Journal of Innovations

Vol. 4, Issue 3

Designing With Practice: Sequence-Conscious Clean-Cooking Transitions in Kigali

AUTHOR(S)

Jeremiah Thoronka

ABSTRACT

Clean-cooking interventions routinely underperform against health, welfare, and climate goals because they are often designed as technology-distribution or behaviour-change problems rather than as situated social practice. This paper introduces sequence-conscious design as a practice-based framework for understanding how households combine fuels, appliances, people, and institutions across the course of a meal. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Kigali’s districts of Gasabo, Kicukiro, and Nyarugenge, I show that households assemble fuel-appliance sequences, for example using electricity or LPG for speed and charcoal for sensory finishing, to manage punctuality, flavour, risk, and social legitimacy. These sequences are stabilised by trust infrastructures, including prepaid meters, SIM-linked accounts, cylinder seals, and vendor weighing rituals, as well as by micro-settlements of custodianship over key artefacts such as meter cards, regulator valves, and utility-linked phones. The paper argues that durable clean-cooking transitions depend less on outright fuel substitution than on designing with these existing scripts and reducing the most harmful stages within them. It therefore advances four practical implications: prioritise incremental re-patterning over forced replacement; avoid premature problem-solution lock-in by testing under real temporal and supply constraints; evaluate interventions using sensory, temporal, and trust-based metrics alongside technical ones; and co-design with users, vendors, utilities, landlords, donors, and manufacturers to institutionalise trust and align value chains with everyday practice.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.62470/2c263067 

CITE THIS ARTICLE 

Thoronka, J. (2026). Designing With Practice: Sequence-Conscious Clean-Cooking Transitions in Kigali. Journal of Innovations, 4(3), 17-30. https://doi.org/10.62470/2c263067