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Design For The REST of the GLOBE – The Other 90%
By J.A. Romig | OCT.05.07
Big hearts and good design combine to improve 90% of the world. |
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If you are reading this from the comfort of your house, apartment or mobile home, then you probably have hot and cold running water, electricity and shelter. You make up ten percent of the world's population. The other ninety percent live without one, some, or all of the above. At this moment, there are six billion, six hundred and twenty one million, five hundred and fourteen thousand, two hundred and sixty eight (6 621 514 268) people on this planet. More than five billion of your fellow humans will likely never buy a copy of a popular design magazine or walk inside a home furnishing store. Their needs are usually ignored in the pages of trade magazines. They are the Other 90%.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is located on New York City's famed Fifth Avenue. The 110 year old venue houses and hosts collections that center on the inspiration, creation and appreciation of tangible items from the world's greatest designers. The beauty of 17th century Japanese sword craft. Eames chairs. The most striking recent tech gadgets. These are the pieces one would normally expect at a Cooper-Hewitt exhibit. Precious things that ten per centers want. The Other 90% just want potable drinking water or a warm place to sleep. Who would think that an art museum would open a show based on cheaply made water pumps and cardboard shelters?
According to curator Cynthia E. Smith, the idea for the show, "Design for the Other 90%", draws directly from the views of economist E. F. Schumacher. Schumacher is considered one of the fathers of the concept of sustainability. In 1973, he published a collection of essays entitled "Small Is Beautiful", subtitled "A Study of Economics As If People Mattered". In a May 2007 interview with WNYC radio, Ms. Smith says:
"Designers of all stripes are...aware that we need to be looking at more socially responsible design."
Sadly, Design for the Other 90% closed September 23, 2007. That's why we recommend that you purchase a copy of the companion book for this Cooper-Hewitt event, as it thoroughly explains the over thirty projects tailored by individuals, organizations, volunteers and artisans. The show may be over but the idea must live on. You can purchase a copy here.
In the same Interview as Smith's, engineer Martin Fisher and doctor-turned-potter Ron Rivera, both explained how a simple, affordable, properly designed product can sustain life as well as become the instrument for a better life.
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Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum |
| The Cooper-Hewitt began when the wealthy Hewitt sisters realized they had some damned nice things that didn't necessarily belong in an art museum but were too historically important to be sold as mere antiques. Their pill boxes, porcelain desk sets and jewelry became the seed collection for an institution that is now the foremost North American Museum, dedicated to design. |
| > CooperHewitt.org |
| E. F. Schumacher |
| Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was a German born economist who defied the corporate mindset by suggesting that the best economies were the ones that were self-sustaining and dependent on local resources and workers. A auto manufacturing plant has no business in a region where the people are perfectly successful exporting hand made textiles, produced locally from locally grown fiber. Schumacher coined the terms "Intermediate Technology" and "Intermediate Size". He also wrote the esteemed book series "Small is Beautiful". If you want to know more about Schumacher and his teachings, The E. F. Schumacher Society website is an excellent place to start. |
| > SmallIsBeautiful.org |
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Rivera designs self-contained ceramic water filters. Fisher designs both hand-operated irrigation pumps and brick presses. Fisher stressed that his solution to poverty was income and that a $34.00 micro-irrigation pump can increase the annual revenue of a single farmer three-fold. The person who buys Fisher's Money Maker Block Press is able to open a small business using local soil and a little bit of concrete.
For Rivera, the time he spent in the Peace Corps in Guatemala influenced his decision to bring health to impoverished persons not with his medical degree, but with his pottery skills. Made from clay and implementing colloidal silver, his ceramic filter is a smaller, less costly version of an original design by chemist, Dr. Fernando Mazareigos. Each design is inexpensive to produce and purchase.
The event covered products in categories of Shelter, Health, Water, Education, Energy and Transport. Rivera and Fisher represent just two of the various innovations from the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition.
The designs that caught our eyes and took our hearts were the ones that typified simplicity, function and human spirit. All of the projects featured were phenomenal but four stood out:
The Mad Housers Hut
In the late eighties, some students from the Georgia Tech architecture department wanted to make a political statement about the reality of homelessness in America. Without notice, little 8x6x10 shacks popped up in the poshest neighborhoods. As time went by, the group went from making statements to just plain making these lockable, heated, temporary shelters. After hurricane Katrina, the rogue builders have kept very busy erecting the huts for Gulf Coast storm victims. The Mad Housers clientèle consists of long-time homeless people already living under tarps and bridges and otherwise outdoors. In one village made from the huts, a Mad Houser volunteer took a junk automobile, rigged it to hold extra batteries and turned the clunker into a mini-power station.
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Pot-in-Pot Cooler
One earthen wear pot nested inside a bigger one. In between is water and sand. As the water evaporates, the sand pulls heat away from the smaller pot. In Nigeria, there are farmers that live nowhere near electricity or water plants and have to travel many miles on foot in order to sell their crops. By the time they get to market, their goods are spoiled. This ingenious cooler was designed by Mohammed Bah Abba and the pots are made locally, further enhancing the livelihood of the community.
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Internet Village Motoman Network
United Villages Incorporated must have been in psychic harmony with the Mad Housers because the Motoman Network is comprised of five Honda motorcycles equipped with mobile access points and a satellite uplink. These portable communications hubs allow schools, medical clinics and government offices to plug into the planet from remote territories in Cambodia, where there is no electricity and no telecommunications infrastructure of any kind. This way, the small villages are able to build solar-powered structures and still receive satellite access to the information and resources of the outside world.
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Q Drum
This one made us cry. A donut-shaped, refillable water barrel with a strap through the center hole. Breathtaking. The wheel reinvented. Those children and young mothers, toting water barrels on their heads should be praised. But rest assured, they would rather have a Q Drum. P. J. and J. P. S. Hendrikse designed the Q Drum in 1993. Now people in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Angola have the ability to collect an ample supply of water in one trip without injury, spillage or the exhaustion of a twenty mile foot journey.
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Bamboo Treadle Pump
In America, when the dry season comes, we turn on our very expensive equipment and pump a few million more gallons of water from nearby lakes or underground aquifers. In Nepal, there is no industrial water “grid”. The farmers are on their own. The Bamboo Treadle Pump requires no electricity or fuel and can be made cheaply from local materials. It takes one person to operate and is equipment that can mean the difference between feast or famine. The Bamboo Treadle Pump has been sold to millions of people and is manufactured by th people of Nepal. The invention was designed by Gunnar Barnes and sponsored by International development Enterprises.
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We encourage everyone to browse the International Herald Tribune's Socially Responsible Design Photo Gallery for some engaging and interesting images.
All the pieces in the Cooper-Hewitt show are equally, socially, morally beautiful. From the already notable "One Laptop Per Child" program to solar-powered pillow desks - marrying indigenous textile arts with LED technology - the items and the ideology are catching on with 'all stripes' of designers. Accolades are also coming. The Bamboo Treadle Pump, by Gunnar Barnes, is already nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award.
As Schumacker tried to tell us, poor communities and people need to be able create their own salvation if we truly want to end poverty. A boy from Tanzania gets to live the rest of his life without the crippling effects of lugging a multi-gallon drum of water during his youth. His station in the economy improves because he is at least, ambulatory. The small farmer in Uganda may never afford a truck to haul his vegetables to market, but he can afford a Big Boda load-carrying bicycle. He sells more produce, he makes more money, he spends more money.
To the ten per centers, a designer bike is an indulgence at worst, athletic equipment at best. To a woman or man without a car, a bicycle is a means to employment and financial stability. The wares on display at the Cooper-Hewitt's exhibition are intended for the rest of the world. The ninety percent that lives every day without heat or shelter or water or electricity or the very basics that we ten per centers take for granted.
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| | By J.A. Romig | FOKaL Writer |
| [ OCT.05.07 ] |
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