A little slice of South Africa has come to HTW Berlin’s Wilhelminenhof campus: at the start of the semester, eleven students built a corrugated iron shack, similar to the millions of others which make up South African townships, as part of the traditional short-term project for their degree in Industrial Design. They used plain timber modules for the frame construction and simple tools, with no 3D printer or plotter in sight. “Thinking on the object” is the order of the day, with a conceptual approach as simple as it is convincing. “Aspiring designers find that their design ideas can be effective and valuable even if they don’t have access to the full range of resources and don’t use any high-tech equipment,” says lecturer Marlene Lerch as everyone gets together at the end of the project week and the results are presented in turn.

It’s also possible that the construction of a corrugated iron shack in their third or fifth university semester could prove a similarly formative experience for one of the HTW students as it was for Marlene Lerch in 2019 during the months she spent with her husband and daughter in Cape Town. After her return, the qualified geographer and urban researcher, who was still working as a community manager at HTW Berlin’s InnotechHub at the time, was unable to get the sharp contrast between rich and poor, as well as the arduous life in the townships, out of her mind. The couple asked themselves if there was any way that they could make a difference. As they had met a lot of committed and creative people during their time in South Africa, the networker and the computer scientist developed the idea of a do-it-yourself platform with step-by-step instructions to facilitate a collaborative exchange between residents of shack settlements in the Global South. In 2021, they founded a non-profit start-up for this purpose, which they named “Hack Your Shack”.

In all likelihood, those who are now puzzling over which do-it-yourself instructions are needed have no personal experience of townships. Marlene Lerch gives an impressive example: the description of how an individual fire extinguisher for a shack can be made for a mere 50 cents from a plastic bottle, baking soda, vinegar and washing-up liquid. It would save many a dwelling and possibly even lives if, as happens regularly, improvised cables catch fire and the fire brigade has no chance to reach the shacks thanks to the townships’ narrow alleyways. The creative low-tech solution was developed by two students from the University of Cape Town. Marlene Lerch became aware of it by chance, and will soon be uploading the instructions to her platform, including a video of a practical demonstration, which was greeted warmly by delighted bystanders.

The assembly instructions for the fire extinguisher also illustrate the credo which forms the operational and ideological basis of the sharing platform created by Marlene Lerch and her husband Christian Fuß. They refrain from adopting a top-down approach, preferring to collect best practice examples and creative ideas, i.e. make existing knowledge more accessible, network committed individuals and initiate co-creation processes. Marlene Lerch notes that the web is particularly well suited to this, as in South Africa 80 per cent of the people have internet access. Even if they don’t have their own mobile phone or smartphone, there is often free Wi-Fi available through a library or similar institutions. It goes without saying that the platform has to be both data-saving and low-energy. It is expected to be launched locally in the pilot country South Africa under the name “dooiy” in January 2023.

The platform will also feature instructions on how to cultivate vegetables in a minimal space, construct a water filter, build an almost odourless toilet from two buckets and fill the bottoms of old PET bottles with household sponges, then cover them with textiles and turn them into headsets so children have greater peace when learning. Other ideas include making functional furniture from minimal materials, turning plastic toast packaging, so ubiquitous in South Africa, into skipping ropes, and constructing a bucket washing machine with just a few resources. And that’s not all.

During her last stay in Cape Town, Marlene Lerch, the prototype of the app in hand, went through the townships and washed the laundry of each of her hostesses with a bucket washing machine. The goal: to strike up conversations, to better understand needs and to test the app.  “It was like a Tupperware party,” she recalls enthusiastically. She also has wonderful videos and photos of these events. Images are important for European eyes and minds, because if you’ve never been to a South African township, it’s difficult to envision daily life there. That’s why the HTW students’ corrugated iron shack workshop also included daily virtual live linkups to a South African township or to the team in Cape Town. One resident described how difficult sanitation is, especially for women, and how dangerous it is to go to the communal toilets at night.

Those living on the margin of subsistence need all their energy to cope with everyday life. But there is a lot local knowledge and creative solutions out there," Marlene Lerch knows. "If we can manage to use dooiy to network this know-how and make it accessible, there is an incredible potential to improve conditions," Lerch is convinced. Marlene Lerch and her husband were able to obtain funding from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action as part of the programme “Innovative Business Models and Pioneering Solutions” in order to develop the app.

The goal is for the non-profit start-up to be self-sustaining in a few years. Until then, they are still looking for more supporters. Perhaps there’s enough young talent out there to give the start-up a helping hand? 90% of designers worldwide still spend all their time solving the problems of the richest 10% of clients (Paul Polak). This is another discrepancy that Marlene Lerch sought to address with her workshop.