Formulating the Design Scope for the Base of the (Economic) Pyramid

Base of the (economic) Pyramid (BoP) represents a population living under severe resource constraint s. Design for BoP has crucial responsibility of achieving the well-being through fulfillment of specific needs. At BoP, design has to shoulder this additional responsibility due to absent or severely constrained mechanisms to translate the functional product into well-being. This paper proposes a design scope for the BoP using normative approach from developmental economics, and then compares it with the pervasive product centric scope. Author defines product centricity as a design scope that considers resultant product as sufficient outcome of design and evaluates the extent of product centricity in prevalent design approaches.