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Intuitive design thinking to address human-wildlife conflict in Kenya
Welcome
Tools, Practices and Mindsets
The following tools, practices and mindsets have been highlighted in this story, however, there are many more which are evident and may become apparent to you as you engage with this story. Which other tools, practices and mindsets can you identify?
Richard's story at a glance
Richard Turere is a Kenyan innovator who used his love for lions and his family duty to solve a challenge that seemed insurmountable. As is the norm in his culture, at just 9 years old, he was tasked with protecting his family’s livestock from lions that strayed from the nearby Nairobi National Park in search of easy prey. These livestock were a source of food, money and pride in his community.
To protect their livestock, Morans – who are Maasai warriors equipped with spears – responded by hunting and killing the lions. In other communities, members would use deadly pesticides to set edible and deadly traps for the lions. This contributed to the lion population in the region plummeting to near extinction. The conflict between the Maasai and wildlife necessitated a new way for humans and wildlife to co-exist harmoniously in their area.
As a young cattle herder, Richard tried and tested several solutions, including fire, scarecrows, and flashlights, to keep the lions away from his family's cattle until developing something that worked. His invention, called Lion Lights, has since been adopted in Kenya, other countries in Africa, India, and Argentina. Richard now leads a non-profit organisation, Lion Lights, that supports the rollout and continued support of Lion Lights, which has been documented and celebrated on many platforms.
Looking at Intuitive Design Thinking from Richard’s Innovation Journey
In this story we look at Richard Turere's innovation journey through the lens of design thinking, unpacking how the tools, practices, and mindsets of design thinking can happen intuitively for innovators, even when they are not intentionally following a design thinking approach. We’ll see how a design thinking approach, with its associated phases, tools, practices and mindsets, leads to real-world lessons and a tested and improved response to a challenge. We will focus on the phases, tools, practices, and mindsets that stand out the most in Richards' journey.
A Design Thinking approach showing the interrelated & iterative phases
The diagram below (adapted by d-school Afrika from the HPI d-school in Potsdam) illustrates a version of the design thinking process with its different phases. Different versions of this model exist using slightly different terminology. This six-phase model – Understand, Observe, Point of View, Ideate, Prototype, and Test – serves as a practical roadmap for working through design challenges. It helps you understand people's needs, uncover unstated problems by watching and listening, framing the right problem, generating creative solutions, building quick prototypes, and learning from testing them with people affected by the challenge.
Here's what's important: the process isn't a rigid recipe. As the linking lines in the diagram indicate, designers move back and forth between phases, sometimes skipping around or repeating steps based on what they're learning. We can even enter the process at any point. In Richard’s case we see him cycling quite organically between Understand, Ideate, and Prototype several times on route to developing Lion Lights.
Design Thinking phases adapted by d-school Afrika from the HPI d-school, Potsdam
Understand the Challenge
Watch
Seen in this video
The video below, LIGHT FOR LIONS – an Innovative Solution to Saving the Species, shows how the development of the city is encroaching on the wildlife's natural environment. Furthermore, this video shows the lifestyle of the Maasai people, the importance of cattle in their culture, the hunting of lions, and the effect of this hunting on the lion population. An older Richard Turere looks back on his earlier innovation of Lion Lights, which he designed to safely scare the lions away.
⚠️ Trigger warning: Includes graphic content of animals being harmed.
Watch this video documentary to understand the context of the challenge: LIGHT FOR LIONS – an Innovative Solution to Saving the Species (Play until 07:17). Answer the pop-up questions that appear during the video to test your understanding.
Optional: Additional video
Watch the young inventor Richard Turere tell his story of creating Lion Lights in his TED talk at age 13: My invention that made peace with lions (play until 7:20)
Understand and Observe
Did you notice the concepts, ‘understand’ and ‘observe’ in the story?
Practices
Identify and understand stakeholders involved in the challenge
Observation - night patrols
Mindsets
Be human‑centred
Important note: This particular case illustrates the limitation in the term ‘human-centred’, as we need to also understand non-human actors in the ecosystem. Recent developments in the field have evolved the term to be more inclusive, as in ‘life-centred design’ or ‘more-than-human-centred design’.
During the ‘Observe’ phase (called ‘Empathise’ in some models) we explore whom the challenge affects, how it affects them and how they relate to one another. In practising design thinking, we aim to centre the people, and in this case the animals, who are experiencing a challenge throughout our problem-solving journey. By empathising, we ensure that we create responses that will be the most relevant and impactful to their problem.
Stakeholders involved in the challenge
As we see in the first video, LIGHT FOR LIONS – an Innovative Solution to Saving the Species, Richard intuitively explored who the challenge of rapid urbanisation affects, how it affects them, and how this challenge has affected the way people and animals relate to each other.
His Family
Richard's family is part of the Maasai tribe, and they depend on livestock as a form of currency, a source of sustenance, and a source of pride. Because of this dependency, they cannot lose any animals to lion predation. At the start of his TED Talk, My invention that made peace with lions, Richard details how they had lost their only bull to lion predation. Because the bull was vital for breeding, replacing it was a necessity; however, the expense was a significant setback that burdened his family and hindered their livestock's growth.
The Maasai Tribe (community)
Much like Richard’s family, other community members faced frequent lion attacks on their livestock. Occurring multiple times a week, these losses directly threatened their livelihoods. The tribe places immense value on their animals and land, believing they descended from heaven with their herds. To them, herding is a divine purpose; they hold a deep reverence for their livestock, viewing them as far more than just a means to an end.
The Lions
The lions live in an ecosystem where human encroachment has increasingly limited their natural hunting grounds. Each year, local wildlife migrates through the Serengeti and Maasai Mara in search of water and greener pastures. Attracted by the ease of preying on livestock during this migration, lions often enter community homesteads to feed. While some were hunted by the Morans (warriors), others suffered a slow, painful death after ingesting toxic pesticides.
The Morans
These were the warriors of the Maasai tribe, men brave enough to hunt and kill lions with spears. As a vital part of the community, they carried the noble responsibility of safeguarding the highly valued livestock. Like the rest of their people, the Morans viewed lions as enemies of their survival and were determined to protect their livelihoods against this threat at all costs.
(*Moran is an English-simplified version of the Maa word 'olmurrani', referring to a young, initiated man in the warrior age set).
Richard
Richard was a 9-year-old child when he was given the duty of taking care of his family's livestock in the middle of the night. Although he eventually presented his innovation at the age of 13, he was still quite young to be given such a task. Richard needed a way to fulfil his duty while still being able to sleep without the constant fear of lion attacks. Furthermore, he had grown to love the lions and wanted to find a solution that prevented their suffering.
The Conservationists
One challenge conservationists from the nearby Nairobi National Park had to contend with was their interest in conserving lions and the community’s negative view of lions. This perspective directly influenced the number of lions killed, causing their population to plummet to near extinction in the region.
In the same way that initial understanding of the problem came intuitively for Richard, this might be something you already do too. However, sometimes we may get so excited by solving the problem that we rush ahead to creating something without digging deeper into the problem. The Design Thinking process intentionally makes ‘understanding’ a step in the problem-solving journey so we can have a full and explicit understanding of the problem and the people involved before embarking on problem-solving and idea generation. It is during this time that we gather insights from the field and include the voices of those affected in reframing the challenge at hand. One way of deepening the understanding of a problem (even reframing it entirely) involves immersing oneself in the stakeholders' environments to observe them firsthand.
Identifying the stakeholders and observing the problem firsthand is particularly important because it allows us to see – much like Richard did – that problems are often far more complex than we initially assume. By engaging in activities, such as watching, listening, and asking, that uncover these layers, we identify the multitude of stakeholders involved in a single challenge and observe what is unstated or not immediately obvious.
Ideate and Prototype
Did you notice the concepts, ‘ideate’ and ‘prototype’ in the story?
Tools
Low‑fidelity prototypes (fire, scarecrow, flashing lights setup)
Practices
Rapid cycling between ideation and prototyping
Using low‑fidelity materials to make ideas tangible
Gaining insights from failed attempts
Mindsets
Bias to Action
Lead with Curiosity
Fail fast, fail forward
In a model of the design thinking process, 'Ideate' and 'Prototype' are two separate phases, but true to how design thinking often takes place in the real world, Richard cycled between ideation and prototyping in quick succession while observing the results. For the purpose of this story, they have been combined here for ease of reference.
Low Fidelity Prototyping
Low-fidelity prototyping and testing take place when we use everyday, affordable materials that we have easy access to in order to make our ideas tangible. Through this, we are able to quickly learn about our solutions. This puts into action the mindset of ‘building to learn’. In other terms, it can be called 'fail fast, fail forward’. You can think of ‘failing fast’ as the action and ‘failing forward’ as the insight that propels you to a new, exciting idea.
💡 Expert Insight
“The injunction to ‘Fail fast, fail forward' foregrounds a designer’s intention to learn. As with all experiments, we don't know if they will be successful – this framing of 'failure' not as a negative but as a positive learning outcome aims to build a testing mindset that grows people's comfort with 'not knowing' but moving ahead anyway. With each prototype we move closer to fully understanding our idea's challenges, affordances and validity. We also build to test assumptions, things we think are true but in reality are not. All in all building – making ideas tangible – helps us course-correct as we move ahead with an idea.”
(Rael Futerman, Hasso Plattner d-School Afrika, University of Cape Town)
Watch
Seen in this video
In this short, simple conversation, Richard speaks about the valuable lessons he gained through his prototypes "failing" or not addressing some user needs.
He details his 3 prototyped versions from low fidelity to high fidelity.
Watch this video to see how Richard took a low-fidelity model to a profitable one.
Explorer Classroom | Lion Lights with Richard Turere (National Geographic Education)
Play from 19:23-22:20
Richard’s attempts at keeping the lions at bay from his homestead were as follows:
He used fire to trick the lions into thinking there were humans guarding the livestock in the middle of the night. This first idea failed, and he realised that the light actually helped the lions see into the cowsheds. This made it easier for them to prey on the livestock.
Richard then placed a scarecrow next to the fence of the cowshed, believing the lions would think he was standing guard. This worked for a little while, but the lions began to recognise it was not a human being because the scarecrow was not moving. They began attacking the livestock once again.
At this stage, as he tells us in the TED Talk, he made a pivotal observation: the lions stayed away when they saw him walking with a flashlight, as the moving light signalled a human presence. This was his 'Aha!' moment… Then:
Richard used an indicator box, a switch, a small flashlight, and parts from his mother's radio to set up lights that would flash while Richard slept. The lions perceived the flickering light as human movement, which kept them at bay! This is what he further refined to become known as Lion Lights.
As we can see, Richard experimented with multiple low-fidelity prototypes and then observed each time how the lions would react to his solution. He played with different possibilities, and although there were failures in between, he was able to gain lessons that propelled him to a new idea.
The value of experimentation – and the embrace of failure – lies in its ability to generate learning that can accumulate into a novel, impactful idea. For innovators, this means you do not have to start with a big bright idea; you can start with a small idea and ‘fail forward’ until you find one.
Testing
Did you notice the 'testing' concept in the story?
Tools
Low-fidelity prototype
High‑fidelity prototype
Practices
Incorporating user insights into improvements
Mindsets
Be Human‑Centred (or Life‑Centred)
Make Tangible
Testing in the design thinking process happens when you take the solution you have created and hand it back to the people who play central roles within the challenge context. This allows the innovator to "stress test" their solution. When the innovator creates something, they create it with assumptions about why it would work. Through handing it back to the intended user, they are able to see whether it in fact works in the way they intended, and if it does not, it gives them direction on how to make the solution more impactful.
The human-centred / life-centred mindset applies here once again (and in fact throughout the design thinking process).
In the previous video from National Geographic Education, we got to see how Richard’s solution was stress tested and what he learned from the testing itself. The reported reduction in lion killings and improved coexistence between humans and lions shows the effectiveness of testing the solution in real-world settings.
Testing high-fidelity prototypes with users
After arriving at his solution, Richard developed higher-fidelity prototypes that were handed over to the main users: cattle farmers. Through doing this, he was able to get feedback that he had not previously considered.
Richard found out that his first version of Lion Lights needed to be portable. The people he created this product for were nomadic people who needed to move their homesteads and livestock during the dry season. This meant that he needed to find a way to make it easy to unpack and take with them.
Richard discovered that he needed to find a way to create random flashing sequences. As we learnt through this story, lions are smart animals. They were beginning to get used to the lights, which might mean they might begin attacking homesteads again. So Richard went back to the drawing board.
One of Richard's first high-fidelity models used a motion sensor that would trigger the lights when an animal got close to it. This became impractical for its users because it was too expensive and it needed to be switched on manually.
Insights gained from previous iterations resulted in a version that is smaller, more portable, and easily installed by users. Because the device requires no human interaction for up to three years, farmers are put at ease; they no longer worry about forgetting to switch it on or damaging it during transport. Furthermore, the updated design reduces the need for constant maintenance calls to distant locations, while its lower cost and extended lifespan make it both affordable and sustainable.
Implementation
While not always depicted as part of the design thinking process, ‘implementation’ is where we really see an innovation launched and sustained in the wider world. Some institutions teaching design thinking might use a tool such as Business Model Canvas to plan this next important step of turning ideas into action.
Design Thinking phases extended by d-school Afrika for this story from the HPI d-school, Potsdam
Watch
Seen in this video
In this video, Richard gives the viewer a look at what a homestead looks like and a tour of his tangible solution in situ.
Watch this video to see how Richard talks about the implementation of Lion Lights: Explorer Classroom | Lion Lights with Richard Turere (National Geographic Education)
Play from 06:50-09:35
A design solution that hits the ‘innovation sweet spot’ satisfies three criteria: desirability (people want it), feasibility (it’s technically possible) and viability (financially sustainable). This idea can be traced to Tim Brown and IDEO ("Tim Brown urges designers to think big") and has since been widely used and adapted. While the process discussed up to this point shows mostly how desirability and feasibility were established for Lion Lights, creating viability became crucial for Richard in the ongoing implementation stage.
Considering the societal and environmental impact of your solution is as important as the product being financially sustainable. A solution needs to provide value for the business, its customers, and its surrounding environment.
Let’s consider the case of Lion Lights.
Customer value:
Strengthening economic stability and physical safety amongst the farming community.
Business value:
Selling the Lion Lights solution to farm owners at an affordable price with minimal production or maintenance costs.
Running tourism and awareness campaigns that engage tourists with locals and conservation efforts. Funds raised are invested back into the Lion Lights project.
Societal value:
Providing training programmes that equip local residents with the skills to install, maintain, and repair Lion Lights, which helps them generate an income.
Ecological value:
Promoting peaceful co-existence between humans, livestock and predators.
Running educational seminars and workshops to raise awareness about the critical importance of protecting our wildlife.
Image: The Innovation Sweet Spot. Adapted from “A Venn Diagram for Innovation,” by Jen Bonhomme, 2016, Medium.
Impact and ongoing evolution
The most exciting part of creating a product is seeing it being impactful in the lives of the very people you designed it for.
Richard was able to create an innovation that gained him global recognition and demand for the product. The Lion Lights website (2026) reports that Richard’s organisation has installed Lion Lights in 14 809 homesteads in Kenya and 3930 across the rest of the world, including Botswana, Tanzania, Namibia, Argentina, and India, where the system has proved effective against other kinds of predators, too.
Reported impacts include reduced livestock losses and a decline in retaliatory killing of lions; in some communities near Nairobi National Park, Namunwa (2023) reports that no lions were killed in homesteads where Lion Lights were installed, and wildlife monitoring has recorded approximately a 15% increase in the local lion population, attributed partly to these coexistence measures alongside broader conservation efforts.
In a January 2026 video report to Planet Wild (a crowdfunding platform that supported Lion Lights) Richard tells how, more than ten years into the product’s development, his organisation still continuously monitors and upgrades the product as well as the organisation's service model to ensure that the Lion Lights system remains effective, well supported in grassroots communities, and one step ahead of the lions. So an innovator’s iterative observation, improvement and development process is never over.
Acknowledgements
How we came to identify this story
The project advisory group approved this as our first story for the collection, after it was suggested by one of the advisory members, who had used the Lion Lights story in his teaching. In an online Conversation Circle of the Afrikan Design Thinking Network in September 2024, a group of participants contributed their ideas about the use of the Lion Lights story as a design thinking education resource.
Story Contributors
Authors: Sinalo Bambeni and Jenni van Niekerk (d-school Afrika, University of Cape Town)
Project management and overall curation: Jenni van Niekerk (d-school Afrika, University of Cape Town)
Project advisory and overall review: Janice McMillan (University of Cape Town), Hoda Mostafa (American University of Cairo), Stephen Kgiithi Kagwathi (Africa Nazarene University), Gordon Adomdza (then Ashesi University)
Story review, resource development, testing and subject matter expertise: Tiego Monareng, Tebogo Chaka, Gadija Petersen, Anne van Niekerk, Rael Futerman (d-school Afrika, University of Cape Town)
Learning Design: Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Catherine Fortune
Special thanks to Richard Turere, founder of Lion Lights
Sources
Cechlovska, K. (2023). LIGHT FOR LIONS – an Innovative Solution to Saving the Species
Lion Lights (2026). Product Development.
Lion Lights (2026). Promoting Peaceful Human-Wildlife Coexistence.
Namunwa, K. (2023, May 23). Kenyan Entrepreneur Named Finalist For The Young Inventors Prize.
National Geographic Education (2024). Explorer Classroom | Lion Lights with Richard Turere.
Planet Wild (2025, January 15). We're saving lions with a genius invention
Turere, R. (2013, February). TED2013: My invention that made peace with lions.
Storyteller Images
Reve AI Inc. (2026). A female African storyteller in traditional dress. Reve (Version 1.0) [AI-generated image].
Citation
Bambeni, S. & van Niekerk, J. (2026). Lion Lights: Intuitive design thinking to address human-wildlife conflict in Kenya. In J. van Niekerk (ed.). Afrikan Design Thinking Stories. Afrikan Design Thinking Network.
🏷️Tools: Physical prototyping
🏷️Practices: Observation, Rapid prototyping, Iteration, User testing, real stakeholders, Problem immersion
🏷️Mindsets: Make Tangible, Bias to Action, Navigate Uncertainty, Lead with Curiosity, Be Driven to Make a Difference
🏷️General: Africa, Kenya, Lion, Cattle, Herder, Innovation, Richard Turere, Farmer, Maasai, Morans, Wildlife, Conservation, Agriculture
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