by: Rachel Schauer
Event: Design for the Other 90%
Location: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, through 09.23.07
Curator: Cynthia E. Smith
The Bamboo Treadle Pump, designed by Gunnar Barnes of Rangpur/Dinajpur Rural Service and IDE Nepal, is used in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Mayanmar, Cambodia, and Zambia to allow farmers to access groundwater during the dry season.
©2003 International Development Enterprises, courtesy Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Both provocative and critical to the well being of individuals and their communities, the innovations presented in Design for the Other 90% at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum aims for relevancy in our current aesthetics-obsessed environment. The exhibition offers a glimpse into how design may encourage growth and prosperity for those who have compromised access to basic human needs. The show addresses categories such as shelter, water, health, and energy, presenting a small collection of products meant to improve the quality of life for those in developing countries. For example, the MoneyMaker Block Press, designed by Martin Fisher and used in various African locations, allows 5-8 workers to produce up to 800 bricks a day. The increased productivity speaks for itself; these are designs that are being put to good use.
For an exhibition striving to emphasize the power of design, however, there is a serious lack of visual media depicting these items actually in use, or even in the context in which the other 90% live. While some products, including the Water Storage System, designed by International Development Enterprises (IDE) India, or Bamboo Treadle Pump, designed by Gunnar Barnes of Rangpur/Dinajpur Rural Service and IDE Nepal, are easily imagined in rural towns, the Solar Dish Kitchen, designed by BASIC Initiative Mexico Program of the University of Texas and University of Washington, or Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child look out of place, provoking issues of regional and cultural specificity that are no stranger to most architects and beg the question: what position are we in as designers to anticipate what the “other” really needs?
The few items shown in action are illuminating on the design level, but also highlight another drastic shortcoming of the exhibition: the definition of design has been limited to mean “objects” — gadgets that, while useful and important, are more like emergency tactics rather than long-term strategies for change. For instance, The LifeStraw, designed by Torben Vestergaard Frandsen and used in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda, is an invention that can filter typhoid and cholera bacteria to provide adequate drinking water. Yet, imagining the straw as a lifetime solution reveals its own improbability as anything but a temporary fix to a much larger and significant environmental and economic problem. Designers are surely capable of imagining more complex strategies, and not just topical Band-Aids.
Both the vital need for designers to step outside the high-end design world of the privileged 10%, and the potential for creativity are reasons enough to make Design for the Other 90% worthy of conversation and debate, whatever its shortcomings may be. The tools on display offer interesting ideas, but are only the first step, and understandably so; the design process can be long and tedious, and rarely generates a perfect first attempt. Hopefully, if more designers are inspired to participate, better and more enduring solutions may be around the corner.
Rachel Schauer is concentrating her studies on architecture and communications at New York University Gallatin School. She also is e-Oculus‘ graphic designer.