A brief history of Thinkit

Thinkit started life in South Africa and Lesotho in 1993, when it was developed to help involve local people in planning to improve their villages. Lesotho is a small mountainous kingdom completely landlocked by the Republic of South Africa. It has a high dependency on foreign aid, importing 90% of its food and with few exports apart from manpower for the mines of South Africa. Faced with a massive scale of environmental degradation and poverty, we quickly realised the need for a better way to engage people in thinking about what really mattered to them, so that solutions would come from a sense of their identity and values, instead of being imposed through a programme. We needed a new language of design, a new way of communicating. As a result, Thinkit was born.

Projects in Southern Africa included a new plan for the village at Thlolego Development Project near Rustenburg, South Africa, which incorporated new environmental ideas with traditional housing. It was here that Thinkit’s founder, Dr. Joanne Tippett, ran a series of ecological design courses, entitled ‘DesignWays’, to help empower local people’s involvement in planning and development. The courses involved use of an interactive process that later evolved into Thinkit.

The strength of this approach has been exemplified in the work of numerous DesignWays students, including: Shirley Sifunda, who used the approach to encourage 500 women in an impoverished region of South Africa, near Swaziland, to grow food and develop an income from the resources in their villages; and Mike Masuku, who used it to assess the needs of poor rural schools in South Africa and develop creative ways to meet their needs.

The most significant aspect of pioneering Thinkit in Southern Africa was the evident benefit to people’s sense of hope and self-confidence, which helped them to become aware of the possibilities for improving the quality of their lives, using their own creativity and the resources available to them.

Following our initial success in Africa, we took Thinkit to California (US) in 1997. Here it was used as an aid for teaching undergraduate students at Berkeley and Dominican Universities, as well as in business planning workshops with Hewlett Packard and Mondavi Vineyards.

In 2000 Thinkit arrived in Manchester (UK), where the company is now based. During this time the kit has evolved in response to feedback from many different people, to become the tried and tested product that we are proud of today. Uses within the UK have included community-led planning and regeneration; engaging stakeholders on behalf of local authorities and government agencies; developing new businesses; providing tools for teachers, and more.

Research using Thinkit at the University of Manchester showed that participants appreciated the opportunity to learn from each other and work together creatively, and saw the value of Thinkit in helping them to do this.