Design For the Rest of The World

If you’ve walked along Fifth Avenue this week you may have noticed a series of temporary shelters popping up in the Arthur Ross Garden of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. These are part of the current exhibit, “Design for the Other 90%.”The juxtaposition of these shelters with the museum — formerly Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion —highlights the exhibit’s central premise that the majority of the world’s design solutions are for the richest 10% of the population.The exhibition, divided into sections focusing on water, shelter, health, sanitation, education, energy, and transportation, challenges us to think about design as a resource rather than a commodity. Arranged along the west side of the courtyard, the show features objects designed to aid — and in some cases save the lives of — global populations living below the poverty level and recovering from natural disaster.The LifeStraw, a personal, mobile water-purification tool, transforms any surface water into drinking water. It is a plastic tube, 10 inches long and one inch in diameter, meant to be worn around the neck. The tube is designed to be inserted directly into the water, which passes through an interior carbon filter that removes dangerous particulates before it is consumed.When one considers the accompanying statistics — half the world’s poor suffer from waterborne diseases, and more than 6,000 people, mainly children, die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water — it’s difficult to believe that the LifeStraw, which has been proved effective against waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea, wasn’t introduced to the world’s poor at the same time as your Brita.The underlying message behind much of what is on display here is not that the technology is revolutionary — personal water filtration systems have been around for years — but that there remains great need throughout the world for practical applications of the technology that the top 10% probably takes for granted.A number of other profoundly simple life-changing objects are presented such as drip irrigation systems, solar-powered hearing aids, and a laptop computers engineered to cost only $100. The full-scale replicas of permanent and temporary shelters are visually the most striking part of the installation.The Mad Housers Hut was designed by a group of students from Georgia Tech with the intent of building free shelter for Atlanta’s homeless. The huts are approximately 50 square feet and have a door with a lock for security, a small loft for storage and sleeping, and a woodburning stove for cooking and heat. These prefabricated huts can be erected in less than half a day. Although they are not meant as permanent shelter, the huts provide people a secure and safe place to live in order to utilize the other resources that might get them back on their feet.There is also an impressive piece designed by a San Francisco-based organization Public Architecture, whose “Day Labor System” addresses the needs of day laborers by giving them a physical place from which to operate. The structure provides day laborers with shade, a place to sit, a restroom, and facilities where classes and training workshops can take place. And finally — since this is after all a show about design — the overall solution is exquisite. The main interior space has the scale of a large shipping container and is clad in rich panels made from salvaged wood. A steel structure frames the wooden box and from it hangs a screen of solar arrays. During the day, the screen is lifted, becoming the shade canopy while the panels generate electricity to run the restroom and small kitchen. At night the canopy folds down to form a gate that secures the station. The bulk of the interior space is devoted to seating and a tightly designed system of benches that pull out to be used under the canopy. The spaces created by this structure stand out from the others in the show, as they feel both purposeful and celebratory.In addition to the objects and structures on display, the exhibit is peppered with powerful statistics printed on large colorful boards strategically placed throughout the garden. To read that almost half the world’s population, or 2.8 billion people, live on less than $2 a day when one is positioned in the shadow of Carnegie’s mansion —nestled in one of the world’s most opulent neighborhoods — is disconcerting. I’m not certain this was the Cooper-Hewitt’s intent when installing the exhibition here — the sheer size of the structures and the small rooms of the mansion left the garden as the only appropriate place to construct them — yet the impact of seeing these few objects designed for the world’s poor and marginalized while surrounded by blocks and blocks designed for the top 10% is a powerful way to underscore the show’s central message. Succinctly put by Dr. Paul Polak, a member of the exhibition’s advisory council, “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”Ms. Niemack, a freelance writer, last wrote for these pages on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim.

Design For the Rest of The World

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