Some problems do not require us to reinvent the wheel. When we identify existing links in need of innovation, we tear them down and build them back again.

These specific tools and strategies already have a place in the field. Despite their use, the assumptions, strategies, production, and/or underlying technologies are outdated, irrelevant, and/or insufficient. The technologies used to construct and interact with these tools of global development are often decades old or were designed from a disconnect, where the culture and context was not well informed enough to incorporate technology effectively.

We systematically deconstruct the tool or strategy, component by component. We identify the assumptions of its designer relative to user experiences, functional objectives, markets, and technology. We examine the limitations and consequences – both in design and in practice – of these assumptions and rebuild the item with the benefit of research, modeling, simulation, collaboration, and transformative technologies. We most often redesign heightened functionality, greater sustainability, simpler user interface, durability, affordability, and application-specific qualities into each teardown.

In reintroducing redesigned tools and strategies into the system, our challenge is to produce a transformative yet orthogonal solution, in that it exerts the maximum amount of positive change while causing as little turbulence to the existing system as possible.

Our teardowns are structured to be more efficient at development and commercialization and to reduce the friction of launching the solution in terms of client comfortability, user training, procurement procedures, and total system integration. By seeing global development and all the tools and strategies it comprises as potential subjects to be torn down and redesigned with new understandings and new technologies, it puts the whole world up for grabs.