explore a bit. Understanding where you are and what you need to do won’t paralyse you. Pulling something off the shelf/your computer and blindly following the writing within may actually cause harm to people. I cannot understand why we continue to let agencies dictate this stupidity of needing more and more tools instead of investing in the humans behind the tools and teaching them how to think and use broad guidelines to adapt appropriate tools.
And this off-the-shelf tool concept is wrong too. Stop pulling things off the shelf. Humans aren’t off the shelf, so our complex problems made more complicated in an emergency also don’t just come off a shelf. If you are arriving in my country to assist me, I’d love it if you gave it some thought and not just checkbox me and ask me pre-made questions that may not have anything to do with my life and situation.
I was asked to write up the implementation of a livelihoods programme for global use some years back, a step-by-step guide on how to implement something. This just can’t be right. Either you want an encyclopaedia of every single livelihood intervention in the world with every single human condition variable factored in (you don’t because you want the tool to be only two pages long), or you don’t know how programming works. How can you responsibly write something like that and put it out in the world? Without context, without background, just say here is a cookie-cutter way to do things?
Why do we need to cater to people who cannot implement programmes? I sometimes wonder if we should start thinking about robot aid workers; cheaper probably in the long run and you can just add every single programming aspect ever into their little robotic brains and let them get on with it. My personal robot will be programmed to never ever hit reply all to an email. Score one for mankind. You’re welcome.
I’ve started refusing to design tools. I try and move clients towards using what already exists and help them contextualise it for their agency. Stop wasting money, and stop wasting my time and taxing my brain with trying to figure out new ways to plagiarise what already exists. Just use what’s there. If you spent less time fretting about your logo on a tool and just use what’s there, we might get some work done.
If you want a new tool, stop and ask yourself – do I need one or am I just being one?
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