So it’s been a very, very interesting ten days or so. I’d planned on doing a lot of thinking and writing about video for Akvo, and instead pushed that back by about a week to make time for the Temporary School of Thought, where I gave a couple of talks (“infrastructure for anarchists” and “avoiding capitalism for the next four billion” – audio in previous blog posts) to a general audience. The talks were on infrastructure-centric politics and development, and the effect was really very interesting. Most of the people I’ve been discussing this stuff with over the years are specialists to some degree, and dropping the entire story on a general audience of artists and activists was a much-needed contact with the audience.

Here’s what I realized: people who’ve had running water all their lives do not understand what water supply is. Water comes from taps and this is the end of the process. It’s a substance which exists in one form: clear, drinkable, abundant.

This substance we’re discussing in the developing world – drinking from giant puddles that your livestock drink from – this does not register as water to a general audience. It’s a different substance.

So this is an abyss of understanding. The story – the message at the heart of the Akvo message – is about water, but creating the story means creating the picture of the “before” condition. People find it genuinely difficult to conceptualize what living with dirty water supplies is like.

Now, of course, the sledgehammer of sick kids etc. is not the way to get this across. Rather it’s a careful construction of the mental categories of “polluted drinking water” and so on – a little more mental than visceral – but still enough to form the idea in people’s heads that there is a problem here, and that Akvo is working to provide remedies. This is an almost medical framing of the Akvo activity – presenting infrastructure as a route to health, wealth and wellbeing.

The second realization was that people can’t really understand the scope of the problems without comparing them to other known problems. Finding suitable objects for comparison (“before it was X bad, and now it’s Y good”) means careful picking of yardsticks. Is poor water quality as bad as car accidents? As bad as drunk driving? As bad as… just how bad is this problem? This is a classical framing question – “how bad *is* water supply?” asks for either dry facts, or imaginative metaphors.

Finally, there’s modeling how Akvo helps. Once you understand the existence of dirty drinking water, and then understand that it’s as bad as small wars, say, then the ground is fertile for presenting the final picture of What Akvo Is – why will helping us be effective action to prevent the problems assailing the people who need water technologies?

This entire process is frame construction and that’s the key I’ve been digging for on the Akvo video work I’ve been doing: the purpose of the videos is to construct and transmit the frame in which the drama of Akvo plays out – they’re there to show what’s going on, and to highlight the role of the Akvo team in helping people to help themselves.

But the main thing is that the video has to construct a frame of understanding – a before picture – that is then shown to be modified by the intervention of the Akvo team and all of our partners – leading to an after picture showing how we helped people to change their lives.

This might sound a bit obvious, but there are a lot of different ways of thinking about video, and seeing it clearly as a chance to reach out to activists and people hoping to improve conditions for the poor globally to show them how water is a key part of global development and humanitarian efforts was a major conceptual breakthrough for me.

That’s the cornerstone of the Akvo video strategy from my perspective: it’s about showing people that water is a critical issue that does not require vast political changes to work on. You can improve the world one well at a time.

This is a direct extension of the “woman who built herself a toilet” Akvo posters – upbeat, happy, progress-through-knowledge type thinking. I want to extend that understanding and outreach to a much wider audience, through the use of video to frame the water issues as incrementally solvable technology problems – things that can be done a step at a time until everybody has enough.

These are subtle points about how video is used to tell stories but all video sends messages at these levels. It’s just a question of whether you choose to consciously communicate using context, or whether context is something that happens by accident around a story.

Creating the context to understand why Akvo is the right answer is the primary challenge of the video strategy I’m working on. I finally realized that although the videos might spend a lot of time showing the what, to succeed, what our videos have to communicate is the why. And not in simplistic terms, not with images of deprivation used as advertising, but in a more nuanced communication about what people’s lives are like, all over the world.

I’ve found the view and the perspective. Now Iit should be a lot easier to put together the proposals.