Design and Micro-enterprises in Sonora:

Partnering with Universities

Jacques Giard, PhD, Linda Oveido, PhD, and David Pijawka, PhD

College of Design, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA 85287-2105

Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora, 85000 Cd. Obregón, Sonora, Mexico

Abstract

Connecting design education and design practice to rural economies is never easy. Such is the case in the State of Sonora, one of the poorer regions in Mexico. With the financial assistance of USAID/TIES, designers, engineers, and planners from the College of Design at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (ITSON) embarked on a three-year program focused on the application of design principles and practices to the fledgling economy of micro-enterprises in Sonora.

Underpinned with the belief that changes in micro-enterprises must occur as the result of an intervention at the local level, one of the program's principal strategies was to empower local institutes and organizations with the potential implicit in the effectiveness of design education and practice. For their part, the role of external agents, such as the designers and planners from ASU, was one of facilitation only, all the while incorporating an interdisciplinary dimension critical to a project of this kind. Consequently, designers, planners and engineers have been involved at every level.

The paper describes provides insight on a design education program developed for students at ITSON, research projects with several micro-enterprises, and future directions for development of new design curricula at ITSON.

Key words: university, education, design, micro-enterprises.
Short History of the ASU-ITSON Partnership

Not long after his appoint as president of Arizona State University (ASU), Michael Crow described the framework for a “New American University” as an institution capable of leading change locally and globally. The TIES partnership, described further below, was an excellent fit within President Crow’s vision for a series of new “use-inspired” research and associated education initiatives that applied fundamental research and partnership mechanisms to the sustainability issues of the border region. President Crow perceives the American-Mexican border region as an integrated desert environment where traditional political lines have become irrelevant in the face of the larger, more urgent need to address the environmental, economic, and social issues affecting Arizona and Sonora and the larger border region (Oviedo, 2005).

This position was equally shared by Gonzalo Rodriguez, the rector at the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (ITSON), who had also moved forward with the internationalization of ITSON based on a framework of professional and integrated competencies in response to the knowledge-based global economy. ITSON is a growing university with an applied approach to regional development that supports community, social and economic development programs. It seeks to increase bi-national and international cooperation through university and industry engagement. One step toward the internationalization of ITSON was the formal signing of a memorandum of understanding with ASU in June 2004.

The notion of international cooperation had already been alluded to by former Mexican President Vicente Fox in his historic visit to Arizona November 2003, which underscored the rationale for this type of partnership. He emphasized that Arizona and Sonora had closely intertwined economic networks and that the long-standing Arizona-Mexico relationship–Arizona is Mexico’s second-largest trading partner–offered opportunities for academic and scientific work that would ultimately benefit both economies and both societies (Oviedo, 2005).

The TIES Initiative

As described by Antonio O. Garza, the United States Ambassador to Mexico, “… the Training, Internship, Exchange, and Scholarship (TIES) is a program established as a result of U.S. President [George] Bush and [former] Mexican President [Vicente] Fox, U.S.-Mexico Partnerships for Prosperity [initiative] in 2001 in response to bilateral commitment to a broad based economic prosperity [between both countries].” Ambassador Garza further stated that, “University partnerships establish new alliances while strengthening new relationships between US-Mexico universities…[and] TIES facilitates the pursuit of partnership objectives by enhancing the capacity of both nation’s higher education institutions to work in strategic alliances to create innovative approaches to mutual challenges” (United States Mexico: University Partnerships for Prosperity, 2005, p, iii).

The grant supporting the research and education partnership ASU and ITSON was motivated by several initiatives preceding the proposal. The TIES program embedded within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was a direct product of the aforementioned Partnership for Prosperity Program. This program viewed development in Mexico as a function of enhancing education in Mexico through training of students in the US and entering into collaborative research activities. The TIES program provides three-year grants to support partnerships between institutions of higher education on topics important to the future of economic development in impoverished Mexican regions.

The Sonoran desert is such a region. It crosses Arizona and the State of Sonora and provides a common ground for trade, environment, security, and transportation. Over the last few decades, connections between Mexican education centers and those at ASU have flourished, a feature that created a basis for the TIES partnership.

ITSON is located in southern Sonora. It has a reputation for being active in community engagement, especially in environmental resources management and micro-economic development, with both efforts clearly directed at the reduction of poverty. The bi-national proposal responded specifically to expressed interest of TIES in the areas of sustainable development–the integration of environment, economic development, and community revitalization in order to help the region move out of poverty. An important objective of TIES is to enhance social capital through graduate education in areas important for regional development. Therefore, the central focus of the partnership was to provide graduate degrees to students from ITSON in programs not available there and to provide innovative education in sustainability at ASU.

Mutual Interests and Strengths of the Partnership

From the very beginning, the ASU-ITSON partnership showed promise because both universities possessed a pragmatic approach to problem solving. For example,

  • ASU and ITSON are emerging as the New American and the New Mexican universities, and because of their innovations, are creating a model for bi-national partnerships that engage academia with the private and public sectors to build capacity to meet regional development goals.
  • ASU and ITSON have a common understanding of and mutual strengths related to the Sonora region that have lead to educational models designed to expand capacity to support regional and global market demands.
  • ITSON has created a strong educational program—the Professional and Integrated Competencies Model—that is based on the needs of the marketplace. This pioneering educational model contains ethical, intellectual, social, and technical principles that serve as the foundation of a pragmatic approach to problem solving. The model’s approach to regional development is business and community-driven to address specific socioeconomic development needs at a regional level. This macro-approach to local development has been successful in integrating education and research to build capacity.
  • ASU follows a similar model that builds upon an interdisciplinary approach to education and training in the pursuit of innovative technologies and planning techniques that advance socioeconomic and environmental development. The integration of these characteristics is a key component of helping ITSON to further strengthen its human capital development through knowledge and technology transfers (Pijawka and Oviedo, 2003).

Innovative Program in Sustainable Design

Sustainability graduate education based on the TIES objectives required an innovative solution. First, student interests would have to be directed to any one of several graduate degree programs offering a basic degree but would be amenable to great flexibility in terms of accepting ITSON course work, bi-national thesis committees, and student research theses targeting southern Sonora regional development. While the students were required to take all the required courses in their respective programs, their Masters theses required connecting sustainable design research to community development. As the paper shows, the students not only had to evaluate a potential product that could be enhanced through design, branding, and recognition but also the proposed design needed to integrate the product system, economics, infrastructure, and marketing. By necessity, sustainable design requires the evaluation and possible transformation of the entire design system. This approach enables all community components to be integrated in order to transition both the product and the product system out of poverty. Therefore, the transition from product scale to community scale was an important outcome in the program and one that was innovative. The integration of product, micro-enterprise economics and education, community resources, and regional marketing strategies all come together when product design becomes the basis for sustainable communities.

The Goals and Objectives

The ASU-ITSON partnership is a rich example of an innovative sustainable development model applied to education, teaching, training, and research programs aimed at rural regional development. The partnership integrates nine Master and three PhD degrees in the areas of eco-tourism, micro-enterprise development, environmental planning, and alternative energy. These degrees feed into the mentoring, training and research programs by connecting students with faculty to work collaboratively in the selected target regions (Oviedo, 2005). Figure 1 provides a diagrammatic view of the ASU-ITSON partnership model.

Figure 1. ASU-ITSON Partnership Model

The research agenda is based on a holistic approach to sustainable development through three important areas:

  1. Micro-enterprise Regional Identity Plan for Southern Sonora;
  2. Eco-Tourism Regional Plan for Southern Sonora; and
  3. Model for Sustainable Development for Small Underdeveloped Regions (Pijawka and Oviedo, 2005).

The areas that have been selected for development in the ASU-ITSON partnership are located in southern Sonora. The Mexican government has identified the areas for development as areas of extreme poverty. Another important region corresponding to Guaymas and San Carlos are key economic development areas connected to NAFTA through the CANAMEX and the Escalera Nautica, as well as serve as a gateway for international tourism for southern Sonora (Oviedo, 2005).

The ASU-ITSON partnership addresses capacity building through education and training as students connect their thesis and dissertation work with this broad research agenda and degrees in specified areas. This partnership also intends to address regional development through sustainable development approaches that address economic development through local capacity building in micro-enterprise, eco-tourism, environmental planning, and alternative energy technologies. This model is the basis for the design and organization of the programs implemented (Oviedo, 2005).

While some of the conditions of implementation were modified due to a series of circumstances surrounding decision-making changes that involve the distribution of courses that the students should take at ITSON and ASU, the framework of the model remained unchanged during the three-year period. This model was developed by ITSON and ASU to provide an integrated vision of the operation and distribution of the partnership implementation plan (Oviedo, 2005).

Design and Micro-enterprises

In most developed countries, design is perceived more and more as part of an overall business strategy that allows one company to differentiate its services and products from another. Over the last two decades, design has allowed many multi-nationals to compete effectively both at the national and international levels despite the fact that services and products are often more similar than different. Is there, for example, a significant difference between a meal at McDonald’s or at Burger King? Or a cell phone from Nokia or Motorola? Or a pick-up truck from Ford or General Motors? If there is a difference it is mostly in design, that is, the branding, the graphic-user interface, or the corporate identity. Burgers essentially all have the same ingredients, much like all cell phones use similar technology and pick-up trucks are built in ways that are almost identical. In the end, it is design that makes a difference.

Contemporary design practice as implemented by industry is not at all the same as the arts-and-crafts approach at the turn of the 20th Century, a kind of applied arts. It has also progressed well beyond Modernism as expounded by the Bauhaus in the mid 1920s. Design certainly is not some superficial visual treatment that provides some decorative appeal after the fact, like cake decoration. Today, design is part of a well-entrenched business strategy in most corporations, especially those that are oriented in services and products. Rarely does a week go by that BusinessWeek, the American business magazine, doesn’t feature an article on design. Moreover, it recently highlighted design schools in its issue of October 9, 2006 in the same way that it regularly highlights business schools. No longer is design perceived to be a last-minute activity and only permitted if the budget will allow it, at least not for those corporations wishing to lead the competition. There is no credible automobile manufacturer today, for example, that would launch a new car onto the market without seriously investing in design. Engineering alone will not suffice, nor will finance or marketing or any other typical corporate function. Design is now part of a much broader corporate agenda that seeks collaboration among all of these corporate functions.

Given design’s high profile and effectiveness in the corporate world, is the same intervention possible at the level of micro-enterprises that, by definition, are so different from the corporate behemoths? Is it possible to identify fundamental design principles derived from a more industrialized context and to apply them to a very different context? The researchers believed if was possible, if for no other reason that design is a universal activity that has been part of humanity since the first stone tool was made some 1.75 million years ago. In the context of this initiative, design was defined in the spirit of Herbert Simon’s definition, that is, creating the means to change an existing situation into a preferred one. Design was not to be limited to the very narrow albeit popular definition often associated with decoration and commercial art. Consequently, it became important to identify design factors that could be considered change agents. In other words, what were the design factors that when deliberately applied created a change from an existing situation to a preferred one? It should be noted that these design factors were not known specifically to the researchers prior to the ASU-ITSON initiative. The intent was to use five real-world cases in Sonora, each with the direct involvement of an ITSON graduate student, to identify and test what these factors could be. The summary of the five case studies is provided in the next section.

Summaries of Five Cases

Over three years, two sets of students—for a total of five students—successfully completed the Master of Science in Design in the College of Design at Arizona State University. In each case, the student was involved in an applied project that included both theoretical aspects of design as well as its application to a known situation involving a micro-enterprise in Sonora.

The theoretical aspects of design dealt principally with issues of design research, user needs and behavior, sustainability, and design management. Issues more typically identified with design, such as form, color, drawing, and model making were not considered essential. In this context, design was the verb or the action of designing; it was not the noun or the artifact, which often results from designing. This theoretical experience was common for everyone and shared by all of the students.

However, the experience gained by way of the applied project was different. Each student developed a project based on a different challenge afforded by various micro-enterprises in Sonora. Each project required that the student appropriately apply some or all of the design principles as a way of ‘changing and existing situation into a preferred.’ Simon’s definition of design became the implicit—if not explicit—goal of the applied projects and would eventually provide a measure for gauging the success of the project. At present, most of these projects are being evaluated in order to determine what the next steps should be.

In capsule form, the five projects are:

  1. The Commercialization of Bacanora: This applied project was led by Heriberto Lachica and focused on the micro-enterprises involved in the production and commercialization of bacanora. The aim of the project was to generate proposals to improve the efficiency of the production process. By way of site visits and meetings, producers were invited to participate in the project. In the end, six specific steps were identified as being important to raising the effectiveness of production. Based on the data collected and with the application of appropriate design principles, proposals were presented to the producers.
  1. The Commercialization of Chiltepin: This applied project was led by Judith Ochoa and centered on the existing commercialization of the chiltepin pepper in Sonora, especially in Alamos, and how design could serve to improve the overall economic conditions of the growers, producers, and vendors. By way of a thorough analysis of the existing situation, the applied project investigated alternative directions in the cultivation, harvesting, and commercialization of the chiltepin pepper all the while applying principles of design and sustainability.
  1. Community Identity: Tesopaco is a small, thriving community albeit very isolated. Yet its citizens are responsible for a broad range of products, from leather and saddles to machaca and coyotas. Led by Arturo Gomez Gamez, this closely-knit context of producers was investigated because it seemed to lend itself to the idea of a shared community identity for all products from this specific locale. In this case, design became an organizational tool as well as a strategy for a common visual identity.
  1. The Commercialization of Machaca: Machaca is a trademark product of Sonora and is available from several large producers. However, there are also many micro-enterprises involved in machaca production. The outcome of this applied project was a proposal for a more integrated and systematic approach for these many small producers of machaca. Furthermore, the project took into consideration issues of sustainability and transferability. The project was led by David Lagarda.
  1. The Commercialization of Mesquite: This project was led by Manuel Lugo. It not only focused on the application of design principles in the entrepreneurial micro-enterprises of mesquite products but also on issues of sustainability. The project’s principal goal was to integrate a strategy that would allow producers to sustain the mesquite crop all the while making it possible to add value to products made locally from mesquite.

Conclusion and The Next Step