Raspberry Pi: Success in Education Where Others Failed

Thamer 00:01

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. My name is Thamer Abanami, and I’m joined by Albert Shum, and we are your hosts for With Intent’s third season.

 

Albert 00:15

This season, we explore the stories and lessons from several designs featured in ID’s list of 100 greatest designs published by Fortune Magazine in 2019. We’ll discuss how the concepts of intentional, responsible, impactful, and innovative design intersect with these designs.

 

Thamer 00:34

Today’s topic is the Raspberry Pi, and we’ll explore the story of a $35 computer the size of a credit card that has changed the technology landscape.

 

Albert 00:45

This is such an inspiring story, Thamer, that a small team of academics created a $35 computer. I see it as a real great case study of successfully using tech for educational outcomes.

 

Thamer 00:59

100%, and it’s a very interesting story, Albert, and I want to talk a little bit about the origins and the problem space. In 2006, Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab began discussing a low-cost programmable computer for kids to reignite interest in computer science and provide a platform for young people to learn programming and tinker. They were inspired by their own experiences with early home computers in the UK. They had something called the BBC Micro.

 

[Audio Clip] 01:29

How did it happen? A vision shared by Acorn’s founding partners, Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry.

 

[Audio Clip] 01:37

The first essential for any micro was to be easy and pleasant to use. Even three years ago, this was not such a widely accepted concept as you might think.

 

Thamer 01:47

They wanted to kind of bring that back, because at the time in 2006 there wasn’t a lot of cheap, open, programmable hardware for people to tinker. They were inspired to make something. They were inspired to solve this education gap, and also going on at MIT at the same time was a project to do a low-cost computer as well that didn’t really make it anywhere. And so I think they were motivated by these three questions of: What can we make that brings back this open and tinkerable, programmable hardware? How can we have that help education of computing and computer science? And then lastly, there is this kind of streak of other people working on this. Let’s go. Let’s make this. So this really couldn’t happen until there was an ARM-based Broadcom system-on-a-chip—and we’ll talk about that a little bit later—that became available in 2008. And then they established the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a nonprofit foundation registered as a charity in 2009, and then they launched in 2012.

 

[Audio Clip] 02:51

So I’m Eben Upton, and I’m one of the founders of Raspberry Pi. What happened with Raspberry Pi was, we tapped into a demand for a thing. There was already demand there, and the pitch with Raspberry Pi has been: we’ve drifted away from programmable hardware. We’ve drifted away from general-purpose hardware tools in a kind of appliance-like world of games consoles and mobile phones and tablets and stuff, which kind of alienates you from all this awesome computing power you have. So we’ve developed computing power which is thousands of times what we had with the BBC Micro, but they are in some ways less useful because they’re kind of in a cladding. And it turned out that we were right, that people felt alienated. So Pi kind of just slotted into this. It was just a gap in the market. It was kind of a dream product to market, right? Because it met a need which was enormous and completely unfilled.

 

Thamer 03:42

The education or computing education context in the early 2000s saw this decline in applicants to computer science programs that Eben and his colleagues described as alarming. I think there were 100 seats at Cambridge’s computer science program, and they would get 200 applicants. And the applicants they did get, they didn’t really have a background. They were smart, but they didn’t really have any background tinkering with computers because of the lack of availability of readily accessible hardware for that. And the situation in the early 2000s was in stark contrast with the ’80s, where these same people behind Raspberry Pi had access to computers for education and tinkering.

 

[Audio Clip] 04:28

The impact made by the BBC Micro can hardly be overestimated. Not only does every secondary school have at least one micro, we’re well on the way to getting a micro into every primary school as well.

 

Albert 04:40

It seems like that trend of a lot of students actually didn’t have a lot of computing experience. And why is that? Was it just a lack of access? Or how did that problem come to be, this decline?

 

Thamer 04:54

Yeah, so there’s kind of two things happening. One is people were learning how to become computer users, because at the time, they had these Windows and Mac applications. So there was an emphasis on teaching people how to use computers, how to use applications. And so these were closed systems. These were expensive systems. And so this was not something a kid could save a couple of months of allowance and go to the store and buy something.

 

Albert 05:21

Right. Well, you wouldn’t break open your MacBook or your PC laptop and try to figure out how it works. It would be—yeah.

 

Thamer 05:29

You’d probably break it, yeah. You can’t create, like, a robotics experiment or a weather station by breaking that up. You know, you could—I mean, you’d have to buy a big PC, and then you’d have to have something ready-made for you, and then you just plug it in, and it’s just—right—you don’t really get to learn how to make it.

 

Albert 05:44

Yeah, and probably way too expensive, too. It seems like, yeah, in some ways we’ve made the technology so easy to use, but also it’s hard to figure out how it works or be able to kind of make it more accessible so that you could try new things or build things with it.

 

Thamer 05:59

Yeah, it’s this idea of physical computing and tinkering, right? That you can learn in these project-based physical problem-solving gives you kind of a better understanding of not just how to use a computer, but what is happening underneath, and how to actually make things happen, and how to solve problems with that.

 

Albert 06:16

Right. And that caused the decline of students that had this kind of physical computing experience that allowed them to understand better how computers work, but also making and building things, right, rather than just using a program.

 

[Audio Clip] 06:33

We look back in the 1980s as this kind of golden age, but it wasn’t a golden age at all, right? I mean, you look at the people who came out of it—they all look like us, right? You know, they’re all, you know, white guys. You know, the socioeconomic diversity was crap. The race diversity was crap, and the gender diversity was crap, right? You know, all it did—if you look at the computer industry, it’s a very skewed—it’s not a picture of modern society. Your natural inclination is to focus on hobbyists because that’s what I was, right? But if you focus too much on hobbyists, what you get is you get this unrepresentative participation. You get the participation of other people who already have advantages in their lives. By going and really doing good work at the school level, you can get uniformity of access. Hard sciences are a ladder because you can’t fake being good at maths, right? Maths doesn’t care who your dad is, you know. Maths doesn’t care. Maths doesn’t care if your parents can afford to get you an internship somewhere. Maths doesn’t care if they can, you know, call up their old mate and get you a job in their advertising agency, right? Maths doesn’t care. You’re either good at maths or you’re bad at maths. The program either runs or it crashes. The bridge either stands up or it falls down. You can’t fake it. And the opportunity we’ve got now is to do better than the 1980s.

 

Thamer 07:57

Albert, I think they had some really interesting design principles. Can you help us kind of outline what they were?

 

Albert 08:03

Yeah, and I think these design principles, when I was looking at this case study, were really inspiring because the team was so focused. In some ways, it was very extreme, and they pushed the limits. And I think the first key design principle is affordability—making a computer for $25—that seems unheard of—but also using off-the-shelf parts that are readily available, so that if things break or you need to repair it, it’s easy to replace. So I think affordability is one of the key principles the team focused on. I think the other one is making it accessible. I think you mentioned making it open so that you could tinker and play around with it, trying things out. I think in this age where everything is unrepairable, that seems almost unheard of, that you could actually take it apart but also add things to it. They included this idea, this feature, which is critical—I think it’s called a General Purpose Input/Output, the acronym is GPIO—which allows users, students, to connect other physical sensors or actuators and robotic kits so that it allows you to connect the world to it, which opens up a whole new set of possibilities for your projects. And that leads to the other key principle of versatility. It was not just like, hey, this computer could only run a couple of sets of programs that one or two companies make. Actually, it was a very open platform that allowed anyone to build on top of it, run different programs, but also use it for different ways of teaching through projects. Projects like you could use the Raspberry Pi to create a—I think one of the projects I remember using was like, oh, how do you make a sensor so that you could water your plants? And I feel like, wow, those physical-based projects really actually allow you to understand how things work, but also build things that work. And then lastly, I think the core principle of, hey, let’s start us out as a nonprofit so that we have clear intention, but also real clear on the goals that solving that problem you were mentioning earlier, Thamer, of helping students learn more about computing through physical project-based learning. I think that was really foundational to the success of this project. So I think those principles of affordability, accessibility, versatility, and being a nonprofit foundation were core to the success of this education tech project.

 

Thamer 10:44

Yeah, and I think it shows in the design choices how extremely simple, extremely open, and versatile this platform is. And so let’s kind of dig into it. It’s a credit-card-sized design, so that gives you a compact and portable form factor. You can integrate it into various projects very easily, easy mounting and positioning within tight spaces. Enhances portability to carry the device. It’s not this giant thing that you have to lug around, and it’s based on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip. And so a kind of system-on-a-chip is an integrated circuit that consolidates all the essential components of a computer onto one chip, and that gives you the CPU, the graphics processor, memory management, and the ability to interface with all these other things in one chip. And that gives you size advantage. It gives you a power consumption advantage. And it was basically the architecture that a lot of mobile devices, including phones, use.

 

Albert 11:47

And also, I feel like it was also an architecture that you could understand, maybe. Like, I feel like so much computing is so complicated with so many components, and I think especially for students, understanding that, oh, here’s where the processor is, and here’s where the inputs are, and here’s where the outputs are—it just made it, at least on surface, it’s really understandable, I think, on how a computer works. And I think that was part of—back to that accessibility principle—making it easier so that students can understand how things work.

 

Thamer 12:20

And so the first Raspberry Pi that was released in 2012 really—this breakthrough of this Broadcom chip called the BCM2835 integrates all these components, like we mentioned on what a system-on-a-chip is: GPU, CPU, memory, and the I/O interfaces. And the I/O interfaces connect you to things like USB and HDMI and the GPIO pins. This really gives you ultimate flexibility. In fact, today if you look at the most recent Raspberry Pis, you can actually drive two displays, two 4K displays out of a $35 credit-card-sized thing. It’s crazy. So you have the versatile connectivity options. You have the exposed GPIO pins. You have this cost-versus-performance balance. It is accessible, and it is simple, and it runs Linux; it runs open-source software, so you basically have everything you need. You just need to connect keyboard, mouse, and display, and you have a computer.

 

Albert 13:19

Yeah, and I think that term “open” gets used a lot, but I think with Raspberry Pi, at least—this is my perspective—I think openness is also being part of a community, allowing the community to contribute. And I think that there’s so many projects out there that students can learn from but also build on and build with. I think that openness and that kind of ethos, in some ways, is so core to making this project successful.

 

Thamer 13:52

Yeah, and it makes it successful across three dimensions: not only the educational mission, but there was already this kind of latent demand by tinkerers and hobbyists that was already there, and then it blew up with industrial applications as a really cheap platform to solve problems.

 

Albert 14:10

Yeah, to kind of expand on that, I think there was a fundamental ability to scale the impact, and I think that’s one of the themes we explore more of in the series around social impact. It’s important to create a better solution, but getting it out there, getting it to scale—I think that’s also important. And I think Raspberry Pi inspired millions of young people around the world to learn about computer science. I think in 2020 alone, I believe there’s—I think there’s 4.9 million learners engaged with online projects, which is amazing. And also, I think because it’s focused on affordability, a low-cost computer just made it accessible to so many different communities.

 

Thamer 14:57

Yeah, and I think it would have been really easy for them when they launched to just kind of sell to the maker community because there was so much demand. But I think they did the harder thing, which was that they really had a belief that they needed to lower the point and the cost for accessibility so that more people—diverse, socioeconomically diverse, racially diverse, gender diversity—would be part of computer science education. And so they really leaned into working with teachers, working with schools, creating communities. To me, in tech, you don’t really see that that often, right? You see kind of people work on the object and throw it over the fence or market to where the most profitable group is, but I think really the thing that is commendable is how they look at the way—how they look at community, and how they look at fulfilling their educational mission.

 

Albert 15:51

In addition to that, I think the other part I think Raspberry Pi probably—I was in some ways surprised but also inspired—was the balance of the Raspberry Pi Foundation with creating a commercial arm that allows Raspberry Pi to sell units to commercial businesses. I think there’s tens of thousands of commercial industrial applications across a wide range of industries, from farming, where they use a sensor like a Raspberry Pi to monitor crops. I think it represents almost 40% of the annual sales. And I think this is another theme of how do you create a sustainable entity? I think having a business arm that allows you to commercialize the technology allows you to create recurring revenue which you could invest back into growing, into developing new products, to serving the community. I think that’s a—it’s a really interesting model, how Raspberry Pi was able to kind of balance the two, the foundation side and the commercial side.

 

[Audio Clip] 16:59

There was always a risk that computing was a thing which was a generational interest, right? That my grandfather could drive a car, my father can take a car apart into its component parts and put it back together, and I can drive a car. And there’s this one-generation spike where this stuff is interesting, and that was always kind of the Raspberry—if Raspberry Pi is a hypothesis test, right, the null hypothesis is kids don’t care anymore, right? The null hypothesis is kids want to play Candy Crush, right? And it’s turned out that I think we’re very close now to proving that kids do care, that kids were just like the rest of us. Kids have become alienated from technology and that they find it interesting. Kids always enjoy knowing something that parents don’t know.

 

Thamer 17:43

You know, the educational impact is quite broad. Focusing on the UK, it supported 26,000 teachers over that number, 12,000 schools through the National Centre of Computing Education, and it has fueled a generational interest in computing and tinkering, which you did not have beforehand at this scale. So this is exciting.

 

Albert 18:11

Yeah, and back to that earlier when the foundation first started, this idea of like, hey, there was a decline to—I feel like there’s this rise. I think the amount of engagement, let’s just say, in terms of students and teachers, and the rise of project-based learning, this idea of physical computing—that’s tremendous how it’s grown over the years.

 

Thamer 18:39

And so as we did our research for the Raspberry Pi, we knew it was big with the tinkering community. We knew it was big in education, but we really—we came across this insight that there’s a lot of failed projects that are educational technology-based, or not as successful. Let’s just say—not as successful. I may be using too harsh of a language, but we kind of asked the question of why did the Raspberry Pi succeed when others didn’t really have that level of success? And obviously part of it is it’s a technology-based solution for technology education, but there’s also more to it. And if you kind of look at some examples, there are these massive open online courses that were hyped around democratizing education, but really they didn’t fulfill that promise. They saw very low completion rates and a struggle to replicate the engagement of in-person learning, and primarily reached more affluent learners to begin with. So almost had the stratification built into it. There was also the One Laptop per Child, which began around the same time as the Raspberry Pi, and it had its own learnings as well. It struggled to hit its price point. It was really about the object. It was targeting a $100 price point, and it didn’t take the extreme simplification approach of Raspberry Pi, where they were cutting things to meet a price point. So they ended up shipping for $200, and that was just, again, a high price for their goals. And it also had a top-down approach, working directly with governments but not with educators at the same level. And then there was the LA Unified School District iPad program in 2013, which was hampered by a variety of problems. And so we kind of looked at these, and we contrasted that with—so how do we look at these and then look back to the Raspberry Pi’s success?

 

Albert 20:36

Yeah, definitely. I think there are some key factors to compare and contrast where Raspberry Pi was different, and their approach, in some ways perhaps, is, again, a good case study of the key elements that contribute to successful education technology projects. I think the one-on-one thing we mentioned already and kind of highlight is the affordability and accessibility, creating something that’s low cost, that’s accessible to schools with limited budget or to regions that might not have the same affordability, purchasing power. I think that’s really key, and in the sense of also making it open source so that you allow others to build on it and experiment and customize. So I think the affordability and accessibility is one of the key successes.

 

Thamer 21:27

And then you have this focus on creativity and hands-on learning. This platform brings that with it through its design and the inclusion of the GPIO pins for physical sensors and things of that nature to attach, an emphasis on programming and understanding computer science principles, and you had students creating weather stations and automated pet feeders and miniature rovers like Mars rovers and things like that, which brings us to also its community and ecosystem are a clear differentiator for its success, with the vibrant community of educators and makers and enthusiasts sharing resources and support, extensive free educational materials, tutorials, and project ideas, and very engaged members—hundreds of thousands of members—in the Raspberry Pi forums as well that are there to support.

 

Albert 22:17

Yeah, I do also want to remind listeners that having a business arm allowed Raspberry Pi to expand on that community. I believe there’s over 60 million Raspberry Pi units sold for commercial use, and I think commercial entities, businesses were able to also contribute to the growth and also development of the Raspberry Pi technology. So this idea of community, and it’s really the ecosystem and building on that, I think this idea of flexibility and versatility—I think that if there was the other kind of key insight that I gained is don’t just build something and assume that’s going to solve all these problems. I think you have to allow others to adapt it, build with it, understand that you’re not going to solve all the scenarios. In some ways, it’s very platform thinking. Thamer, you and I have worked on platforms that you really have to cultivate and create the right conditions so that others can build on it, be it creating the tool set and the tool chain so that educators or school clubs or even homeschooling environments can use it for their needs. So I feel like this flexibility and versatility is another really key factor.

 

Thamer 23:36

Totally agree, Albert. And as part of our research for this episode, we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to connect with Sheryl Cababa. Sheryl is author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, an excellent book—I recommend it to everybody. Sheryl has worked on design and research for educational outcomes, and she shared some of her insights with us during our background research conversation with her, and we wanted to share some of those insights. And one of them is the importance in these kinds of projects of really having an orientation around stakeholder-centered design. A lot of times, misalignment with stakeholder values or misalignment with understanding who your stakeholders are and fully internalizing their context and needs is typically a missed opportunity in tech-based projects that we’ve seen a lot. Albert, I don’t know if you—we can talk about our experience with this?

 

Albert 24:41

Well, I think it’s also incentives for different stakeholders. I think that’s—not to jump into behavioral economics—but different stakeholders have different needs and incentives, and you have to understand that and not ignore it and assume that it’s going to be taken care of.

 

Thamer 24:59

You also sometimes get these top-down approaches with limited input from end users, where you kind of—we have seen this in our work, where you’ll partner with some designers or engineers that might have an ivory tower approach to something where, you know, engineer or designer knows best, and that typically doesn’t work.

 

Albert 25:19

Yeah, it’s also blind spots. We all have it. I think you can’t know everything. And I think the nature of design is not to assume your design is going to be perfect. I always look at design as a means for understanding, for learning, and for building. I think this idea of engaging with your stakeholders, building things together—at least I’ve seen that path, that approach, have better outcomes.

 

Thamer 25:45

This is something that we both learned in our careers, to really focus on and make a foundation of our approach. But it’s always good to hear it from people like Sheryl, and hear Sheryl talking about the idea of stakeholder-centered design.

 

[Sheryl] 26:00

If you are deploying educational technologies within a community, you should be talking to people within that community, or at the very least involving people from that community within the design process, because you can learn a lot about people’s perspectives when it comes to their interactions—not just with, like, the specific technology you might be trying to deploy, but with technology in general. You know, we do a lot of work around math education. When we’ve done work doing participatory design, for example, with parents from Black and Latino communities in the U.S., there’s a lot of concern around surveillance of their children. If we’re talking about ideas such as emerging technology that might help you better understand your child’s progress or your student’s grades, but it would depend on things like always-on listening devices and things like that in the classroom, there are a lot of concerns, especially from parents who are within communities for whom technological surveillance has not served them very well or has actually harmed them. These are things that sometimes are not taken into consideration if a technology team, for example, is just validating their work with, let’s say, the privileged school community down the street from their office park.

 

Thamer 27:30

And one of the things I like about what Sheryl is saying is engaging with stakeholders. Not only is it important, but it really will help you expand your understanding of the problem space. Here’s something that Sheryl shared about that.

 

[Sheryl] 27:45

So I think the most important things for somebody to consider if they’re designing a tech is, one, to deeply understand the problem space. You need to also expand who your stakeholders are or who you consider your stakeholders to be, so not just end users. And then lastly, co-design with those who are at the extremes when it comes to your stakeholders—so the students who are most disadvantaged, for example, if you’re designing within edtech.

 

Thamer 28:15

Albert, one of the things that I think we have witnessed in our careers in technology is extreme tech bias.

 

Albert 28:29

Oh, wow.

 

Thamer 28:29

Can you share some of your experiences with that?

 

Albert 28:32

I think working in tech, we tend to look at tech will solve all problems. We have this kind of techno-optimistic view. And again, I think tech does have amazing impact. At the same time, for every new technology that’s introduced, oftentimes it’s technology looking to solve a problem, and I think it’s our job to humanize technology. But also, I think this is one of my key insights I’ve learned over the years, that technology can create positive impact but also negative impact, and you have to understand those challenges, making sure you understand what the total impact is. Our tech biases assume tech will always be positive and do good, but I think more and more of technology today, at least—the way I look at creating technology or solving problems—is making sure you understand the total impact.

 

Thamer 29:23

Here’s what Sheryl has to say about how to avoid tech bias.

 

[Sheryl] 29:27

Tech bias kind of happens in probably every domain, including healthcare. One of the examples that I use in my book is from Atul Gawande’s book, where he talks about geriatric care and how it has something like a 40% reduction in people ending up in assisted living, etc., but it’s continually being underfunded. But he pointed out that if there were a device called the Automatic Defrailer, and it was invented in Silicon Valley and did the same things that geriatric care did, it would be so successful.

 

Thamer 30:04

And to continue Sheryl’s point, it’s really about balancing innovation with educational realities.

 

[Sheryl] 30:10

It seems obvious to say we need to kind of diversify who is involved in the design and development process. We see a lot of edtech coming out of Silicon Valley, for example—that’s just a really narrow slice of the population at large. And if you think about education, it serves everybody. And my team had created these principles around developing emerging technologies. I think a lot of technology, for example, is designed with efficiency in mind. I had learned that Google Maps, for example, or using this kind of spatial direction software actually reduces our ability to understand essentially, like, spatial directions ourselves, and so it’s benefiting us in the moment, but maybe in the long term, it’s actually harming us. And, you know, educators are really wrestling with generative AI right now in terms of how it can be used in a way that’s meaningful for students. And so it’s just things like this that I think are really important to consider, not just in terms of how technology gets used and implemented in diverse communities, but how we design for ourselves to continue having diverse ideas and diverse ways of learning.

 

Thamer 31:32

One term I had not heard in a long time that came up in the conversation with Sheryl is the term “techno-determinism.” It was a very interesting conversation, so I asked Sheryl to define it in her own words. What is techno-determinism?

 

[Sheryl] 31:48

What is techno-determinism? Okay, techno-determinism—we’re seeing this happen, I think it’s best to kind of describe it by way of example. This idea that we have to keep moving forward, we have to keep progressing with this without applying that much of a critical lens to it, because to stand in the way of its progress or development will mean we’re harming the future. There’s a lot of leaders in Silicon Valley who actually hold that philosophy, where we can’t stand in the way of technological progress, because then we’re harming humanity. And the problem with this is it’s a very narrow set of people who are kind of deciding this and right now at least really doing it with a hyper-capitalist lens. Technology leaders are really good at using the language of “this is eventually going to benefit everybody.” But even Sam Altman has said he just thinks that we need to put these things out there and test them in order to learn about them at the expense of it potentially causing harm, because then they can sort of fix things. But I think you can do that without necessarily risking putting a lot of people in harm’s way. There’s one example, I think from last year, there’s a researcher who was kind of doing work around the kinds of answers AI gives when it comes to health outcomes for Black people, and it was serving up all sorts of misinformation that is based on age-old racist ideologies that have integrated themselves into our healthcare system. So it’s almost like we’re just piling on historical problematic historical perspectives are just getting baked into these systems that make it even more entrenched in some ways.

 

[Thamer]  33:49

When I think about our conversation to this point with regard to tech bias in educational outcomes, it seems to me—let’s see if I can—you know, I try to explain it to my five-year-old self. In order to solve a problem, you need to think of the solution space as a pyramid, and a lot of times the tech thing is something that can be at the top of the pyramid, but it can’t really exist without a bunch of stuff below it actually solved. And so we kind of jump to the top of the pyramid without actually trying to understand how to get the foundation right. Is that a fair analogy?

 

[Sheryl]  34:43

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s actually a really great analogy. I was kind of wishing I had—I feel like I need to—

 

[Thamer] 34:49

Your diagrams basically show that, right, in the book. So it’s your idea, just playing it back to you. So the benefits of—another thing that came up in our background conversation with Sheryl is the idea of the curb-cut effect or curb-cut theory.

 

[Sheryl] 35:13

So curb-cut theory is the idea that if you design for those with the most extreme experiences, others will benefit as well. We think about the physical curb cuts, and imagine walking down a sidewalk and there are the curb cuts that lead into the street. These are basically there because of the disability activists in the 1970s pushed for them so that people who are using wheelchairs are able to use sidewalks continuously without worrying about falling off the sidewalk to go into the road. And what we’ve learned since implementing curb cuts is that they benefit lots and lots of other people—people who also have mobility problems, who might be using a walker, people who are pushing a stroller, people who are using carts. Even if you’re just walking alongside your bike, you benefit from curb cuts. It’s an inclusive design theory that you can understand the needs if you try to understand the needs of those who have the most extreme experiences or who are the most marginalized, that others will benefit as well.

 

Thamer 36:18

Albert, we’ve worked on a few projects where the curb-cut theory and the curb-cut effect has been discussed. Can you kind of explain, Albert, how Raspberry Pi could potentially be an example of curb-cut effect?

 

Albert 36:34

Yeah, I think Raspberry Pi’s extreme focus, again making something that’s so affordable for education, for a segment of users that have very specific needs, those benefits actually extend to broader audiences, broader groups that initially you probably didn’t even realize. Again, it allowed educators to build on it, allowed commercial companies to use it for their industry. It created this whole new ecosystem. So I like to see—at least, I like to see the curb-cut theory as something focused on these extremes but also making sure these benefits can extend to many others.

 

Thamer 37:17

And with that, Albert, I think it’s time for our recap and reflection before we close. Can you take us home?

 

Albert 37:23

Yeah, I think the Raspberry Pi journey illustrates this transformative potential for user-centered design and also the theme that we’ve been exploring in this series around social impact and how Raspberry Pi was able to democratize access to technology and empower creators—that’s such a powerful approach that Raspberry Pi took. And I think combining this accessible hardware with a rich ecosystem of learning resources and community support, those are the key ingredients that Raspberry Pi delivered to its community. And I think these lessons, hopefully for our listeners out there, can apply to future innovation, to educational technology, and in building on this idea of stakeholder engagement, adaptability, and having a clear educational mission. I think there’s so much we learned—we have learned from Raspberry Pi, and my hope is for the listeners out there that they can build on these learnings and create that impact and create that change you want.

 

Thamer 38:35

Well said, Albert. That’s a wrap on today’s episode, and we’d love to thank our guest, Sheryl Cababa, the faculty and staff at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech for their support and insights, and we hope you’ll join us again next time as we continue our journey to uncover the stories, insights, and impact behind historically noteworthy designs. With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech and is a part of its Latham Fellows Program. Thank you for listening.

 

Albert 39:02

Thank you.

 

Thamer 39:02

Okay, that’s a wrap.