Design Revolution / by Emily Pilloton (2009)
In January of 2008, with a thousand dollars, a laptop and an outsized conviction that design can change the world, rising San Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton launched Project H Design, a radical non-profit that supports, inspires and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design. “We need to go beyond ‘going green’ and to enlist a new generation of design activists,” she wrote in an influential manifesto. “We need big hearts, bigger business sense and the bravery to take action now.”
Featuring more than 100 contemporary design products and systems–safer baby bottles, a high-tech waterless washing machine, low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, wheelchairs for rugged conditions, sugarcane charcoal, universal composting systems, DIY soccer balls–that are as fascinating as they are revolutionary, this exceptionally smart, friendly and well-designed volume makes the case for design as a tool to solve some of the world’s biggest social problems in beautiful, sustainable and engaging ways–for global citizens in the developing world and in more developed economies alike. Particularly at a time when the weight of climate change, global poverty and population growth are impossible to ignore, Pilloton challenges designers to be changemakers instead of “stuff creators.” Urgent and optimistic, a compendium and a call to action, Design Revolution is easily the most exciting design publication to come out this year.
Emily Pilloton is the founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, a global industrial design nonprofit with eight chapters around the world. Trained in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and product design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pilloton started Project H in 2008 to provide a conduit and catalyst for need-based product design that empowers individuals, communities and economies. Current Project H initiatives include water transport and filtration systems in South Africa and India; an educational math playground built for elementary schools in Uganda and North Carolina; a homeless-run design coop in Los Angeles; and design concepts for foster care education and therapy in Austin, Texas.
Allan Chochinov is Editor in Chief of Core77.com, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.
about 3 years ago
3.16: Research had shown that simply making the information readily available to users would result (and in test cases had resulted) in up to 10 percent reductions in energy consumption, without any other efforts.
3.17: Let is look to beauty as a means to catalyze already great ideas, but not prioritize beauty over function or human relevance.
3.18: Despite our own individual person agendas of world-changing design, let us always begin with one It is for and by our users that our designs are inspired, exist, fail, succeed, grow, and change.
about 3 years ago
Pages 41-43 Design Revolution
3.13 Redefining the Design Client : While on paper we may continue to define the client as the person or company paying us, we must consider the client as the person or group we are serving and involve those people.
3.14 Design outside of Design : Whether we can ever really walk in someone else’s shoes is debatable, but there is no question that, as designers, we have a duty to understand the people and environment for which we are designing as fully as possible before beginning to explore potential solutions.
3.15 Activism Through Academics : Many designers will tell you that not one of their students projects ever left the confines of their portfolio books of renderings, leaving some amazing ideas without real impact and implementation… Colleges and universities need to take the initiative to put in place programs that are not simply socially oriented, but executable based on school, student, and public resources.
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2.08 Design as Capital
The parallel between capital and design is based on the provision of a resource for personal economic gain and ongoing self-sufficiency.
3.01 Step Up
Beyond responsibility, we have a duty to be at the forefront of both social entrepreneurship and constant ingenuity, using our skills to do good and improve life.
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2.02 The Untrained Designer as Expert
“Creations from untrained designers can often shed the most light on what a functional and user-accepted solution to a real problem actually looks like.”
2.03 Design (Thinking) as Business Asset
“The idea is nondisciplinary, looking to a designer’s mindset as a framework for understanding and creating innovative business propositions.”
2.04 Design as Activism
“The difference today is that the business world is running parallel to the activism of design, finding new ways to equate social and financial values, which brings viability to design activism.”
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3.03 Small Steps and Big Plans: “The designers dilemma- the tension between inventing and improving- The answer, it seems, is that incremental design is a natural, viable process for widespread innovation, but those small increments must be part of a broader plan driven by a thoroughly articulated goal.
3.04 Taking the Product out of Product Design: Design thinking should be a solution-building process rather than something to be approached with an object-as-solution mindset.
3.05 Impact Over Function: To design for impact means looking beyond how something works to what it enables the user to do.
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3.10 User Engagement and Ownership
“Particular to humanitarian design is a greater need for “co-created” design solutions that bring the user into the equation, creating a system by which the object is worthless without human interaction…Their creation forces the designer to put the user’s engagement at the center of the design process, and in their use, the design makes the user a co-designer, increasing his ownership of and attachment to the product.”
3.11Design for the 100 Percent
“Design thinking should support the growth and economic empowerment of the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ in the developing world while also tending to the needs of our own communities.”
3.12 A Brave New (Business) World
“Designing for many and designing for money need not be mutually exclusive. With new models for social entrepreneurship that are complementary to design ingenuity and that bring viable business and distribution partners, we can make design for social impact a profitable and sustainable enterprise for our users and ourselves.”
about 3 years ago
Actually fromDesign for the Other 90%
Toward a more socially responsible design
“What I found as I began my research was a groundswell of work being done by a dedicated group of designers, engineers, architects, and entrepreneurs around the world to create sustainable solutions for improving people’s lives.”
A Growing Design Movement
“A movement is growing both within the professional design community and the design, engineering, and archtitecture schools to direct our practices toward socially responsible, sustainable, humanitarian design.”"In 2003, the United Nations designated Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, an official NGO, or non-governmental organization–the first design school to attain this status–to further Art Center’s DesignMatters program for solving social challenges through design.”"Dr. Paul Polak, a psychiatrist and founder of International Development Enterprises, calls it a ‘design revolution’ that is applying design thining to a new set of ‘clients’.
Revolution Closer to Home
“Sergio and his students are making plans to emply and teach local residents to craft church pews for the ninety churches that were destroyed, stools and table from beautiful two-hundred-year-old lumber found in the destroyed houses, and to help rebuild the local economy.”"All of the people I interviewed and spoke with clearly wanted to stay and rebuild New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast. The message they asked me to convey is that they continue to need help, as there is so much more work to be done.”
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A Good Long Tradition:
“Everyone loves to invent something–whether it’s a new twist on a cookie recipe or a novel way of attaching a book bag to your bicycle–and when we look at a collection of particularly ingenious inventions like the ones in this book, I believe we feel a unique kind of delight: We are awed, charmed, intrigued…and jealous all at the same time. (‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ is often the highest compliment we can bestow.)”
Good Design:
“Nevertheless, if we can accept Good Design as a paragon for the artifacts of design, what can (and should) we expect from the enterprise of design? Is there a distinction between ‘good design’ and ‘design for good’?”
Design for Good:
“But designers would do well to remember that they are not in the artifact business. They are in the consequence business. And for design to be a force for positive change, we must always ask what consequence a design creates–from materials and energy use to toxicity, pollution, and social inequality.”
“On the broad spectrum, designers can be volunteers, handypersons, tinkerers, and poets. And on the narrow spectrum, the specialization in the maturing field of design right now is extraordinary, rendering the disciplines and the jargon between ethnographers, materials technologists, human factors experts, and branding experts almost exclusionary. The whole notion of what designers are, exactly, seems to become blurrier every year.”
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Good to Go: Solving Problems and Celebrating Life-
“Sure design is here to solve problems, but it is also here to celebrate life”
An Industrial Design Revolution-
“Humans have an instinct to seek out better ways, and designers possess the toolbox (and responsibility) to deliver solutions that make those ways accessible and improve life”
1.01 Precedent and Present-
“I believe that design has always been the most direct manifestation of two human instincts: to shape our physical environment and to improve life.”
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1.05 The Rise of Social Enttrepreneurship
By adding design to the social entrepreneurship equation, we form a symbiotic relationship between people, product, and profit, bringing design to more socially and fiscally sustainable arenas, while giving enterprises a tangible and deliverable tool around which to structure production, job creation, and economics.
1.06 The World is Flat-ish
Without contextual understanding and user feedback, a design for social impact will likely fall short of its intentions- however good they are.
2.01 Design and Citizenship
As Glaser notes, the key is to ask questions, for the answers will result in responsible decisions. Without responsibility, talent is too easily wasted on waste.
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1.02 The Problem with Products
“We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied-sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions…We think we’re in the artifact business, but we’re not; we’re in the consequence business.”
1.03 A Misdirected Industry
“Generally Speaking, design firms and the design world are incestuous and insular…Many of our so-called “solutions” are effectively designs for design’s sake, self-congratulatory artistic exercises that are appreciated primarily within the design community and photographed for design magazines.”
1.04 The State of Sustainability
“Green” and “sustainable” are becoming synonymous, and this is a problematic for designers and the world. While “green” means environmentally responsible, “sustainable” encompasses all aspects of responsibility and foresight: environmental, social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian. It’s about time we let those last four catch up.”
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2.05 DESIGN AS CATALYST
“Design can be a catalyst for individual users, communities and economies, and we, as designers, can serve as catalysts to bring additional value to that which already exists. Design must not just inspire action and reaction; it must amply impact.”
2.06 DESIGN AS CIVICS
“In these cases, design was more than the solution; it was a proposal for the government to match the standards set by designers, effectively revealing what a feeble effort the FEMA trailer was and providing the case for design as healing process… For it to grow and continue to create change around the world, civic design must come from both the top-dowm and the bottom up initiatives.”
2.07 DESIGN AS PUBLIC HEALTH
“From an industry perspective, we would do well to align the design process with a public health model, one that is based on a broad understanding of demographics, delivery of programs and services for basic human needs, engagement in constant research, and qualitative and quantitative measurement of results.”
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3.06 Innovation for Ingenuity.
Ingenuity and innovation are inherently tied to each other, but they differ in scale and scope. This means to bridge the two, however, and the tactic that will inform more empowering design solutions, is to innovate for ingenuity.
3.07 Need Before Consumption
In our own design practice, we must begin with the human need and ask questions like, “What is the problem and how can I best approach it?” and “What are the most basic needs that design can serve?”
3.08 Consumption for Humanity
Though the systems at work and the habits that feed them must change so they value more long-lasting, adaptive, and necessary objects, we can in the meantime use consumption to our benefit, adapting commercially available products to suit our more basic needs.
3.09 Learning from Appropriate Technologies Engineering
How can we ever understand the ways in which our clients and users will engage with the product if we as designers are not fully engaged in its realization?