News

Perspective

Designs for the real world

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published June 17, 2007

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the backyard is the best part of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York this summer. The main gallery is packed with cool stuff you know - iPods have great colors, blogs are fun, robots smart, kayaks swift and Nike Free sneakers truly radical. It's no surprise they are on the museum's honor roll of design from the last three years, the Design Life Now triennial. Outside is the real winner, a big plastic doughnut, lime green with a rope through it. It's thick and flat as an airplane tire but wider and hollow. On one side is a screw-in cap. Fill with water, insert rope and a child can roll 20 gallons of water for miles. The Q-Drum reinvents the wheel and water carrying, vital drudgery older than Aquarius. It's in a display called "Design for the Other 90%, " a low estimate for the people ignored by the work celebrated inside.

Appropriately the drum, water filters, instant shelters, cargo bicycles and other designs are exposed to the elements, or in unfinished kiosks roofed with the universal blue of plastic tarp.

The dream to make everyday items more useful - or at least more stylish - is as old as the Shakers and William Morris and fresh as the latest catalog from Design Within Reach.

Too often design only made things more beautiful - and more expensive. Enough cursing the darkness. The middle class now has great plastic from Umbra, Graves gadgets at Target, with Sweden's IKEA on the way.

More important are the designers "for the Other 90%, " worried about real-world crises and sustainability and savvy about high-tech tricks and primal designs. Their torches light a path to useful design for the poor:

- Address basic needs. Many lack water, safe food, roofs, heat and light. Better mosquito nets and more durable charcoal comes before plugging into the Web.

- Think small. Hydroelectric dams and new roads take time, big money and government collusion. Small tools and shelter are cheaper, quicker and give power and safety to individuals, their families and work.

- Stick to cheap, not affordable. Products that cost $1, 000 are not "within reach" in places where a $10 tool is costly but needed and treasured.

- Work globally. Smart designs existed before design schools and still come from real people everywhere, not just Milan, Stockholm and Los Angeles. African peddlers and Korean engineers all contribute. Production too can be native potters in Cambodia using local clay or Chinese assembly lines that can make a $100 laptop.

- Embrace plastic. Western tree-huggers don't but poor people do. Plastics are strong, durable, incredibly cheap and abundant. Marketplaces sell wood, stone and hand-woven fabric to tourists, but local shoppers rely on plastic for packing, shelter and much more. And reuse it.

- Use some muscle. Gasoline and electricity aren't always needed. Animal power, especially human, is strong, cranking flashlights and radios, pumping water and powering bicycles.

That and design brainpower put to important uses.

 

Designed to sustain

 

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Problem: Lack of affordable irrigation. Solution: Krishak Bandhu treadle pump.

The treadle pump combines manual power and the traditional strength of bamboo with metal valves and a plastic tube well that allows poor farmers to grow market food crops outside the traditional single-season cash crop season watered by monsoons. The pump, which can be powered by all ages, runs about two hours a day, costs about $30 financed through microcredit systems. The KB brand stands for "farmer's friend" started in 1991; more than a half million are now in use.

Designer: Gunnar Barnes and International Development Enterprises Nepal

Problem: Building shelter quickly. Solution: Global Village Shelter

This shelter, roughly 8 feet square , of heavily laminated cardboard from Weyerhauser, is made for quick delivery and easy assembly in disaster areas for a cost of $550 per unit. It is fire resistant, waterproof and withstands strong winds. With a lockable a door in the front, window in back and pyramid roof , it offers a safe, private house-like image. It has been used in Grenada, Afghanistan, and Katrina-ravaged Gulfport Miss.

Designers: Ferrara Design, Inc., of Morris CT, with Architecture for Humanity

Problem: Surface watter too impure to drink. Solution: LifeStraw

A ten-inch plastic tube with carbon and other filters to purify surface water. It ids designed tobe used by one person and has a lanyard for portability; it will last for one year.

Designed by a Danish medical innovator, it has been produced in China and Switzerland since 2005 and can be made for a few dollars. It is distributed by relief agencies, can be purchased for donation or for domestic emergency use.

Used in Pakistan and various African countries.

Designer: Torben Vestergaard Frandsen

Problem: Heat spoils produce. Solution: Pot-in-pot cooler

This combination of two pots, with sand and water in between was invented in Nigeria in 1995, and is made in local workshops. As water evaporates, it draws heat from the inner pot and can keep produce, such as tomatoes cool for up to 20 days, extending the farmer's time to sell their crops. It's now used from Cameroon to Ethiopia.

Designer:Mohammed Bah Abba

Problem: Delivery bicycles are dangerous and inefficient, Solution: Big Boda bicycle

WorldBike activists use modern bike design and technology to help Africans get the most use and more safety out of the continent's most common transport. This bike with a bigger steel cargo support, better brakes and papyrus cushion for two passengers was built in Kenya with the assistance of local bike mechanics. It supports small scale entrprise by delivery people and bike shops in Kenya and Uganda.

Designers: WorldBike, Moses Odhimabio and others.

Problem: Lack of nearby water. Solution: Q-drum

This rolling polyethylene drum was made in South Africa in 1993 to provide an easier, low cost way to move clean water in larger more useful quantity than traditional jugs or jerry cans. It is 14 inches tall and sturdy and stable enough to stack. It can hold up to 75 litres and be pulled with, rope leather or other available cord. Now used in many African countries

Designers: P.S. and P. J. Hendrikse

 

 

Design for the Other 90%

The exhibit will be on display through Sept 23 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 91st Street and Fifth Avenue, New York City. General admission is $12.

Information on these and additional designs for sustainable development may be found at cooperhewitt.org and peoplesdesignawards.org.

 

[Last modified June 16, 2007, 21:52:52]

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