The secret lives of stoves in remote Australian Indigenous communities

This is a practice based account of an unobtrusive experiment conducted as part of a federally funded national project from 2006 -2011. As Design consultant I was engaged to investigate the short life expectancy of domestic electric cook stoves in Remote Indigenous Communities. The following account describes the putting in place of a follow up study to verify how the implemented design interventions performed in the field. Product performance data and user feedback are, for Industrial Designers, essential and necessary information that inform their design process and future design interventions. But what if we haven't got any of these avenues available, what if our users are not located within easy reach, what if they are in a setting so remote that it even has no mobile network reception? Then the designer is faced with an uncommon challenge, how to get the users or their things, in this case commercial stoves, to talk from afar? This account highlights the intricacies and complexities of satellite field data logging in remote locations, where designers cross multiple communities of practice while negotiating complex communication issues between electronic components and humans related and unrelated. While technical issues are resolvable it is the social dimension and the strength of social connections that ultimately determine a projects success or failure.