“Can Design Save the World?” IDSA debate, June 17, 2010 /

Photo: Mark Notermann

by Linda Norlen

Five designers—each from a different discipline—shared their perspectives on designing “for the other 90%,” the 5.3 billion people living in less developed parts of the world. And instead of debating, they mostly agreed: research is one key component to their work.

Jason Morris (industrial designer) used a collaborative design process to help bike couriers in Uganda design a better bicycle. Although the bike is being assembled in Uganda, Morris pointed out that the country has no infrastructure for actual manufacturing—he couldn’t fulfill his ideal of having the whole product made locally.

Michael Cetaruk (interaction designer) worked on frog design’s pro bono project with Movirtu, a for-profit mobile phone company, to design a system for sharing access to basic mobile phone services, aimed to serve people earning less than $2 a day, who can’t afford to own their own handset.

Kevin Flick, (user researcher) reminded the audience that over a billion people don’t have access to clean, safe water. The PATH safe water project is designing a product they hope to bring to market in rural India: a home-based water purification system with a price under $20 (a sum that many rural people will have to finance over a year and that others will still not be able to afford). 

Kara Pecknold  (graphic designer, researcher) said her first experience designing for the developing world was building a website for a women’s weaving coop, but the project was a failure: it didn’t increase market share. Pecknold and other panelists agreed that much of their work is a struggle: “We present things that don’t succeed. Our job is to take it back and see what doesn’t work…We thrive at a 95% failure rate.”

Sergio Palleroni (architect) has worked on sustainable architecture and community design in the developing world since the early 1980s. “My job is to coopt people like these” (designers, architects) “and put them together with college students” to engage the problems of communities traditionally underserved by the design fields. (Over two decades the BaSiC Initiative founded by Palleroni has built over 100 buildings.)

One thread that ties all their work together is the strong use of research. Pecknold pointed out that the field of usability research has good tools (using cultural liaisons, for example). To overcome language and cultural barriers, the speakers said, you have to do pre-research. Even so, only some people have the necessary empathy to do this kind of work.

While the event was not actually a “debate,” organizer and moderator Lindsay Berdan served as devil’s advocate (wielding a large red pitchfork as a prop). Berdan asked how the panelists—all white, middle-class people from North America—could know what’s best for poor, non-white, people from Africa, South America, and Asia. And whether their work encourages aid and handouts, rather than local solutions.

“We’re not designing for people in other countries,” Cetaruk argued. By bringing design thinking to these regions, we’re practicing a version of the old idea that we “need to teach people how to fish…Already we see design centers popping up in places like Nairobi,” he said.

For a larger discussion about philanthropy versus profit, western aid versus local empowerment, watch the video of the entire panel.